- Jul 9, 2020
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NOTE: This is meant for beginners in the web development space. If you’ve owned an agency for a few years, you probably won’t get anything useful from reading this.
I got a bit inspired to write this from the several threads that I’ve lately seen on the topic of finding clients for web development. These threads are usually based around freelancing sites (Fiverr, Upwork) and usually discuss how hard it is to find clients there and how low-value the few clients are.
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This is going to be a somewhat longer post, so brew your fancy coffees and teas and pop up an ibuprofen, so you can cope with my writing - you will soon enough notice that I'm not that good at producing text...
To start this post,
I want to note that I personally find freelancing sites a complete waste of time. At places like Fiverr and Upwork, you have easily thousands of people competing for the same pool of clients regardless of the product.
The way these freelancing sites are structured, they easily create a very monopolistic hierarchy for the sellers, leaving the bottom of the hierarchy usually competing with price.
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The word ‘problem-solving aspect’ comes up many times during this post, and is very important that you understand its meaning. Whenever I refer to problem-solving aspects, I’m referring to ALL the qualities of your product that affect a customer’s buying decisions. Some of these aspects are the product itself, the product’s price, the quality of your product, and such. I’ve shortened this to PSA.
I got a bit inspired to write this from the several threads that I’ve lately seen on the topic of finding clients for web development. These threads are usually based around freelancing sites (Fiverr, Upwork) and usually discuss how hard it is to find clients there and how low-value the few clients are.
---
This is going to be a somewhat longer post, so brew your fancy coffees and teas and pop up an ibuprofen, so you can cope with my writing - you will soon enough notice that I'm not that good at producing text...
To start this post,
I want to note that I personally find freelancing sites a complete waste of time. At places like Fiverr and Upwork, you have easily thousands of people competing for the same pool of clients regardless of the product.
The way these freelancing sites are structured, they easily create a very monopolistic hierarchy for the sellers, leaving the bottom of the hierarchy usually competing with price.
---
The word ‘problem-solving aspect’ comes up many times during this post, and is very important that you understand its meaning. Whenever I refer to problem-solving aspects, I’m referring to ALL the qualities of your product that affect a customer’s buying decisions. Some of these aspects are the product itself, the product’s price, the quality of your product, and such. I’ve shortened this to PSA.
Intro. Why You Aren't Getting Clients
What I usually see from beginners in this space is very unoriginal branding. Bland, unoriginal, cookie-cutter-ish templates that easily blend with the hundreds of thousands of other freelancers/agencies that offer web development.
To these people, I would like to ask 'Why do you think you're special?
If you don't make sites that differ from the masses, your only selling point becomes the price of your services.
Now, if you're reading this, you've most likely noticed that you aren't the only one capable of competing with price. That's why you've probably lost dozens of clients to your competitors solely because they agreed to make them a site much cheaper.
1. Importance of Branding
Branding is a topic of its own that I could ramble enough about for a whole book, but since it’s a very important aspect of this post, I’ll try to quickly give you an idea about it.
In any area of business where you have competitors, you need to have an advantage over your competitors to get sales. The more competitors you have, the bigger advantage you must have. This advantage can be attained through many means.
In web development, which is a highly competitive niche, we should avoid gaining an advantage from PSAs since there are already hundreds of thousands of other people who are already competing with prices, revisions and quality.
If we were to focus on gaining an advantage from PSAs, we would easily end up on an endless loop of reducing our prices, offering more revisions on our site development, and other qualities that effectively reduce the amount of money and increase the time spent per customer.
That's why we want to focus on gaining an advantage over our competitors with correct branding and being more proactive than them (more on this later).
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I like to think of branding as the aspect that lets you choose your clients before they ever even contact you.
If you've come to read this because you're stuck on freelancing sites, you probably have experience in trying to convince potential clients why they should choose you over someone else.
Branding is a way to convince someone to purchase from you without ever directly talking to them. That's why branding is such an important part of building a successful agency - you don't have to rely on your ability to convince potential clients with prices and the quality of your product.
General branding is easy. Everyone can create some sort of brand for their agency.
