5 best ways to find your first clients

After several months of hard work, your product or service is finally ready to see first customers. Your website is online and you have maybe even opened a brick and mortar store.

But then you start to wonder: How to find my first clients? There is no ideal method to find first clients but there exist different efficient ways to choose from depending on the nature of your business activity.

1. Make media talk about your product/service

If you can consider your product or service innovative, you should definitely contact media to make them write as many articles about you as possible. This strategy can help you increase visits of your website  as well as number of customers coming to your store. Journalists and bloggers are always looking for new thrilling topics to share with their readers.

What do you need to launch an efficient press campaign?

• A quality database of journalists and bloggers of your industry
• A persuasive and well-written press release
• An efficient emailing tool to send out your press release to several thousands of journalists at the same time.
• A little amount of courage to contact them afterwards by telephone and convince them to write an article about your business

2.  Launch a digital marketing campaign

No matter what your business activity is, numerous digital marketing tools can help you find your first clients. The advantage of a digital marketing campaign is that you can easily measure its result and the return on investment.

What are the different actions that you can carry out?

• Improve your website optimization to appear on top positions in search engines
• Create and manage a community on social networks to build customer loyalty
• Buy media space to increase your online visibility
• Launch a Google Adwords campaign
• Launch social network campaigns

3. Launch a crowndfunding campaign

Even though crowdfunding platforms are originally used to raise funds, nowadays they are more and more frequently used as a tool for advance orders to find first clients. It is an excellent way to showcase your product or service and to start to develop a community interested in your startup. Moreover, if you use international platforms such as Kickstarter or Indiegogo, crowdfunding is also a great way to offer your products or services internationally. Creating multilingual crowdfunding pages can also multiply your chances to find potential clients.

If you want to know more about how to launch a successful crowdfunding campaign, you can check our article: 7 keys to a successful crowdfunding campaign.

4. Cold-call and cold-email

One of the best ways to find your first clients is to contact them directly.  Commercial prospection is not the most favourite way to contact clients and is often neglected by entrepreneurs. Even though it is not the easiest technique, it is crucial for a good business development of a company.

What do you need to carry out an efficient commercial prospection?

•  Identify your most important prospects
• Create, rent or buy a database of your potential clients
• Draft a convincing email that you will use to contact your prospects by email or social networks
• Prepare a short and efficient pitch to describe your activity
• Cold-call to sell your products or services or propose them a meeting

5.  Do on-the-spot prospection

 Being a founder of a company, you are also its number one salesman. You will now have to take every opportunity to enlarge your network and talk about your products or services to as many people as possible. Networking can have a very important impact on the success of your company. Depending on your activity, participate to fairs, hand out flyers, or stick posters – this can also help you attract your target group.

What are the keys of a successful on-the-spot prospection?

•  A solid visual identity: it is crucial to make people remember you. Therefore, your company should have a graphic charter and a good-quality logo corresponding with your positioning and business sector. Your business card should also correspond with your brand image. Originality and creativity are very important to make your clients remember you.

• Convincing Marketing Material: efficient distribution of flyers or posters depend a lot on the quality of your marketing support. A commercial brochure, a flyer, posters or other support represent the first contact of your prospect with your company. In order to stand out from the crowd, it is recommended to create good quality marketing material.

Launch of a press campaign, digital marketing operation, crowdfunding campaign, commercial prospection or on-the-spot prospection: there are many different ways to find your first clients. Nevertheless, you cannot expect your customers to come knock on your door or visit your website if you do not invest time and effort to promote your company.

If you have difficulties finding your first clients, do not hesitate to contact one of All-In Factory experts to help you kick-start your business.