How to Get New Clients During COVID
A lot of you have been reaching out to me letting me know that you can't build a business right now. How do you get new clients during COVID? Maybe you feel like you are ready to pack up and go home. Are you thinking that the sky is falling? Everything is going bad? Nothing is going well? Everything is awful? You have got to STOP that nonsense right now! I'm going to show you how to use attraction marketing to get new clients during COVID.
Things are hard. Do not get me wrong. Trust me. I understand that things are hard, but there is a lot of opportunity out there. There are a lot of people who are working and their businesses are still going. Now you may be doing business differently. You might be pivoting.
If you are a part of Bookkeeper Training School, you have a really good opportunity to help businesses pivot. Businesses that are mailing out invoices are manually invoicing. There's a lot of educational opportunities out there for you. Most businesses are doing their business with a lot with paper. In Bookkeeper Training School, we teach you how to do everything paperless.
So, how can you help your clients do that better? By teaching, being an expert in your field, and build trust with people. And that's how you're going to get new clients during COVID.
How to Get Out of the Mindset that It's Not Possible to Get New Clients During COVID
You've got to get out of this mindset that it cannot be done, that there are no more clients. Go back to Episode 15: How Negative Self Talk is Killing your Success, and if you have not listened to this episode yet, I want you to stop. I want you to go listen first because if you're in the wrong headspace, you cannot do what I'm about to suggest you do.
Unless you change your mindset, it's not going to work. Because, how you're going to get new clients during COVID is using something called attraction marketing. And if you have all of this negative energy in you, you're not going to attract anything. I know that this can be hard. And that's why I said go back and listen to episode 15 first, then come back here.
I am a very rounded, concrete, show me the facts type of person. And those of you who know me, those of you that are in Bookkeeper Training School, and those of you who listen to Small Biz Life, know me as a very concrete person. I only do things that work, and I will tell you that focusing on changing your mindset absolutely works.
Attraction Marketing
So, what is attraction marketing? Jeff Bullas defines it as:
Attraction Marketing "can gain leads for your business very quickly.
It involves giving value and offering free content to pull prospective leads into your company. The ‘attraction’ part of the equation is the important bit here – the idea is not to bang on about your merchandise or your company, but to grab people’s attention on an unconscious level so that they don’t really know they’ve been converted until they take action.
Basically, you are giving before you take, and putting things into the marketplace to attract people to you. By giving, I don’t mean the product itself, but knowledge or information about it that would help the customer make a wise choice." (How To Use Attraction Marketing To Triple Your Leads by Jeff Bullas)
Are you having trouble attracting new clients?
If you're having trouble attracting new clients to you, you've got to think about what you're putting out there into the world. Attraction marketing is essentially how I do all of my marketing right now. This is something that we use in Ingram Digital Media and in my accounting firm. Attraction marketing is how I have grown both of our businesses, quickly while being at home, not traveling anymore, without spending a ton of money on ads and other forms of marketing.
How does attraction marketing work?
It is what it sounds like. You are attracting people to you based on what you are putting online. I did some research on this and learned from others like Julie Stoian. She's amazing at this!
According to Jeff Bullas, the main tips for attraction marketing are:
- Give value by offering free content to pull prospective leads to your company
- Don't completely give away products or services for free but knowledge or information related to the products or services that would help the customer make a wise choice
- It improves engagement which results in increased sales
- Have a genuine interest in customers and their needs. This is the key to success when using attraction marketing.
How can You Master Attraction Marketing
Now, you might think that this is hard because it means that you've got to put yourself out there on social. It's hard to know who to trust or who to believe. But, people are looking for people that they can trust. So, if you want to master attraction marketing to grow your business, you have to become someone that people can trust. Here is how Jeff Bullas defines it and how I apply it:
- Spread Knowledge
- Earn Trust
- Be Authentic
- Be social and responsive
- Give Insights
- Generate and distribute content
Example of how to apply attraction marketing to gain new clients during COVID
I'll give you an example of how I apply this to my business. I look for opportunities to educate people. And the way I do that is primarily through Facebook. Most of you know I'm a bookkeeper, tax consultant, tax preparer, and college professor. Doing tax consulting and educating small business owners is really where I like to be online. Because what that does is help me get leads for my bookkeepers and Bookkeeper Training School.
I search for different Facebook groups. And I look for posts that I can comment on. Yesterday. I was online and there was a post in a pretty big group about someone asking about S corporations. (You can hear my podcast episode 7 on S Corporations here). She was asking about S-corporations. I'm asking questions as if I were talking to a client. Talking about what you would have to do, payroll, profits and doing all the things needed.