The difficult part of branding is making it efficient. Correct branding matches your PSAs.
To help you grasp this idea of what I mean by matching your brand with PSAs, imagine what first comes to your mind when you hear Rolex.
It's probably something to do with luxury or very high prices.
And that is very true. That’s because their watches indeed are very luxurious and very costly.
Now imagine what comes to your mind with AliExpress.
Hopefully something along the lines of cheap junk. And that’s because it is exactly that.
We can now mix and match those two companies' brands and PSAs.
Let’s mix and match the brand of AliExpress with Rolex’s PSAs.
How would you see that work?
Could you ever imagine anyone buying a $15k watch from a company that has branded itself as the marketplace of cheap junk?
Perhaps a tad extreme example, but perfectly sensible to make my point.
Matching your brand and your PSAs is very important. A slight mismatch will end up with reduced sales and time wasted on clients who came for your branding and are annoyed because you didn’t deliver the things your brand told them.
Effective branding convinces potential customers to purchase from you.
2. Branding Your Agency
2.1. Target groups
We need to understand a bit about our customer base in order to create a brand that is appealing to them.
We can do this by figuring out what our customers want. To do this, you need to think about your target groups.
If you’re new to the web development space, you don’t really want to offer ‘general web development’. You rather want to tackle specific target groups one at a time.
For example, you could start your agency by targeting only restaurants or pet grooming shops.
Focusing on a smaller area of business allows you to get more authority with much less work.
Smaller Target Groups —> Less Competition —> Easier Authority
Authority —> Easier Convincing & More Powerful Branding
If you were a new restauranteur, you would probably get your site from someone who has already done sites for 20 other restaurants rather than from someone who has only done sites for personal bloggers.
Choose your target group and think about the PSAs that your target group cares about.
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For an example,
you’re a web developer and you’ve chosen your target group to be new restaurants in your local area.
Think about how costly it is to open restaurants in that area.
Is it cheap or expensive?
If it’s cheap, it probably attracts people to open restaurants that don’t necessarily have that much money, since the barrier to entry is low. (e.g. family run pizzerias)
They can’t afford to purchase web development that costs 10-20% of the cost of opening that restaurant.
You would need to offer cheaper websites. (e.g. 400-600€ would be considered cheap in my country)
Think about what qualities restauranteurs are looking for in their sites.
They most likely want some sort of menu that they can themselves update.
They probably also want to display the location of their restaurant (Google Maps integration) and show GMB reviews.
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Once you figure out the PSAs your target group is looking for, you can then start matching your brand with the PSAs.
Create a brand that tells every visitor that you know exactly what they are looking for. You don't want to let your potential customers be left with questions like
'Can I afford this?' or
'Are they capable of implementing GMB reviews and Google Maps?'
You don't want to increase the barrier of sales. If your brand doesn't answer their questions, the barrier to sales would be highly increased as they would have to contact you in order to get answers to those questions.
And believe me, most people aren't willing to spend their time doing that. They'll simply just go find someone who already answers that.
2.2. Uniqueness & Personality
As I previously mentioned, most beginners in this space struggle with being unique. They become a part of the same blob where it's impossible to differentiate which web developer made which site.
You need to be unique. The easiest way to be unique is to bring your own personality into the mix. We are all different people, we are all unique personalities. Why not bring that in here?
Think about what makes you unique from the masses?
As example,
When I started web development work,
I was 17 years old, a heavy minimalist with an appreciation towards elegant fine arts and Nordic design.
That's why my brand is focused around me being a young underdog (in highly competitive areas) who creates beautiful Nordic minimalist sites with an elegant yet a bit cheery side.
Sounds unique?
That's because it is - at least in my local area where I conduct most of my business.
What makes you unique can be your age, your speaking style, or a million other things.
Here's a site from an award-winning developer who is a perfect example of a site with personality.
Unfortunately, branding is a topic that is far too vast to tackle in this thread alone and would require multiple books to even get a slightly better grasp.
Though, I hope this has been enough for you to get the main idea.
3. Sell Locally
Now this is something that I can’t stress enough. If you’re new in the business scene and you’re offering web development services, you're missing on a lot of opportunities if you aren't targeting locally.
