Eric Siu shares unconventional ways to land high-value agency clients: host dinners to connect people, niche into emerging areas like Web3, poach clients and talent, give useful gifts, and focus multi-channel outreach on a small number of ideal prospects instead of mass marketing.
Today, we're going to talk about how to get your dream clients for this year and beyond. So I'm not going to give you the typical marketing strategies that people are talking about where it's like, oh, you should be doing paid media. You should be doing SEO. I'm going to try to go a little outside the box a little bit, at least in my opinion. So the first thing I would say is if you want to get your dream customers, one of the things that you can do is very simple. It's throwing dinners, right? And so as an example, hopefully we can pull this up here. But, you know, in the last 30 days or so, I did a dinner at NFT NYC with 20 amazing people. And during Art Basel, I did a Web3 dinner with about 40 people or so. And these are all movers and shakers. And think about the offer here. When you're, when you're offering to throw a dinner, you are doing a couple of things, right? So, A, you're connecting a lot of amazing people. 2, you're covering the bill at a really amazing restaurant. So they're getting a free meal and it's also a really good meal. And so it kind of is a no-brainer, right? You're giving people something to do and you're connecting amazing people and you're taking care of the bill as well. You're doing a lot of heavy lifting. So that's an example of a no-brainer offer. Okay? So you could throw a dinner or if you want to take it up one level more, you can even throw events as well down the road, right? And I would recommend that Maybe if you're starting out, maybe you throw a dinner that is maybe 4 or 5 people, right? And it doesn't need to be something super expensive. But then as you become more successful and you have more resources, then you could decide if you want to go kind of all out for a dinner. Okay. So that's the first one. Second one, you just heard me mention Web3. So if you're watching the video right now, you can see that I'm wearing a JPEG Morgan hat. And this is related to NFTs. NFTs are part of Web3. And so, for example, for our agency, Seagull Grade, we're actually going to try to focus on being that premier Web3 agency, right? So focusing on that, like, you know, we have a lot of experience working with SaaS companies, e-commerce, right? That's kind of our bread and butter, travel as well. But for the future, you know, we do want to focus on Web3, which is part of the reason why I'm even stepping back into the kind of the day-to-day to help assist with kind of this transition to Web3. And so niching down, when people ask, hey, do you have experience in our industry? It actually helps in terms of converting the customer when you're able to do that. Okay. And number 3, now if you're trying to get clients, let's say you're running a services business, what you can do is you could poach, right? And if you have more resources, you can poach from companies, your competitors that already have a Rolodex of clients already that would follow them around to the next company. And because they've done such a good job, they're willing to follow them. And so This is a non-obvious way to do it. It's, you need, you need more resources to do this, but it does work. We've seen it happen over and over. So that's another one. And then when I mentioned, well, this is kind of non-obvious because most people don't do it, but it's also do a great job because what happens in a services type of scenario is if you do a really good job, they're going to tell other people. And we've had clients on the agency side that just keep following us around. You know, we've had people follow us around from 3 to 5 different companies and they just keep doing it because they think our team is reliable. Not they think, they know our team is reliable and they liked the relationship, right? So, you know, that's a non-obvious way to do it. And if you want people to remember you too, over time you want clients to remember you, get a gift that they'll actually use. Maybe it's AirPods as an example. Maybe it's something else. Maybe it's a pillow, right? Maybe it's an Oura Ring that they're going to use every day. But, you know, that's what it is. Another non-obvious way is really engaging people. So if your clients are engaging people where they're hanging out, so if people aren't in tech, they're in Web3, I'm probably going to engage with them on Twitter. If they are more visual, let's say they're a model or like a food blog or something like that, maybe I'll hit them up on Instagram. But engaging them there, it's not just about hitting them up and then bombarding people with emails. It's figuring out creative ways to engage with these people, whether it's a touchpoint on Instagram, then it's a touchpoint on LinkedIn, maybe then it's an email, maybe it's a phone call. But you're figuring out creative ways to engage with these people. And what I would say too, in terms of getting your dream clients, is not trying to, you know, blast to 1,000 or 10,000 people, right? It's maybe narrowing it down to maybe 100 people or maybe 50 people or 25 people or so that you want to just continue to cultivate a relationship with and just keep delivering for them over and over. You're going to be so good that they can't ignore you that eventually one of the 25 or one of the 50 or one of the 100 they're going to want to work with you and then you can start to compound from there, right? But in terms of getting your dream clients, you know, there's the tried and true methods of SEO, of paid media. But for me, I try to go for the things that are, you know, really focused on kind of long-term relationship building, right? So, you know, that's why I spend the time doing the podcast. That's why I spend time doing videos like this. And that's why I spend time doing dinners. That's why I spend time doing events. They're hard to do. And the good thing about that is it's a blue ocean because when it's hard to do, it's not a red ocean where everyone's competing and fighting each other. And so when you go the extra mile, it actually pays off, you know, tenfold, right? And so let me know if you think I missed anything in the comments and please don't forget to hit the like and the subscribe button because it helps us grow and we'll catch you in the next one. Bye.
