Whether you’re a freelancer, consultant, or small business owner, one challenge remains constant: finding and keeping clients. The good news is that growing your client base isn’t a matter of luck — it’s a repeatable process built on the right foundations.
In this article, you’ll discover seven proven steps that take you from the very beginning — knowing exactly who you want to serve and why — all the way through attracting leads, converting them into paying clients, and building the kind of lasting relationships that generate referrals and repeat business.
Most people skip the early steps and jump straight to tactics: posting on social media, running ads, or cold outreach. But without a clear target audience and a solid brand strategy behind you, those tactics rarely pay off. This guide is different. It starts where success actually begins.
By the time you finish, you’ll have a clear roadmap for building a thriving client pipeline — one that works consistently, not just when you get lucky.
Here are 7 essential steps to get more clients:
1-Define your target and niche
In the course of my coaching I have discovered that the majority of coaches who have trouble getting clients, have not narrowed their target market or niche enough to be able to make their marketing effective. To market effectively, you must focus on what problem you solve (niche) and who you want to work with (target).
In the coaching industry, the word “niche” is sometimes used when “target” is what is meant. So, what’s the difference between a target market and a niche?
Your niche is the problem you solve or what you’re an expert at. That expertise is determined by your experience and your interest. Your target market is a specific group of people who are most likely to have the problem you solve. Sometimes it’s hard to tell what group of people that may be, in which case it’s just a matter of testing different ones.
There could be many people who have the problem that you solve, and it’s much easier to find those people if you first carefully define who they are. And, if they can see exactly how you can help them, they will respond to your efforts. That’s what target and niche are all about.
Maybe you are someone who has resisted this, perhaps for fear of losing possible clients due to over specializing. It could even be a form of procrastination or self-sabotage. Whatever the root cause is, it’s something that you must take a closer look at if you want to get more clients.
The important thing is to be specific about who you help and how you can help them, so the people who need your help can find you. This is a foundational piece to your marketing strategy and overall business plan.
2-Do market research to create a brand
Before you set up a website, create a marketing message, or start promoting your business, you first need to do some market research, which will help you in choosing a URL, keywords for SEO (search engine optimization), and language for your sales materials.
Your keywords or keyword phrases will help get traffic to your site, attract the right clients who can use your services, and help you language your offerings. You can go to Google’s Keyword planner to do some keyword research, or just look at online groups and forums to see what keywords your target is using to define their issues.
Once you’ve done your keyword research, you can use your selected keywords on your website to optimize your site ranking. Using keywords on your website will give you “organic” (that means free) traffic. It’s the best kind of traffic, because these visitors actually searched for your keywords, i.e., they are high-quality leads.
But it’s important to use keywords strategically and sparingly. Search engines will not give you a good ranking if you use your keywords too often on your pages. The purpose of keywords is to aid the search engines in directing people to your site who are looking for what you are offering.
Your copy should sound authentic and be clear on what you do, who you serve, and how you can help.
Blogging is one of the best ways to boost your site’s search engine ranking, without having to pay money. Search engines want to see regular, updated material on your site. And the easiest way to get new information on your site is by blogging.
When you write a blog, you will want to use keywords that you found in your initial market research. They can go in the title as well as the text. Then, since every blog post has its own individual keywords, it’s an additional way to improve your search engine ranking.
Market research is the step that most coaches and consultants skip over and also why so many of them fail to get traffic to their site. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come, unless they know why they should. Your market research insures that you will design and set up your site in in a way that gets appropriate traffic.
3-Look for high quality leads
The fastest way to get more clients—whether you’re just starting out, or have been in business for years—is through networking. Since you’ve identified your target market, now you can go to their hangouts and meet them. You can network online or offline and doing both will get the optimal results.
Offline
There are probably networking opportunities where you live that you can attend to see if your target market is there. You also want to go to places where there are people who can refer clients to you. That’s where entrepreneurs often make a big mistake in networking. They approach people who they think are their target market, try to sell them on their services, and if there is no interest, they move on.
Here’s a better approach: When you meet people at a networking event, ask them if they know anyone who could use your services. That way you let them off the hook from you trying to sell them something, and it becomes a conversation of peers, rather than salesperson and potential client.
If they’re interested in your services for themselves, they’ll tell you. Effective networking not only targets potential clients, but also peers, colleagues, and other professionals with whom you can share resources, knowledge, information, and referrals.
