5 Steps To Get More Clients This Month
Whether this year is exciting or daunting for you, the fact remains: you need to get more clients this month. But there’s a big difference between wishing you had more clients, and actually doing the hard work to get more clients. I’m going to teach you how to do the latter. Hope is not a strategy. Making an offering to real brand managers is. Take a look at the five steps below, and get started today.
Step 1 - Develop an Offering
The first step in getting new clients is deciding what you want to do for those clients. This might sound simple, but it’s tempting to skip this step. You know exactly what you do (and you’re tired of talking about it after the holidays), but new clients don’t. When we assume that brand managers and marketers understand the space we’re in, we open ourselves up to a laundry list of potential problems down the road.
An offering should clearly explain what creative service you offer, how it will help the brand, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and a call-to-action for the brand. It’s a lot like a pitch deck, except it’s a little more general. If you don’t already have a template you love, click here to get my Photo + Video Pitch Deck Template. It’s free and it works, with clean design and winning copywriting prompts.
This goes without saying, but make sure your offering is profitable. Set your rates high to start, and make sure you’re accounting for creative development, client management, post-production, and unexpected costs. Many creators get nervous here, and start negotiating down their own rates before they even pitch. Put a rate on your deck that you would be excited to work with, and then pitch it. The brand will probably negotiate anyway, so there’s no need to do it before you start.
Step 2 - Arrange Your Portfolio
If you have a body of work from the past year, now is a great time to update it. Your portfolio can live anywhere, so pick a medium that is easy for clients to navigate. I usually send out PDF decks with my copywriting work, but websites or reels on Vimeo work well for videographers. Photographers and graphic designers would do well to create a clean portfolio page on Squarespace, and send that link.
Your portfolio should fit the kind of work you’re pitching. Show only three or four of your best, most relevant projects. There’s no need to bog down a potential client with old work, or work that doesn’t translate to their brand. Pick a few projects that would get them excited, and let those do the talking.
Step 3 - Contact Current Connections
The fastest way to get new clients is to contact current connections. It goes without saying, but current connections already know and trust you, which is the biggest hurdle you have to overcome to get hired. Instead of spending time trying to build trust with new clients, why not skip all that to start?
Send out a round of “Happy New Year” emails that include a short message, your main offerings, and a link to your updated portfolio. If you connections need what you offer right now, it’ll be a great touch-point for them. But even if they don’t, simply checking in with them will be a helpful reminder that you’re available when a project comes up a few months down the road.
For your best connections, get a lunch meeting on the calendar. Offer to buy them lunch, and then ask them what their goals are for the year, what the most difficult part of their job is, and what you could help them do better. Really listen to their answers here, because brand managers give the best insights over lunch meetings. It’s amazing what you can learn.
Step 4 - Email Your Favorite Brands
After you contact your current connections, make a list of your favorite brands. It doesn’t matter if they’re large or small, just make sure you’re really a fan. Take a look around your room and make a list. Why should you contact your favorite brands? Because you already have a head start in understanding the ethos of the brand. You’re a genuine fan which goes a long way in your pitches, and it goes a long way in developing winning creative.
I won’t go too in-depth here, but a tried-and-true method of emailing brands is to stalk employees of the company on LinkedIn. Find a brand, marketing, or social manager on LinkedIn, then figure out the format of their email address. Usually it’s Firstname@company.com, but it could be any combination of the first name and last name, including initials of those two. Send emails to the combinations you create, and the email that doesn’t bounce back is the one.
Alternatively, you could also use a service like Hunter, which gives you a small number of free corporate email addresses each month. They don’t usually have that many from smaller brands, but it’s works well for bigger brands.
Step 5 - Use a Prospecting Service
Let’s say you reached out to your current connections and you emailed a few people at all your favorite brands. What’s next? A prospecting service is next. I don’t recommend this to people before they’ve tried the other methods, because prospecting services are so expensive, but they work. Uplead, Lusha, and Leads411 are good starter options. This is a big business, in which companies sell access to their databases of verified corporate emails for $100+ per month. You can search for specific job titles, within specific companies, and export their email addresses to contact on your own.
This is a top-tier strategy that gets expensive and time-consuming, so make sure you’ve exhausted other avenues before you try this. For creators who have bigger enterprises, and maybe some consistent contractors or employees, a prospecting service could be just what you need. For about $100 per month, and then maybe five hours per week from a sales freelancer, you could be reaching out to a few hundred brands per month, which could really grow your business.
Thanks for reading, I hope this was helpful to you. Again, if you don’t already have a template for your pitch decks, download mine here. It’s free and it works.
