Sign Your First SMMA Client Without Case Studies

Signing your first marketing agency client is usually the hardest part of actually getting started. In fact, most agency owners become frustrated because they don't know how to go about it and actually end up quitting and failing right away. But it doesn't have to be that way. You see, what makes it hard to sign the first client is usually not having any previous client results or case studies that you could actually use to go out and show clients and convince them to work with you. But you don't have to let that stop you. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how you can go out and get clients that without having all these case studies built up for you. And you can hopefully get your first client very quickly after watching this video. So first leverage your team experience. If you have a partner or anyone else on your team, see if they have case studies. For example, if you're working with a company like Agency Box like me, you can leverage my past results for your own success. And if you have someone who's your web developer, you could ask them to give you some case studies that you could actually use and give to your clients. See, when I first got started, I wasn't an expert in everything. I actually have, you know, someone I was working with on social media content. And so I had them provide me some of their past examples and that got the ball rolling as far as my first couple of case studies went. The second thing here is to network and build relationships. If you go out to local events and meetups or join online groups or forums related to marketing, you can connect with potential prospects and actually build relationships. And when you have a strong relationship, you don't have to worry about having to prove yourself and show as many case studies. That's one of the big things that people think is like, I need all these case studies. It's not really about that. It's just the prospect trying to get more proof that you're capable of delivering results. Instead of delivering a case study, just build a relationship. Next thing here is you can actually go ahead and offer to work for free and build your portfolio. You see, while someone might not trust you early on to do a high ticket package, you could go on and offer to do some work for free, show them that you can actually deliver high quality work, and then it builds up your portfolio and your testimonials. You just ask someone, hey, can I actually go ahead and do this for you for free? And in exchange you could give me a testimonial. Sound good? All right, now next, you can Offer a guarantee Considering offering a money back guarantee to potential clients as a way to demonstrate your confidence and ability to actually deliver results. Since clients would feel safer with a money back guarantee, you can actually skip the whole process of having case studies and stand out from the competition. It's going to give you that extra leg up above any other competition that's pitching the same client you are. So if you offer a guarantee, you got to make sure you can deliver on it, right? If you over promise, you might just end up burning your business and having to offer refunds or real fast. All right, next is to collaborate with other agencies and freelancers. You could partner up with agencies that have a stack of previous testimonials from their clients. Again, my Company Agency Box enables marketing agencies to partner up with us and leverage all my past experience for your own success. So if you work with me or someone else out there, you can actually leverage and borrow our case studies for your own success. This gives you the ability to have, in my case, an eight figure agency at your fingertips without having to have any of that actual previous work. Totally ethical because we're your partner in this and we're the ones doing the work. Next up is content marketing. So you can actually go out and create high quality organic content like videos on social media, go out and make webinars, whatever you can do to showcase the quality of work you do and that you're an expert in your field. Then you can actually attract clients. That way you don't have to build an entire system or funnels or webinars, but just get some content out there and showcase your high quality work. If it's on social media, post examples of the work you've done, show testimonials and just ultimately the goal here is to prove to prospects that you do good work and so that they can see what they're getting into and that they have trust that the work you're showing as examples is going to be similar to the work that they're going to get. Next is to jump into some online communities. You would underestimate the power of online communities, Facebook groups and forums just dedicated to the marketing world and you can actually go and participate in discussions, learn from other people and build your reputation as an expert in the field. With this you can actually attract clients from that. And and if there's niche specific online communities, join those. There's sites for doctors and dentists and cosmetic surgeons and cars, whatever you fancy. You can join a community for that and actually be the go to person to help Tell these people how they can market their particular business. It's a great way for you to get in front of a lot of people in a targeted way and also be positioned as an expert. In addition to these, you could offer a free consultation. Really, it's getting your foot in the door and actually having a conversation with a potential customer. It's going to build trust, establish a relationship, give you the ability to understand the client's needs better and actually give them a valuable step by step blueprint on how they can actually go ahead and start growing their business. Whatever it is, if you offer a free consultation, you can bring value and at the end of the day, you can actually offer them a package to work with you. If you don't have case studies to show, that's fine, because you're going to come across as an expert by delivering value and trying to help the client. Whether they sign up with you or not, you still want to give them value and help them in whatever way makes sense. All right. And you can also leverage referrals. You see, a lot of my business has been built primarily on referrals. You get one customer, you deliver them a good experience, they refer one or two more customers, and you keep doing that until your business is a thriving machine. And this doesn't just have to be people that have worked with you. You can go out to your network and ask for referrals. Now here's the thing. You want to create some kind of referral program that incentivizes people to refer business to you. The way I set it up is 10% of whatever someone refers me. As far as clients go, I pay them a commission on that in perpetuity. So literally, as long as that person's a client of mine and someone else referred them, they're getting a payout every single month or every single quarter, depending on how you know the size of the deal. And we actually pay out the people who refer business to us. That, number one, makes my friends who refer business to us make money, which is cool, to help my friends make money. And number two, it actually encourages people to send business to me. Most people aren't gonna wanna out how to do all this marketing stuff their self. They'd rather just refer someone they trust the business and actually make a little kickback on that. So again, even if you have no case studies, no client testimonials, no past results, you can still get clients for your marketing agency because you can use these strategies I just talked about and go ahead and succeed and build up your agency. So whether you have a million clients and tons of successful case studies or you have none, or maybe you are using agency box and are leveraging my case studies, you can actually go out and start getting clients without being worried about that. Now, if you found this video valuable, you learned something new. Maybe you were inspired in some way. I would encourage you to check out my top seven ways to sign new clients in2023. It's a video that's linked and I would love to see you in that video right there. So click the link on that top of the screen over here and I'll see you in that video.