This type of post is good for lots of different folks. So we're going back and forth, and I helped her. I helped her solve a problem. I told her to go back to her accountant and do this. She was so grateful. I also told her to go check out the website and listen to my poscast episode on S Corporations. Since I did that, I've gotten 25 friend requests from that group.
The second thing is I love helping small business owners and I want to be that person that they follow so that when they do need a bookkeeper, they've taken knowledge, they've learned from me and learned from other people I talk about. And when they get to that point that they need a bookkeeper, they are going to say "Wow. Kristin really knows her stuff! I'm going to hire one of Kristen's bookkeepers from bookkeeper training school."
So in that one post, I'm spreading knowledge, earning trust, I'm being authentic, and I'm being responsive. All of this took me about 10 minutes.
Why is your Facebook Profile Important to Attract New Clients during COVID
When you are working on attraction marketing, people are going to want to click on your Facebook profile. They are not going to go to your page, they are going to come to your personal profile.
You need to give them something that they can see so they have a next step. When you start attraction marketing you are going to have tons of people who friend you and people who are going to want to follow you, which typically happens when someone sends you a friend requests.
How to Use Your Personal Facebook Profile
It can be scary to know that many people will start looking at your Facebook Profile. You might be thinking that you don't want to use your personal profile, but when you are out there working on attraction marketing, you are getting to know people and you're building trust. These people are going to click on your personal profile. However, there are ways to limit what they can see:
- You can make some parts of your about page public. You can make the parts about where you currently work (your business) public, and make the other parts private.
- When you are posting, you can make some posts public so that the people who follow you can see them. And you can put some posts out there that are just for your friends.
How to Enhance Your Personal Facebook Profile
Make sure you do the following to enhance your personal profile:
- Have a value post on top of your personal wall that is public. This can be a blog post of yours, an offer, a freebie, or anything that helps showcase your knowledge.
- Upload a nice profile picture
- Link your Facebook page to your about section in your profile. If someone clicks on this link it will take them to your Facebook page
So essentially what you're doing with this is your funneling people, creating value, earning trust, being authentic, being social and responsive. It doesn't all have to be business all the time, but you are trying to get people over to your personal profile so that they will start to follow you there. And then ultimately you can get people to follow you on your page.
If you'd like to know how I deal with all the friend requests, please listen to my podcast episode 19 (above)!
So again, the process of attraction marketing is spread knowledge, earn trust, go out there and be helpful, and then people are going to naturally gravitate towards your personal profile and then hopefully to your pages.
Other Tips to Help with Attraction Marketing
- Make sure that you've got content that you're putting out on your page on a regular basis.
- You need to be telling people, you're looking for clients on your personal profile because your friends and your family are one of your best marketing tools.
- Make sure there's a call action, so they know how to get in touch with you. It can be: click on my page or book a discovery call.
- At some point, you have got to make an offer. One of the biggest mistakes we make as business owners is that we don't make an offer!
To recap attraction marketing: you spread your knowledge, you attract people to you, you get them on your email list, you get them on your personal profile. You try to direct them to your page. You can message them. If they try to friend you, if you don't want to friend them back, send them to a venue that you want to send them to and then make an offer.
Five More Tips to Attract More Qualified Leads with Attraction Marketing
Here is another article on attraction marketing and how to attract more qualifed leads. Summarizing:
- Know your audience
- Choose one channel - network that makes sense for finding your target audience (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.)
- Tell a story and back it up with statistics
- Offer your first solution - after drawing people in with engagement, provide them with an offer or service they cannot refuse. Something that will solve a problem or help them with a dilemma they are currently facing. Whatever the solution, this should leave your audience wanting more from your business in the future.
- Engage with your audience
You CAN do this. You just have to make it a regular habit to do attraction marketing. I know lots of people who are having the best year they've ever had in their businesses.
I got two people in Bookkeeper Training School who reached out to me last week. One of them said that she just hired her first employee, in the middle of COVID, and in the middle of a shutdown, she hired her first employee.
Another one joined in January. She got through the course and started her business, and then everything shut down. Even in the shutdown, she managed to replace over half of her full-time income during a pandemic. And she's working a fraction of the hours that she was working before.
Don't tell me it can't be done during a pandemic because we are seeing it every day. Don't give up, keep out there. Let me know how I can help you. If you have questions make sure to leave them in the comments.