Being international is great and lucrative. I get it.
You don’t have to touch grass and can conduct all your business directly from your chair.
But,
International Markets —> International Opportunities For Money ==> International Competition
If you’re new to the space, why do you think that you would succeed in the international markets?
What’s so special about you that clients would want to choose you, a new web developer, to work on their businesses' front (website) rather than those authoritative agencies that have been there since the 2000s and have decades of experience.
It's much easier to get a sale locally than globally, and is why beginners should rather target locally in my opinion.
A part of that is the trust factor.
Most people are going to trust a local business much more than someone who is located on the other side of the globe and has no 'risk' of running into you on the streets if things went really south.
Selling locally also lets you network and connect with people much more easily, which is a very powerful advantage that you can get.
As the saying goes,
"Your Net Worth Is Your Network".
This is something that I hope I knew when I was starting my businesses. I'm rather new in this space, but I've still managed to land clients easily worth 5-figures only because of my connections.
Network with people, people.
Targeting locally can also easily be integrated into your branding.
You can make it a part of your brand that you're a local guy making cool websites for local businesses.
So,
offer locally and enjoy the benefits of increased brand authority, easier networking, increased word-of-mouth sales and a bunch of other lovely things.
A small tip:
Create landing pages based on cities,
E.g.
‘Real Estate Web Development in London’.
‘WordPress Sites For Restaurants in {your city}’.
4. Retaining Clients and Up-selling
What a lot of beginning business owners get wrong is that they treat their clients like one-night stands.
Flirt / Convince Clients To Purchase --> Do the *transaction* --> Bye
Don't do that.
This is one of the pleasures of business. Connecting and networking.
Keep in contact with your old clients and be there when they need you.
With hard work, you convinced your clients to purchase from you. Don't let that work go to waste with only one transaction and make sure that you're there when they need something else.
They purchased web development from you, and they will most likely also need a domain, hosting, maintenance, etc.
The best thing about up-selling is that you don't need to convince them again - they already trust you. You just need to make sure that they know what you can also do.
Should be self-explanatory already.
5. Lead Funnel Ideas
Now, this is the section that probably offers the most value for beginners.
Lead funnels. Ways of getting clients. And (somewhat) unique ones.
I won’t be recommending you the same old basic lead funnels that most ‘gurus’ tell you.
These three funnels are ones that I’ve personally tested, and deemed worthy enough to tell here.
Though, to keep this post relatively short, I will only list them quickly and I’ll leave the implementation part for you to figure out.
- Business Schools and Clubs
Think about it.
These are places where aspiring business owners come. Most of these people will have businesses at some point in their lives.
Send an email or call the lecturers/key persons and tell them who you are, and that you'd like to offer them a specialized package at a discounted rate.
2. Other Agencies
Probably the easiest for beginners to implement.
Find (preferably local) web development agencies that are rather small and consist mainly of 1-5 people.
Connect with them and at an appropriate time, notify them that you would be at their use if they ever wanted to drop service.
3. Business Registries
This might be very country-specific, unfortunately.
Some countries have their registered businesses registry public.
Scrape the leads of newly registered businesses, go through them and check which ones don't yet have a website.
When you do implement these lead gen funnels,
Be creative and unique.
If you want to come up with your own lead funnels, remember that creativity is important.
Think of angles that are ‘unexplored’. Don’t go the common route of scraping LinkedIn leads and blasting spam emails.
Also, try to think of the common route that a buying customer goes through.
The earlier you can strike on that route, the less competition you have and the higher your chances of landing a client.
Exactly like in the funnels no. 1 and 3 above.
You're already there before they even decided to purchase a site. Though, remember that you're not there to push them to make that decision at that time, you're only there to notify them that you're there when they're ready to make that decision.
When you send any prospects emails or do phone calls, be someone who they will remember positively.
Handle things exactly like you did your branding. Differ and don't blend in with the masses - these people surely get enough spam emails/cold calls already.
For cold emailing,
Do NOT use any templates. They are all mostly trash.
Write your own cold emails and preferably keep them under 3 sentences.
