Weekly Tip: 3 Innovative Ways to Reach Out to your Dream Clients and Stand Out
How to reach out and network with dream clients as a tech freelancer or an agency.
Hello Freelancers and agency owners,
Last week we took a look at how you could cold-email companies. However, we all know it takes a lot of effort and time to stand out and get even a simple reply. The Covid makes it even harder to meet and network with people in the absence of events.
This week we are going to look at some innovative ways you could try to start a conversation with your dream clients.
In order to do so, you would need 2 things:
1. Idea of the desired client: ideally a well-defined buyers persona. Check here for our free template.
2. Mindset of a scientist: time and desire to experiment as well as right expectations for results.
1. The “Listing” 🥇
This method including a "Top Chart" and including your desired clients in it. For example, if you are a Laravel developer you could create “Top companies that use Laravel in a <City>”. If you are after a specific industry like fintech, you could write something like “Top fintechs in Manchester to watch in 2021”. Just take something out of your Customer Persona and try to group several potential clients(you’d want to connect with) in it.
Once you have your list of companies and ideas in mind, just write a short blog post on a neutral website like Medium. Aks your friends to clap(like it). The good thing is that Medium allows for 50 claps per person. So if you ask 5 friends to clap, you could gather 250 claps which looks good for outsiders. The next step is to reach out to the companies in the list and share that you have included them in an article and ask for feedback. Usually, they would respond to be happy to be featured in something. Remember do not start selling immediately, but try to network and be friendly. Tell them what you do and that you’d love to work with them someday or help them with a specific challenge. You could also tag them when sharing the post on social media for maximum effect.
Example of this method that I did in 2019 and managed to book a meeting with a top German company:
https://medium.com/donatix/top-8-companies-that-use-laravel-in-2019-1330ad0d7b82
2. The Survey 📝
This one takes a lot of time but potential benefits could be reaped for a long time. It is very important to have a well-defined and tested buyers persona.
The idea is to take your Buyers Persona and create a survey around the challenges they have. For example, if your persona is a CTO in fintech: you could create a survey around “Challenges that fintech CTO’s face in 2021”. You define several questions and ask CTO’s to fill your survey. Once done you could publish it and use it as material when reaching out to other CTO’s. Even better if you could on a more granular level and pick one challenge, e.g “How fintech CTO’s tackle talent shortage in 2021”.
3. The video email 📷
Probably the easiest on the list. A lot of people send emails, but not a lot create personalized videos for their prospects. The good thing is not hard and there are a lot of tools that make it even easier.
I have found this method very useful when you want to connect with a speaker or another VIP person before or after an event.
Very useful guide, you could find here:
And that is! Remember to be genuine and helpful when trying those methods. Don’t be too salesy from the start. The goal here is to connect, network and stay top-of-mind with people rather than chasing them for a project.
Next week we would step away and see
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