11 Ideas How to Find Clients Online
How to find clients online has always been a difficult task for every marketers. A strong online presence is at the core of a successful marketing strategy to attract new customers to your small business as well as find your potential clients online. The fundamentals of an online presence include of a business website, business blog, directory & review site listings, and social media profiles. There may or may not be other online channels to utilize that are relevant to your business, location, and/or industry. Below is a more in-depth look at the online methods of attracting customers.
11 Ideas for the task “How to Find Clients Online”
1. Business Website
First, you need to have a business website. Not just a placeholder or brochure ware, but a functional website where customers can find the content they’re looking for. This means having relevant and useful information that makes visitors’ time on your site worth it. Perhaps most important is optimizing your homepage content so as to guide your visitors in engaging with your business.
2. Blog writting
Blogs are excellent opportunities that many businesses are interested in and pay attention to their marketing because of the huge interactions on blogger’s blog with potential client through their content. According to HubSpot research, business using blog communication at the frequency of 6-8 times per month will get the double number of customers. This proves that blog is a potential marketing channel to find effective online clients.
On the blog site, you can effectively find and reach potential clients by inserting hyperlinks and using prominent CTA calls to action to send users to the landing page you are targeting.
For example, when customers download an e-book, they can find other e-books through the link inserted in the content, then you will be able to increase the number of clients reaching.
3. Use Your Google My Business Listing to Get More Clients
Getting listed in online directories will help you get more customers, and the first listing you should create is on Google My Business. Not only does a Google My Business listing get you on Google Maps, but it is also the tool by which you can increase your visibility, improve your rank, and get more website and foot traffic.
A complete and accurate GMB listing gets 7 times more clicks than an incomplete one, is 70% more likely to attract location visits, is 50% more likely to lead to a purchase, and makes customers 2.7 times more likely to consider you reputable.
4. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
In order for clients to find your website through organic searches on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, you need to cater your site to meet the needs of what people are searching online. Search engines will only rank your page if they find relevant content for the people visiting it, so an SEO strategy around your content is a must. In order to get clients online, find keywords relevant to your business and use them in your website, blog, and social media content. SEO is about being a trustworthy source of information for online searchers—in particular, your target audience.
5. Calls to Action
Getting people to come to your site is not enough to get new clients. Use effective call to action (CTA) buttons, lead capture forms and tracked phone lines to convert visitors into customers. Responding to these requests (answering inquiries, following up on form submissions, and returning calls) is what will initiate the sales process. This is your opportunity to show potential customers why your product or service is top notch and why they should work with you.
Keep in mind that people will only have you top-of-mind for only a few hours after they reach out, so be sure to respond quickly! Treating the needs of others with the same urgency you would treat your own will help you to attract new customers and grow your business.
6. Social Media
To attract more customers, you can’t just put information out there and wait for them to come to you. You need to also cultivate an audience of people who are interested in your information, products and services. One of the best ways to do this is to build an audience on social media. Social media provides a great way to interact with and have conversations with potential customers. Use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Pinterest, and Instagram to engage with your audience. Compare the different social media networks and find the one or ones best for attracting new customers.
Start a Facebook group
If you have a particular expertise, why not start a Facebook group around it? You can begin attracting your ideal clients, and show them your expertise. Whether you get clients directly from the group, or whether you eventually run advertising to the group, you’ll have a group of eager, interested people that you can find 24/7.
This is a time investment, because you want to monitor and encourage connection between your group members. Praising the posts and suggestions of others helps to make people feel welcome, and it encourages them to post more.
Do a Facebook LIVE:
Facebook LIVE is hot right now, and lots of people are jumping in. It’s easy to do, since it just takes an iPhone (although a small tripod that costs about $20 can help). The advantages of Facebook LIVE are:
- It allows people to see you on video, so they know you better
- You get practice being articulate on video
- Facebook loves Facebook LIVE, and tends to show your video to more people
- The video is automatically saved for future viewers.
- There is also 3rd party software that allows you to schedule a Facebook Live in advance, and run it from your computer rather than your iPhone. Some examples of these softwares are OBS(Open Broadcaster Software), or Wirecast.
Boost a post on Facebook:
Facebook ads are all the rage right now, and I’m a big fan of them. But they can cost you lots of money with few results unless you know exactly what you’re doing.
A simple way to get into Facebook advertising is to write a weekly blog that gives great content about your message, and then ‘boost it’ on Facebook so more people see it. It costs only a few dollars, and it gets the most important thing out in the world – your message.
Don’t try all the strategies at once, but choose one or two that you want to explore. Whichever one of the strategies you choose, the key is to be consistent and give a focused effort before evaluating results.
