How to gain more clients: 6 long-term and short-term strategies

Self-employment is all about good foundations, and continued growth. A stronger customer base is the foundation on which all businesses can rest, but it’s equally important to keep devising ways you can gain more clients. This is because, whether through environmental factors or changing circumstances in their own lives, some of your clients will drop off. To stay financially viable as a business owner or freelancer.

In this blog post, we’re going to tackle client acquisition in three different stages: short-term, when you need to grow your business fast at the beginning; long-term, when you can take bigger risks and plan longer strategies; and the strategies you can employ to maintain the clients you already have.

While ‘short-term’ has the connotation of unreliable strategies that won’t serve you later on, this isn’t necessarily true if you engage with the strategies holistically. Combined with long-term strategies, the short term can serve your business well at building a large customer base, as long as you know what to do with it when you have it. This is especially crucial at the early stages of your business, when you want to use marketing methods to get the word out and find clients.

Your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) will be a continuous responsibility in building and maintaining a customer base. What it refers to is your ranking in search results, when people go online and use Google or another search platform to find something. So if you run an online hardware store, you want to be among the first results when people are looking for affordable hammers.

But how exactly do you manage that?

Fortunately, there are many employable methods to boost your ranking and ensure good SEO. Let’s go over a few which can help find clients quickly:

• Show authority through your content. Whether it’s a blog, videos, photo reel, or social media posts, demonstrate yourself to be an authority on the service or product you provide. You drive traffic to your website by keeping visitors there, clicking further into your website and building more engagement.
• Regular updates. Good content isn’t enough. The online marketing sphere is competitive, especially with social media, and you need to secure engagement by consistently reminding your customers what you’re up to, what’s coming next, and what they might have missed. Regularly updated content is one of the best markers of a site’s relevancy in Google’s results.
• Refine your metadata. Metadata is how you inform potential customers about what they’re going to see. It’s the title of the search result when a potential customer finds your website, and the description underneath. Make sure your metadata includes keywords, sticks within the word limits, and informs and entices the viewer.

Another important driver of organic traffic, link building is a foundation on which all SEO strategies rest.

First, a quick definition: link building is the process by which you acquire hyperlinks from other websites than your own. Basically, you find clients by getting people talking about you and recommending you, in SEO terms. When a search engine crawls the web for results, the more existing links that drive traffic to your website—and links on your website driving customers to other pages—the more likely you are to have a better result.

So, how exactly can you use link building to your advantage?

• Avoid the cheap, spamming methods. These methods may be tempting but they won’t serve you in the long run. Buying links to pass SEO credit may seem like a fast method to boosting your search results, but Google states in their help section that bought links may be considered spam, and therefore be excluded when crawling for results.
• Spend the money on a content creator instead. Even if it works, link buying is expensive. A better way to spend your money would be hiring a content creator who understands SEO practices. This is especially useful if you doubt your own writing skills. A good content creator will know how to write content that gets featured on other websites, thus providing reliable links to yours, while also threading links to other pages on your site in each piece of content they write.
• It’s about quality, not quantity. It wouldn’t take very long to cobble together a bunch of shoddy articles with hyperlinks strewn about the place, but it also wouldn’t work in your favor. Creating less, more authoritative and relevant content is going to build true links, which will serve you for a long time.

Ideal for ecommerce businesses, this is an especially useful client acquisition technique for online boutique stores. When it comes to price or variety, your business cannot compete with the major online marketplaces like Amazon. Instead, you have to separate yourself from them and offer something else. One of the best ways to do this is through loyalty programs.

Running a loyalty program does mean you’ll have to give things away for free, but it’s all about giving away enough to gain more in return. With an effective loyalty program, you’re likely to see benefits like:

• More customer referrals
• Customers advocating for your brand
• Higher sales
• Loyal customers

Here are a few different loyalty programs you can try out with your business:

• Points systems: customers accumulate points by spending on your website
• Tiered loyalty: ranked memberships for customers providing more benefits
• Paid loyalty: customers pay a fee to gain immediate and ongoing benefits
• Value-based loyalty: customers are offered the chance to donate to charities of their choice

With a business banking account, you can simplify account management, team spending, and more. It’s fast, only taking a few minutes of your time to complete the registration process. Qonto’s business accounts are ideal for business creators, freelancers, and those seeking to start their first startup.

