Starting a small business is tough and unless you have investors or savings piled up you are going to have to be conservative when spending money on marketing your business.
I started my business 4 years ago with no savings and no investors and had to hustle to win clients and grow my business. Since then I have grown my marketing agency from 0 staff to 15 and have invested in 3 other businesses.
In this article, I will share what I did to grow my first business from 0 sales to $10,000 in recurring monthly revenue. Of course, your situation is going to be different from mine depending on your business but you should be able to take some of these tips and use them to grow your business.
Search engine optimisation
The first thing you need to do is set up your website so that it tells potential clients what you do and how you can help them. You will also want to make sure that your website is optimised for the search engines.
Optimising for the search engines means that your website can be found when a potential customer searches for your business. For example, if you are a cleaner in Ottawa Canada you want your website to reflect this so people looking for cleaners in Ottawa will find your website.
SEO is a complex subject and there are many guides out there that you should read, I’ve included a few below:
As a small business owner, I would recommend getting your website and SEO set up first because it can take months to see any results from this. When your website is optimised you can move over to other marketing methods while your website matures and moves up the search engine rankings.
PPC Marketing
I’ve included PPC or pay per click marketing in this article because it can get results quickly. I’ve seen a $4.50 ad spend return over $1000 for a client but I’ve also seen a $1000 ad spend produce no returns, so be careful with pay per click marketing because you can lose a lot of money very quickly.
As a new business owner, I would not look to advertise on Google Adwords or any of the other search engines right away. You would be better off hiring an advertising agency later down the line when you have more money coming in.
Social Media
Social media is a great way of getting your business out there when you have a small budget for marketing. You can run social media ads but as a start-up, I’d stick to just posting on there for now.
Pick the social media networks where your potential clients hang out and post there. If you try to cover too many social networks you will become overwhelmed and won’t generate any leads for your business.
The mistake I see many business owners making on social media is that their constantly trying to sell their products rather than create good content that can build up their following.
Gary Vaynerchuk a social media entrepreneur has a good book called jab, jab, jab, right hook which talks about this and is well worth a read if you want to learn how to get the most out of your social media marketing.
One final tip I can give you when it comes to social media marketing is to install the Facebook pixel on your website. You can learn how to do this here and the reason why you should install the pixel on your website is if you decide to run ads in the future you can target the people who have already viewed your website.
Imagine you have a cleaning service and someone visits your website but for whatever reason, they may not buy at that time. If you can then set up a small advert which gets shown to people who have landed on your website and continue to show this advert every time they log into their social media account, you have a much better chance of landing them as a client.
Ad costs when targeting these users are usually cheaper too.
Cold Emailing
Out of all the digital marketing options out there cold email has the worst reputation because it is used by spammers. With that said if you sell business to business, cold email is going to be your best friend and you should use this to get clients fast.
As a startup, cold emailing is by far my favourite way of building your business. When I first started my first business I managed to generate $1500 in recurring monthly revenue by only sending 36 emails.
If I were to start all over again cold email would be my go-to option to grow my business. let’s take a look at how you can use it too.
Firstly, forget everything you have read on cold emailing being a numbers game. Of course the more emails you send the more likely you are to generate business but you shouldn’t think of it in that way.
Every email you send could be a potential client for your business so you should treat every email with respect and only contact the recipient if you truly believe you can help them.
Bad Cold Emails
We have all received bad cold emails, which all start along the lines of:
“Hi Sir/Madam,
My name is X and I can help your business with X I have 10 years experience and can offer you a good price. Email me back to get started.”
Usually, these emails are much longer and by the end of them, you are rolling your eyes while moving your mouse to the trash icon.
The above email is copied, pasted and sent to 1000’s of other recipients and shows that the person has no interest in working with you but just wants to land a job and take your money.
I’m sure by sending these in bulk they will still result in business otherwise they wouldn’t be sent out so often, but your wasting so much time and burning potential relationships by sending out emails like this.
Good cold emails
Forget using templates and get personal. Try it out today. Find 100 clients that you would like to work with and put them into a spreadsheet. Next, you will need to find out who at the company would deal with what you are offering and find their contact details.
Services such as Hunter.io and Viola Norbert can help you find the persons email address.
When you have the contact details go into your mail and start creating personalised pitches.
I have had success with an email that follows the following layout:
- Greeting
- Introduction
- Reason for the email
- Past case study
- Call to action
An example of this email would look something like:
“Hi James,
I was just looking on your companies Instagram, congrats on completing the office refurb by Manor Park, it looks so much better than before, those new doors really make the property pop!
The reason for the email James is that we have just worked with a commercial builder in Ontario and wanted to see if we could help you too.
The company “XYZ building” were losing $xxxx a month from by sending website traffic from their ads to their homepage, we helped them redirect this traffic to a landing page that converted 46% higher and cut ad spend by 23%. I see you are also sending your ad traffic to your homepage.
Are you free Tuesday at 2 pm for a quick chat?
Thanks for your time James,
David.”
As you can see the above “template” goes into more detail and is personally made for James at the fictitious company.
The reason why the above email works is you are concentrating on James and the problems facing his company, rather than telling James about your skills and experience that he doesn’t care about.
Now that you have a personalised email you just have to send them out and follow up with them at least 3 times over the next two weeks.
Some people will miss your initial email or even your second one, so it’s very important to follow up with them. Your follow up emails don’t have to be complex either, just email them asking if they had a chance to review your offer and if you could speak later that week.
Dead simple right.
The advice above isn’t some fluff either, this stuff works and I challenge you to set up time in the next few days and send out 50 emails a day. You will easily set a few meetings and you should be able to close some deals too.
Summary
Running a small business is hard and anyone who tells you it isn’t is either a natural entrepreneur or isn’t entirely being truthful. The day to day of running a business can be difficult but it’s made much easier when you have revenue coming in.
The tips shared above can be used to get a new client this week. Let us know how you get on in the comments section below.
Author Bio
David Jones is a serial entrepreneur and currently runs the marketing of www.firewalltechnical.com an IT services company in Canada.