Even if you have long-term clients, you can't predict market fluctuations and their impact on your agency. Therefore, to sustain your business and keep it afloat, you need new clients and fresh revenue streams.

But finding qualified leads and the right clients is no cakewalk. You have to build trust for your agency among people unfamiliar with your brand.

In this blog, we discuss how you can get more clients in the short term. We focus on ten proven strategies that have worked wonderfully for several businesses. If used effectively, these can help agency owners stand out and thrive.

1. Get Positive Customer Reviews and Awards

Customer testimonials, reviews, awards, and certifications are indicators of your reputation as a business. Reviews aren't common among web design companies and digital marketing agencies. Therefore, even a few reviews on Google, Yelp, or Clutch will help your company stand out and build trust.

Rewards and certifications are crowd pullers. When you establish yourself as a company that provides high-quality services, businesses line up to work with you. Certifications help win local and state-level projects and avoid relentless bidding on jobs to get new clients.

Similarly, potential clients also look for customer reviews before they call you for a quote. 90% of customers read online reviews before they decide to buy a product. So, getting positive reviews is the best way to generate new clients.

2. Create Unique, Genuine Resources

Offering resources such as instant website builders and report generator software can help agencies with customer acquisition in a big way. By solving your customers' core issues, freeing them from the tedious day-to-day tasks, and enabling them to achieve more, you can easily attract their attention and build more transparent, trusting relationships.

For example, DashClicks allows you to use their white label InstaSites software to serve your clients. With this software, you can build a user-friendly, niche-specific custom website within seconds. It can transform your prospecting process and deliver high value with lightning speed. DashClicks InstaSites offer you the following three benefits:

A. Instant Websites

As a digital marketing agency, your ability to build an InstaSite within a matter of seconds can be a transformational experience. With the DashClicks InstaSites platform, all you need to do is fill out an online form and press the enter button. It will help you form an excellent first impression and increase your chances of winning a contract.

B. Niche-Specific Templates

You can revolutionize your prospecting process by allowing your clients to choose from a wide range of industry-specific templates to create an InstaSite. It will help you to work with multiple niches. For example, different niches such as an agency, business, and services, event, gardening, travel, fitness, legal and non-profit may have varied requirements from their websites. A restaurant might be looking for a different website template than a real estate company. When you offer your clients a wide range of niche-specific website templates, they stay.

C. Bulk Website Builder

DashClicks' single and bulk builders allow you to create hundreds of new websites with a single click, saving you time, effort, and money. With the help of DashClicks bulk InstaSites builder, all you need to do is upload your client information using a CSV file, and the bulk builder will create all the required websites with just one click. To know more about how it works, watch this YouTube video. After completing those websites, you can send them to your prospects for review. You don't need any coding or designing experience to make these sites.

3. Focus on Marketing and SEO

Marketing, blogging, and SEO are the most effective ways of prospecting. They help drive traffic to your website, thereby making people aware of your service quality. Working on various keywords and employing standard optimization techniques can help you discover more business opportunities. When researching keywords, make sure they express buyer intent.

It's also essential to follow the latest trends to create fresh content and tweak old content accordingly. It will increase your visibility on search engines, and users will start acknowledging your website for trending and niche-specific content.

4. Get Involved with the Local Community

Community outreach is one of the best ways of prospecting and business development. Find opportunities to tap into the local community ā attend local events and collaborate with regional organizations to promote your business. If you have the time and resources, try community outreach to find leaders and meet potential customers. This process is long and tedious, but it leads you to loyal customers who will stick around for a long time.

5. Run Paid Ads

According to Google, for every $1 spent on Google Adwords, businesses earn average revenue of $2. So, running paid ads can be the best way to generate new clients. Though most agencies do it, but to succeed, you need to set your budget and have a strong keyword strategy. Apart from running ads on Google, you can also use Facebook and LinkedIn to target specific audiences. Include a compelling offer or guarantee in your ads to increase their conversion rate. To know more about how you can achieve more success through paid ads, click here.

6. Try Custom Emails

Email marketing is still as relevant as ever. Since the open rate of most template-based emails is relatively low, try writing a custom email to your prospects through email management tools. It will boost the chances of conversion, especially if it provides value and gives an offer. You can use the power of personalization to make your emails even more effective.

7. Leverage Offline Events

Offline events are a great way to generate leads. Some events in your niche can be highly engaging and rewarding. For example, the auto industry looks forward to car racing events, car shows, and swap meetings to network, prospect, and get more clients. Try attending tech meetups, startup competitions, seminars, and panel discussions.

Such offline will allow you to reel in the foot traffic, network aggressively, and meet other attendees to create brand awareness and promote your products and services. Face-to-face conversations are often the best way to build long-term relationships without sounding too salesy.

8. Get Partnerships and Referrals

Partnerships and referrals work best as an acquisition strategy if you get them from agencies and businesses of a different vertical or price range. When marketing and promoting, you may come across many prospects who don't match your ideal buyer persona. However, if you find another business whose buyer persona complements yours, it's a good idea to work with it for mutual benefit.

9. Promote Your Accomplishments

Do an excellent job at customer service and quality, receive a testimonial from a happy customer, get yourself featured in a local or national journal or TV show, or win an award and then promote it aggressively. Talk about it in your marketing messages, social media posts, blog posts, paid ads, tweets, case studies, and everywhere else you can. You could even write articles about your achievements or awards, repurpose this content, use photos of the award ceremony, and develop a case study for broader publicity. It is a fantastic way to spread awareness about your business, build trust, and get more engagement.

10. Use Storytelling to Create Buzz

Storytelling is a great way to engage with your audiences and move them ahead in the sales funnel. You can do it on different platforms through website content, blog posts, paid ads, guest posts, retargeting, YouTube videos, podcasts, and SlideShare presentations.

Putting your point across through a compelling story is a more effective strategy than a monotonous discussion using data points and abstract ideas. We understand stories, learn from them, remember them, and hold on to them in times of crisis. Stories, when told well, can have a profound effect. Therefore, they are the best way to create marketing buzz. To know how to use storytelling to create awareness, click here.

Conclusion

Client acquisition is a never-ending process, so marketers never sit idle. Hopefully, the blueprint shared in this blog will help you to build a sales pipeline. All of these tips are easy to implement, provided you are ready to invest the needed time and effort. Do let us know your views on these strategies in the comments.