Make a list of relevant groups, organizations, meetings, and events that you know about whose attendees are your target market or your colleagues. Even in a small town there may be networking opportunities such as having a booth at a local event, festival, local business exhibitions, or eco-fests.
Online
Groups
We talked before about defining your target market and doing that very narrowly so that you can find groups of these people. The two best places for groups are on Facebook and LinkedIn. What your topic is and where your potential clients are hanging out, will determine which of those two would be better for your marketing efforts.
Also, you may already be a member of some groups on Facebook and LinkedIn and such groups are places to tap into. Get involved and see which members are potential clients.
Select a few of those groups to establish a presence in and start connecting with people. Share valuable content, information, and resources to begin building a relationship with them.
You can also eventually form your own group. These are the people that are really interested in what you have to offer, and that’s because you are sharing plenty of valuable content and resources with them.
Forums
Another place to find leads online is in forums. If you are connected with any forums of classes you are taking or have taken, that’s another place where you’re going to find leads. In forums you usually have people who are like-minded or who have a common interest. And so those are people that you can also connect with and see if they need your help.
Guest Blogs
The third place to find leads online is through guest blogging. If you can be a guest blogger on a site that appeals to your target market, you will probably get some interest from the readers of that blog. You always want to make an offer for one of your freebies at the end of your guest blog post so that people have an enticement to come over to your website and see what more you have to offer them.
There are many places to find high-quality leads that you can turn into clients. You need to start somewhere, so just pick one of these venues, either offline or online, and try it out. That’s the only way to know if your target market is there.
4- Build a list
First of all, why would you want to build a list? You want to build a list so you have an audience—people to build a relationship with so they understand how you can help them and want what you have to offer. The easiest way to get them on your list is to have a gift. This is a way to give them a free taste of your service, in exchange for their email address.
In order to build your list, you have to move leads from the offline or online venue where you found them and onto your list in an environment that you control.
There are two ways to do this—writing or speaking.
Speaking
Speaking live in front of groups probably has the best return on your investment, time-wise. You’re leveraging your time by getting your message out to a group of people. This will take a little more prep work in that you have to design a talk. But it’s a great way to get clients, especially if you already have a topic you can speak on.
You can give a talk in many different venues—live or recorded—in person or virtual. At the end of the talk, you tell them about the opt-in gift they get when they join your list. Or you can direct them to a low-end product, or offer a strategy session where you will offer your higher priced product.
Organizations, clubs, and local groups are always looking for speakers who don’t charge a fee. You can fit that bill. You can target groups who have an interest in your topic.
Signature Talks /Masterclasses/Workshops
Did you know that masterclasses and workshops convert more business than any other online strategy? That’s what industry leaders say, so it pays to know how to give them and profit from them.
The most amazing thing about giving a signature talk is that it gives you access to a worldwide audience. They are also a better learning environment for both the student and teacher, because they offer both live-interaction and a community setting that home-study courses lack.
Writing
Blogging
I mentioned before about how blogging can help your SEO. A blog is a place where you can share interesting tidbits about your life, as well as valuable information about topics related to your products and services.
This is also a great place to build relationships online, because you are “talking” directly to your visitors in casual language. They can get a better feel for who you are and what you do by what you write about and how you present your material.
A blog lets you build a relationship with readers in a way that a static website can’t. Readers can interact on a blog by leaving comments. When you reply to people who comment on your blog, you are creating a dialogue, the beginning of a relationship.
Article Writing
Writing articles is another effective way to build your list. Most article directories, such as Medium and LinkedIn Pulse, like to see articles of about 500-1000 words. And they give more exposure to articles of that size. Your articles are designed to give valuable content, information, and resources that will build trust with your prospects and filter out the people who don’t resonate with you.
In your articles, you will want to include the keywords (which you found from your market research) that your target market is using. Writing keyword-focused articles will help you get your webpages ranked well in search engines like Google, Yahoo and others, and thus will generate highly targeted traffic from the article directories.
The cool thing is that you can repurpose your blog posts into articles and vice-versa.
One more tip is to do what I do and combine speaking with the blog venue, and that is to do video tips and post them on your blog. That way you get the best of both worlds—they get to see AND hear you, plus you are providing valuable content for your site.
5-Use social media platforms
Once you have decided on a marketing strategy that uses either writing and/or speaking, you need to find an offline or online platform. We have talked about offline platforms such as meetings, and events. The best and most popular platform to use online is social media. And one of the most often asked questions is how to use social media to find clients.