Implementing strategies that take time to theorize, develop, and come to fruition is hard work on top of everything else you have to do to run a business. But it’s work that pays off big time, especially in the long run.

The below strategies are useful both at the beginning of your business, and after it’s already established. Key to employing them successfully is giving them the time and effort they need to reach their full potential.

Not strictly related to customer acquisition or gaining clients, a good business plan can help with these things tangentially. We create business plans to attract investors, gain funding, or entice employees. If your business plan helps with even one of these aspects of company formation, start out on stronger footing, which allows you to attract—and retain—clients.

Let’s go over the basic elements of a traditional business plan. For a detailed guide on business plan creation, read our comprehensive guide on how to write a business plan.

Executive summary This is the contents of your business plan. In summarized form, you lay out what the reader is going to come across, to entice them to keep going or opt out without wasting their time.

1. Business description Once you’ve hooked your potential investor, this is where you can reel them in further. Use your business description to describe the ethos of your company and what makes you stand out against the competition.
2. Industry analysis What is the current state of the industry into which your business fits? This section includes an analysis of influencing factors (economic changes, customer needs, etc.), and why your industry is worth investing in now more than ever.
3. Market analysis Shift from your competitors’ industry to the current and changing behaviors of your customers. Include consumer factors that will narrow your analysis to a crucial pool of potential customers, while leaving room for the pool to grow.
4. Organization and management How is your company structured? Relevant for business owners with a staff, this section includes a listing and detailing of your board of directors and employees. Describe what they do and what their professional histories are.
5. Financial projections Help readers understand your cash flow, loan repayment schedules, and projected earnings. This stage is important for demonstrating a realistic yet ambitious approach to financial growth and return on investment.
6. Financing request Cap off your financial projections with a request for funding, based on the above data. Be clear about the amount you are asking for and how you plan to repay it.
7. Appendix Include here any supporting documents, pre-empting potential requests from your readers so they won’t have to ask. These could be things like your CV, credit history, relevant licenses and permits, etc.

Your client-focused marketing strategy is your business plan’s other half. This is where you focus on external efforts, laying out promotional plans across all different channels. You can use a marketing strategy to help align teams to specific goals, find out what’s testing well with audiences, and jump on emerging trends at the right time.

Your marketing strategy should lay out four key aspects of what you are marketing:

• What product you’re selling or service you’re providing
• How much you plan to charge for it
• Where you’ll be providing your product or service
• Which channel(s) you will promote it on

These are also called the four Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place, Promotion.

Solving the ‘What’, ‘How’, ‘Where’, and ‘Which’ of your promotional campaign will bring it into focus. From there, you can embark on putting together a comprehensive marketing strategy:

1. Objectives
2. Budget
3. Competitor analysis
4. Demographic analysis
5. Content creation
6. KPIs

‘Short-termism’ describes a tendency towards short marketing campaigns, quick results, new content—anything that doesn’t take long to put together and rewards with immediate ROI. But this tendency can be a trap for business owners looking to gain more clients.

It’s thanks to the advent of digital advertising that short-termism has become dangerously alluring for business owners looking to strike it big with minimal effort. Examples of short term marketing include:

• Social media polls
• Viral content
• Controversy

These kinds of tactics are more likely to attract curious onlookers than potential clients. Everybody gravitates towards the loudest noise, but it’s usually just to find out what’s making such a racket.

This doesn’t mean short-term marketing campaigns don’t serve a purpose, they absolutely do. But they should be backed by longer term campaigns that more develop customer loyalty and brand consistency.

Consider Nike’s use of ‘Just Do It’. Pioneered in the 80s, the simple slogan could have been a throwaway term for one hot TV ad, but instead it has served them for 40 years and counting. The long-termism of the phrase is its malleability. It’s vague enough to generate limitless content, while precise enough to express the unchanging ethos of the company.

When considering long-term campaigns, invest time and energy into finding what not only works in the short term, but will breed more advertising opportunities, helping you to gain more clients and establish a consistent brand.

Client loyalty is achieved with both short and long-term campaigns, and any successful business balances loyal customers with visiting ones. Your clients and customers are also likely to stick around when they see you obtaining more clients, and your business is growing. A company with no loyal customers practically describes a scam, and a company with only loyal ones doesn’t leave much room for growth.

Hopefully the strategies explicated above provide some guidance when seeking to gain more clients you wish to keep.