Marketers and business advisors always talk about the importance of knowing your client persona, whom you want to serve, and what they want. But, when growing a business, it’s critical to identify all 4 key players to get more clients and grow your business.
Who are these 4 key players to get more clients?
Let’s start with the most obvious: the buyers.
Your Perfect Buyer Persona
These are the people who actually sit on the moneybag and decide whether or not to buy your services or products. Many times, these are the same as clients, meaning the same people who will benefit from your value. But not always!
In a corporate organization, the buyer might not be the clients, and furthermore, the clients might not be the users who get to enjoy the benefits of your service or product. So knowing who your clients are is not enough, you also need to know who the buyer is.
Sometimes even in family dynamics, the client and buyer are not the same. It could be so that the client who will benefit from your value is not the one who’s buying it for them. For example, as a mother, I buy lots of things for our kids, so if a brand that is producing something for underaged kids wants to sell, they actually need to target us, the parents, who make purchase decisions. Or grandparents!
Knowing the buyer, the clients, the user, and what their objectives are is, of course, the 101 of business. Let’s talk about the other key players!
Your Suppliers and Industry Colleagues
Who has your clients already? Who is already selling to your perfect clients? Someone is, for sure. What are they already buying that would make them instantly – or over time – need your products too? How can you cooperate with these suppliers and industry colleagues?
Let’s take interior designers, who are the best partners for you to get directly in touch with your perfect client? Real estate agents maybe? Builders? Electricians? Paint shops? Who else regularly meets your clients?
Maybe it’s the local tax advisory firm that has the affluent client base that you’re after. Or, maybe your local homeowners love to get together at a golf course on weekends? Well, figure out what you can do to help these suppliers somehow, and you will both win.
Your Industry Media People
Who works in the media that is being consumed by your dream clients? It’s the local media folks! Oftentimes, designers are very focused on getting into the big, global publications but they forget the local newspapers and magazines that actually are being read by your clients, daily.
Get friendly with your local media, and build your media ladder from there. You want to know the people who cover the news in your hometown and offer valuable content for them to write about.
Remember: it’s not the media folks’ job to market your business, their job is to serve their readers with interesting and valuable content! You need to provide value for them to be featured.
Bonus: offer to write a free column in your local newspaper for 12 months! This will give you plenty of possibilities to showcase your work, and get clients without doing the actual design work for free!
Your Messengers
Who are the messengers? Well, these are every person who actually loves what you do, supports you, cheers you, and wants to share your excellence. You can formalize this to an influencer or ambassador program, or keep it unofficial, or better yet: do both!
User-generated marketing is the most powerful marketing method you can use to get your message authentically to the masses. This means that people who have engaged in your services or products create content and post it to several media outlets, such as social media.
This again could happen by accident too, but even better: create a system for engaging your audience to create and publish their own experiences with your firm! And then ask to be able to share their content on your channels too, with a proper note about the content origins.
So, there we have it: the 4 key players you need to attract to get more clients!
