Managing a business is stressful enough without the worry of wondering where your next client is coming from. However, when it comes to selecting your services over others, prospects are spoiled for choice no matter what industry you’re in.
New competitors are launching almost every week, in every corner of the country. Meaning, any opportunity to work with a new client provides a window for you to get to know them and for them to learn more about you. By creating a relationship and demonstrating your abilities, you will keep the door open for present and future opportunities.
Master your Elevator Pitch
Being able to confidently explain your business and points of difference will give you a huge advantage when speaking to prospective clients. To ensure you’re networking effectively, and making the most out of every opportunity, you need to first plan your elevator pitch.
An elevator pitch is an overview of your business, including the what’s, why’s, how’s, and a call to action. This can have a powerful impact on the person you are connecting with, along with setting you apart from your competitors.
How do you create the perfect elevator pitch?
- Start by thinking what makes your service unique. What sets your apart from all the other firms in the area.
- Identify a goal. What do you want your potential clients to get from your pitch? Maybe it’s your low fee structure, your service or your knowledge about the industry.
- Explain what you do or offer. Focus on the problems that you solve and how you help people. Ask yourself this question as you start writing: what do you want your audience to remember most about you?
- Include your unique selling point. Remember, how you say it, is just as important as what you say. You don’t want to rope-learn this pitch so you sound like a robot when you share it. Instead, you want to be knowledgeable enough about your business, that all these just roll off the tongue so that you can explain who you are and what you do well, in a few sentences.
Establishing a Digital Presence
Whether you’re an enthusiastic networker or one who dreads the thought of it, knowledge and confidence is key to overcoming inhibitions and getting the most out of your opportunities.
In this digital age, it is essential for any business to have an online presence. Whether it’s a website, a social media page, or a combination, getting your company online will help sell your service as well as help communicate with your clients.
If someone wants more information about your firm, they’re most likely going to do their research online. Whether they’re specifically looking for your firm, or they just want to find any company that matches their needs, having an online presence will give you a competitive edge.
Social Media
It doesn’t matter about the size of your business, when you started or how many clients you have, social media is an important tool to utilise. It helps you connect to clients, increase awareness, and improve your business growth.
With over two billion active users on Facebook globally, chances are your customer-base have a Facebook account. The same can be said for LinkedIn with more than 500 million users. If your potential-clients are on these platforms, you should be too. This is a great place for you to connect with people, share your expertise as an expert in your industry, promote your services and keep up to date with industry changes.
If you have a professionally designed website, built for converting customers, then social media is a great place to drive traffic to that website where they can fill out enquiry forms. Global Web index reported that 54 per cent of social browsers use social media to research businesses and products.
Website
Your website is often the first impression for a lot of potential clients in the digital world. When someone hears of your business, or is searching for a similar on Google, the first place they’ll go is your website. This is your chance to show them that you’re a professional and to highlight how and why your business operates. If they click onto an old, run-down, text-heavy webpage then your brand image will take a huge hit before even meeting the client.
If you have budget for it, you can engage an agency to build a powerful website for you. If the budget is on a shoestring, you can use a freelancer and if there is absolutely no budget you can do it yourself. With the tools available just about anyone can jump onto a free website building program and drag-and-drop elements to build a webpage.
Before creating the website, it is crucial to spend time planning. Be clear on the message you want to convey to your clients and be confident on how you want it to look. Once you’ve mapped that out, the building stage will come easy. You can look to competitors for inspiration, to see what they’ve done well and where the website has weak points.
Besides the obvious benefits of a good first impression, a good website will be recognised by Google. They’ll rank you higher on their search pages and list your website across more search terms. Keep this in mind when you’re writing the text for your website. You want to include keywords for your industry, for example, at triSearch, that includes Conveyancing or Property to optimise its ranking.
Assign key words and phrases will also increase the likelihood of searches returning your domain. A website is the first point of reference, your digital shopfront, so improving the user interface will help engage a potential client.
Adjusting Fees
In today’s business landscape, you’d struggle to find any industry which isn’t a competitive one. To stand out from the competition you need to be offering your clients the best possible value for your services. As the new financial year is nearly upon us, a lot of your technology suppliers and office vendors will look to increase their fees. This is something you need to account for when setting up your fee structure.
The easiest way to stand out is by dropping your fees wherever possible, without effecting your bottom line. By making small changes and reducing overheads, in turn, you can reduce the fees you charge for your services, making your firm more attractive to prospective and existing clients.
However, as good as having low fees is an advantage in comparison with other firms, always be cautious to never to devalue your service or business. Ensure to sell your service on the value you will bring to the client, with the bonus of lower overall costs.
Establish Yourself as a Thought Leader
It may seem impossible to stand out in today’s environment. But one big differentiator for a business owner or entrepreneur is their position in the market as an expert. Especially in a competitive marketplace, potential clients need to find a compelling reason to choose your services over another.
Proving you’re a team of knowledgeable experts is an effective way to influence decision-makers to engage in your services. Achievable by setting up your personal brand.
Branding yourself in the right way gives you an advantage as you can position yourself as an expert in your field. This isn’t a logo, tagline, elevator pitch or a marketing strategy. It’s how others perceive you and it’s made up of your personality, appearance, work ethic and many other traits.
Every interaction you have with someone will add or detract from your personal brand. What you say, how you say it, how you present yourself, your mannerisms, the way you dress, the company you keep and your vocabulary will all contribute to your brand.
In this tech-savvy world it has never been easier to position yourself as an expert today and try to ‘wow’ your potential clients. Whether it’s sharing short twitter posts with your following, producing regular well-written blog posts on your website, or promoting LinkedIn posts across professional networks.
Whether you’ve built a powerful personal brand already, or if you’re just starting out, you can never stop developing it. Differentiating yourself in the legal market won’t just help with your position in the industry but will also help set you apart from the competition in the market.
Client Retention
There’s a big difference between just getting the job done and working to ensure your clients are truly satisfied with their experience. Aside from performing your necessary duties, it’s important to nurture every client.
By showing you really understand what they need, asking for feedback and always keeping them updated is something that will set you apart from other firms. It’s about going above and beyond, doing what you can, not what you need to do.
Your relationships with your clients need to be at the forefront of your mind. Your services should be one that is highly reliant on trust. The more trust you can create through rapport building, the more confident your clients will be in your ability and reliability, and the more business you’ll receive.
The relationships you have with people are an important tool to generating more clients. Therefore, word of mouth referrals is more powerful than any other forms of marketing.
Conclusion
How well you can bring on new clients and keep them will determine the success of your firm. Any opportunity to work with a new client provides a window for you to get to know them and for them to learn more about you. By creating a relationship and demonstrating your abilities you will keep the door open for future opportunities.
When a client comes to you, they have likely engaged other similar services. By setting your business apart from your competitors it will help in trying to grow your practice.
You can achieve this by perfecting your elevator pitch, improving your digital presence, finding ways to lower your fees, positioning yourself as an expert and lastly, creating relationships with your clients.
