Struggling to Acquire New Clients? Here’s a Blueprint to Energize Your Client Acquisition Plan

Clients are the core of your business and a key component of its success. Attracting new customers is challenging, however, and can be costly. Marketing is getting more expensive and consumers are less trusting of traditional methods.

So, what options do you have for client acquisition? With the right strategy, you can attract more clients and increase your conversions. Here’s how.

The Client Acquisition Funnel

Whether customer journey or sales funnel, funnels aren’t new to the business world. The client acquisition funnel has similar stages:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision

As prospects move through the funnel to signing on as a client, they gain awareness of your business, include your service in their consideration, and choose to become a paying client.

Lead generation typically occurs at the top of the funnel, lead acquisition occurs in the middle, and conversion occurs at the bottom. With client acquisition, the key is to look at the funnel as a whole.

Client Acquisition Marketing

Client acquisition marketing uses specific strategies to market services to new prospects. Usually, this involves the marketing and client service teams and differs from other types of marketing in that it targets current prospects in the consideration phase.

This is because the client service team has an opportunity to onboard clients and retain them, just like the marketing team.

Client Acquisition Channels

Client acquisition channels are the methods and platforms used to attract new prospects. Choosing the appropriate channels depends on your resources and audience, and may include paid or organic marketing and inbound or outbound marketing.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is effective for all businesses, especially service-based businesses like law firms. New, valuable content is highly effective in attracting your target audience and driving them to your website.

Gated Content

Ebooks, guides, and other gated content is part of content marketing, but it’s more in-depth. This content provides something more valuable and elevated, so readers must exchange information like names and emails to access it.

Social Media

Social media marketing may be organic or paid, but it’s vital to modern businesses. Having an active social presence showcases your business and helps you establish yourself as an industry authority. It’s important to determine the best social media platforms for your business, however. Different audiences may be more active on one platform over another.

Search Marketing

Search marketing may include paid ads or search engine optimization (SEO) tactics to drive awareness and traffic. The idea is that prospects search for something relevant to your business, such as “how to choose a family lawyer.” If you’re in the top of the search results, whether in an ad or a high organic ranking, the prospect is more likely to click on your link and learn more about your business.

Email Marketing

Client acquisition often includes collecting a lot of client information and building an email list. Though it may seem outdated, email marketing is an effective way to promote content and stay at the forefront of your prospects’ minds.

How to Improve Client Acquisition Strategy

A solid client acquisition strategy should be sustainable, targeted, flexible, and diversified.

Sustainable

A sustainable client acquisition strategy is intended for the long term. Any investments in time, money, or resources can pay off in the future.

For example, a content marketing plan as part of client acquisition should be more than a post or two to attract clients in the short term.

Ideally, these efforts will drive organic traffic for months or years, paying for the initial investment many times over.

Targeted

Like other types of marketing, client acquisition needs to target the right audience. It’s important to define the ideal client and what you’re trying to say to them.

Create a client persona, or an imaginary client that’s representative of your audience. If your business has a broad audience, such as a law firm with diverse practice areas, you may need to segment your audience into a few different client personas.

From there, you can determine the best messaging, channels, and content to target your prospects with personalized marketing efforts.

Flexible

The business landscape is always changing, and your client acquisition strategy should change with it. Consumers are skeptical, so you may need to pivot to address external market changes and stay on course with your strategy.

Diversified

A diversified client acquisition strategy uses multiple acquisition methods to reach broader audiences and generate new leads.

Instead of putting everything on one tactic or channel, you have multiple options to fall back on. If one method fails, you can redirect your efforts toward the ones that are succeeding.

Supercharge Your Client Acquisition

Client acquisition is an essential component of any business, especially service-based businesses like law firms.

No matter how big or successful, no business can afford to slack on client acquisition. With these tips, you can set up a client acquisition strategy designed to fuel growth, both now and in the future. 

Author Bio: Maxwell Hills is the founder of Hills Law Group, a premier Orange County family law firm with a concentration on high net worth divorces.

Max’s entrepreneurial career stretches back to his teenage days when he had his music used in Grey’s Anatomy and ESPN. Today, Max has used that experience to build Hills Law Group with 0 customers and $0 in revenue to a respected firm in the industry.