Marketing on social media is one of the fastest and easiest ways to get clients, if you know how to use the different networks effectively.
If you have clearly defined your target market as suggested in step one, then you should be able to determine which social media platforms they are in. In selecting a social media site, consider the culture of that network. For example, is it mostly a business culture or is it more a social culture?
For example, LinkedIn is more business-oriented in its culture than Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. Facebook is more social and is more geared to people who are connecting with friends and family. So if your target market is moms, Facebook may be the best place for you to be doing your marketing. But if your target market is executives, then LinkedIn would be the better place to do your marketing.
I recommend that you pick one platform and focus on it. Mastering one marketing strategy will put you farther ahead faster, than trying to keep up with many strategies on the different social media networks.
Be connection-selective
In order to build your list with social media you want to keep in mind that you are looking for quality leads not quantity. So be “connections selective.” That means when you’re connecting with people, be selective about who you’re connecting with. Try to only connect with people who you think are qualified leads or qualified joint venture partners. Then once you connect with people take the time to build rapport. It’s something you would do with anyone you meet—establish a relationship.
6-Learn how to sell
The sales or enrollment conversation is a vital part of your marketing strategy. No matter how good you are as a coach, consultant, or other service-based business owner, you must master the sales process. But it doesn’t have to be difficult. Most of us shy away from sales because of the stigma it conjures up—the aggressive salesman who makes you feel pressured to purchase something. So now, when we are in the salesperson position, we overcompensate for not wanting to sound like the aggressive salesperson, and go to the other extreme of being too lax in our selling skills.
But sales skills in the enrollment conversations are the key to a coach’s success in business. If you can’t enroll clients into your programs, you don’t have a business. But most coaches didn’t get “sales” training in coach training. You learned how to be a coach, but not necessarily how to be a salesperson.
But because your business depends on the outcome of these enrollment conversations, you need to understand how important they are. You should set a goal for how many conversations you want to have every month, based on the number of clients you want per month, and set up your marketing to secure those appointments. Then track your conversion rate for them.
If you’re just starting out, it’s a good idea to hook-up with a colleague and practice your conversation. You want to be perfectly comfortable exploring someone else’s personal situation, uncovering their pain points, helping them create a vision of a better future, wrapping your program key points around their needs, and finally asking for the money.
Once you feel comfortable with these conversations, your confidence will increase, and your conversions will improve.
7-Nurture your list and your clients
Nurture your list
The goal of a marketing strategy is to get your lead to opt-in to your list and then market to the list by building the relationship and educating them about you and your work. Once you have gotten your quality lead to opt-in to your list, you will need to have a follow-up system that nurtures that lead until they are ready to buy your products and/or services. This system is automated through your autoresponder.
You write a series of emails (or provide links to a video series), which educates your lead about what your solution is, how you work, and anything else they need to know in order to make a buying decision. You also want to continue to give them value through free tools, resources, and information that will be useful to them.
We all have heard that you need to “touch” a prospect at least seven times before they are likely to respond to your marketing efforts, and some say many more than that. So you should have at least 7 emails in your series, and preferably more.
Nurture your clients
After you’ve gone to all the effort of getting a client, how do you make sure that they stick with you at least through your program, but potentially for many years to come? Of course you want a well-designed product or service that can hold your client’s interest and give high value so they will want to stay in the program. You want to help them feel like you really care about them and are there for them.
The best way to retain clients and sell more products to them, is to nurture them and have a follow-up system in place for doing that.
Keep your follow-up system simple so it doesn’t overwhelm you. You can create an email series that includes links to interesting articles, resources, tools, videos, and other helpful information. That way you set it up once and it’s in place for all your clients. You can also survey your clients to find out what they need next and then create next step products for them.
You can also do things like:
- Send them a gift
- Give them a “just checking up” phone call
- Send a hand-written note/card
People like to feel special and you especially want your clients to feel that way. Then you will have clients that stay with you much longer, and you will have less marketing to do.
Now you have the 7 essential steps you need to get more clients. Let’s review them.
Step 1: Carefully define your target and niche
Step 2: Do your market research to create a brand and drive appropriate traffic to your site
Step 3: Find out where your leads are
Step 4: Create a marketing strategy to build your list
Step 5: Use social media to get your leads
Step 6: Learn how to sell, improve your conversion rate, and track your sales
Step 7: Nurture your clients and provide continuing value
If you want more information about how to do all of these steps, check out my book, “7 Essential Steps to Get More Clients” here.