Reach out on LinkedIn
Your ideal clients may or may not be on LinkedIn, but it’s a great connection platform. One of the ways to reach out on LinkedIn is to look for people who may be referral partners of yours; in other words, they know and do business with your ideal clients, but you’re not a direct competitor of theirs. As an example, if you do skin care, and you find an image consultant on LinkedIn, you may be able to form a referral partnership.
7. Email Marketing
Many people underestimate the power of email to reach their potential and existing customers. Email can be extremely effective if you use it properly and utilize effective subject lines. If your business has been around for a while, you probably already have a contact list made up of prospects, clients, vendors, etc. Emailing your list with valuable content, news and offers to stay top of mind is a great way to grow your business.
8. Have a clear offer and consistent message and put it everywhere!
Online, people can’t see your charisma or get your passion. That makes it essential that you have a clear message about the transformation that you deliver. You should include this message:
- On your website.
- In the signature at the bottom of your emails
- When you make an online post (more about that later!)
- On your Facebook or LinkedIn page
9. Write in an online forum
When you have a clear target market, you can go where your ideal clients are gathered. This is true online as well as offline! What are the forums that your ideal clients are reading? Can you be helpful on that forum?
Most forums don’t allow you to post ads for your services, but if you’re in a forum, you can offer helpful suggestions to your ideal clients, with no attachment. Some people will message you and ask for more information about what you do.
This is particularly true if you have a signature that includes your expert title, like ‘Sally Jones, Relationship Expert’.
10. Get busy with Quora
Quora is a Q&A website created, answered, and edited by the user community. On Quora website, content is a set of questions and answers for topics that arise in daily life or work. Users can collaborate by editing questions and suggesting edition of the other users’ answers, Quora also helps these short answers to be more complete through articles that speak out common experiences of yourself.
On this foundation, Quora has become an increasingly popular destination for various marketers these days. People from all over the globe visit the site to share their expertise, answer questions in a comprehensive manner, and help others understand a wide range of issues.
The portal has a pretty strict no-spam policy, so if you’re going to get new clients there, make sure you have a complete profile, be helpful, and don’t blatantly push your product or service. If you’re good at something, people will notice and reach out to you. Be patient, as this will surely be a long-term endeavor.
11. E-Commerce websites
One of the most important and popular ways to sell online today is to sell via e-commerce website. The top names of e-commerce sites in America that you cannot ignore are: Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Etsy,… These websites have a lot of traffic, which attract all people who are in the need of buying products. So, the advantage of e-commerce sites for those businesses is the possession of potential customers available. In addition, when participating in these platform, your product will have the opportunity to appear on the first search results of google so that you can be able to reach more clients in the future.
However, the challenge here is the tough competition with thousands of competitors in the same products on the website you have chosen. Therefore, in order to effectively use the approach of online clients through e-commerce, you should learn and research about your competitors and the differences between e-commerce websites, thereby helping you choose the right e-commerce site matching with your own sales tactics.
4 Steps Turning Potential Clients into Real Clients
Before applying the online client approach, you need to have a specific plan for finding and attracting potential customers to achieve the main goal of turning potential clients into real clients.
Step 1: Understand the product or service
The first thing you need to understand about the products and services you offer. In addition, you need to understand the budget, financial cash flow and industry insights along with the customer’s perspective on your products and services to have effective marketing strategies.
Step 2: Define goals
After standing on customers’ perspective to evaluate your products and business services, it is time for you to set specific business goals to strive for. Start by answering questions like: Are you satisfied with the number of existing customers? Are your customers happy with the products and services you offer?
Step 3: Analyze customer feedback
Receiving experience feedback from customers who are dissatisfied with your product or service will help you avoid these mistakes in the future.
Step 4: Build a spropects on client’s profile
After you’ve done your research and analysis, you’ll have enough to figure out the characteristics of your potential clients, which will give you a basis for sales tactics and appropriate marketing strategy. Also, this will help you choose effective ways to find potential clients, especially for online client approaching channel.
The bottom lines
All the ideas above are the best ways to approach your potiential clients. Potential customers bring very little value at the present but can bring a higher value in the future. These are how sales directors, marketing managers and various other sales professional trying to trive for everyday due to the fact that business growth is directly related to increasing the number of customers they serve.
There’s plenty of fish to catch in this digital sea, however, the fish have evolved to become smart, so you have to choose your fishing spot carefully, as well as use modern tools and a desirable bait if you don’t want to come up empty handed. Thereby, the most important thing that you must find the right one, in the right moment and by a right method to take your success further.
