I Tried 21 Methods For Getting Clients, These Are the Best (SMMA)

Through scaling my marketing agency from scratch to $7 million per year and then helping over 100 digital marketing agencies hit 7 figures, I've literally tried every single method out there for getting agency clients, all the way from traditional stuff like cold emails or ads to some pretty unknown methods like joint ventures and the Dream 100 initiative. In this video, I'm gonna walk through the 7 methods that have worked best for my business and the hundreds of agencies we've worked with to generate high-paying clients. These are the client acquisition strategies you're gonna wanna focus on in 2025 and beyond if you're serious about scaling. All right, so when it comes to landing clients, you know, the, the number one thing I would say is that it's not just single channel, right? I think a lot of times that, you know, you, you just wanna do cold outreach or you just wanna do Facebook ads or you just wanna do Dream 100 mailings. But I found that it's a cumulative strategy that you stack on top of yourself that's gonna generate the best results. So I'm gonna talk about the 7 key strategies that work together to get agency clients on a very, very consistent basis. So if you think about it as a hierarchy, kind of the base strategy, the first thing we want to do is cold outreach. And typically when we think cold outreach, we think get a list and spam a bunch of people, right? And I'm sure, you know, that might be what you're thinking, but when I say cold outreach, I really mean we're focused on one particular niche, pool builders, right? And we know that's who we want to sell to. Well, if we want to get in touch with pool builders, if we want to show them more value, if we want to schedule a time to show them how we can help, uh, we've got to get their contact details. We We get their name, their email address, their social profiles so that we can connect with them. And that's a cold relationship to start. And so at the very beginning, yeah, we're gonna get a list of prospects in our niche. Uh, and there's lots of ways to get the list in your niche, right? Way one is to join the association, and that's my favorite strategy to get the initial list. But there's also tools like Coldlytics where we can go in and say, hey, I want all the pool builders that do over a million dollars per year, and we wanna make sure we get the right contact details, right? When it comes to cold outreach, we don't just want name and info@theircompany.com. We want the name of the owner. We want their direct email address. We want a cell phone number if possible. We want their Facebook profile, not for the business, but for the owner of that business, their LinkedIn profile. When we get that data, now we can structure a communication process to make an introduction, to start to add value, to build know, like, and trust. And I think that's the foundation of your marketing and client acquisition strategy is getting that list data and having a cold outreach on-ramp. Up from there is when we start to do inbound marketing. And that's where inbound marketing is where you get discovered. People find you online either 'cause they're looking on YouTube or they're looking on iTunes or they're reading a blog post. If you look at my agency Plumbing and HVAC SEO, you know, this is probably the number one strategy that's helped us grow. Is that we've got webinars, we've got books, we've got content, and people come to us pre-positioned to buy. If all you did was inbound marketing, if all you did was create content and sit on podcasts and put out information, but you were putting it into a vacuum, uh, nobody sees it, nobody's exposed to it, and it really doesn't take you anywhere. So that's why stacking cold outreach with inbound marketing works so well, because we're gonna get a list of prospects in that niche, and now we're gonna create content. Maybe we're gonna do a webinar, maybe we're gonna publish a case study, Maybe we're gonna publish a guide or a cheat sheet. Well, when we create that, we can reach out to our prospect list, that cold list, and say, hey, I just created this thing, or I'm thinking about creating this thing. Would you like me to send it to you? And so now you're actually getting exposure to your content in addition to positioning yourself to be found in the ether from people just looking for you by what you do. Up from there, we've got cold outreach, then we've got marketed inbound marketing. From there, we've got marketed lead generation, and this is running Google Ads, It's running Facebook ads. It's setting up retargeting to market to your ideal prospect. You know, I found that if you do, uh, market lead generation in a vacuum, like that's the only thing that you do, it's pretty expensive. It's very hard to target the right audience. We're trying to get pool builders that do over a million dollars per year. Uh, but it's also expensive because they have no context about you. They've never seen your value. And really all you have is an offer to schedule because we've got a cold list. Uh, we can put that as a custom audience and we can have introduced them via email or called them and reached out to them on social media. So when they do see our ads, they're more likely to be receptive to it. Now, also because we're doing inbound marketing where we're creating content, webinars, and podcasts and information, once somebody does opt in, they, they can get more value from us. We can advertise not just an appointment, we can advertise, hey, I created this cheat sheet and I'd like to give it to you for free. So, you know, kind of going up there was get marketed lead generation. A little bit higher, looking at technique number 5 is associations and speaking. So in your niche, let's just say again, we're using the example of pool builders. Um, there's a National Pool Building Association that's getting together, and it's got a list of members. When we join that association, there's a couple things. First of all, we can draft on affinity. So when we reach out, we can say, I'm reaching out because I'm a fellow member of the National Pool Building Association. But in addition to that, they've got live events that happen typically a couple times per year at a national level and a local level. One of the best things you can do is get out from behind the keyboard and actually get live and in person and Fly out to that city where that event is happening, pay to have a booth there, rub elbows, talk to some prospects, and develop relationships over time. One of the key things that will position you as an expert is being the speaker at these events and at these conferences. So develop the relationships that the opportunities can present themselves to potentially speak at these types of events. So we've got cold outreach, inbound marketing, marketed lead generation, associations and speaking. And at the very top of the hierarchy would be joint ventures, right? Finding people that already have relationships with the clients we want to do business with and finding a win-win, finding a real— a reason why they could refer us to somebody else, a reason they could plug us in. I really believe you're one joint venture away from a 7-figure agency. And I've seen multiple examples of agencies like Jimmy Nicholas from Jimmy Marketing, who was in orthodontics, aligned with one of the top orthodontic coaches, and boom, grew to multiple 7 figures predominantly through that one relationship. This is the hierarchy and it really stacks on itself because if you think about it, you know, I want to go get a joint venture. Well, you can't just start in your niche and get a joint venture, right? You have to earn those types of opportunities. And if you've got a list and you're creating great content and you're advertising yourself and you're showing up at the industry events and conferences, that's where those joint ventures come from because they see you as an expert. They see you as a thought leader. They see you putting out great content and that's when they'll start to reach out to you and be like, hey, you know what? I, I think you could add value to my audience. I'd like to talk about how you can help. Practically speaking, those are the key strategies. Uh, we've got what we teach called the Growth System, which like really takes that obscure concept of all of those strategies, says how does that stack on a daily, monthly, quarterly basis in order to get appointments with prospects in order to hit our sales targets. And so there's a couple things we should be doing daily, right? Daily cold outreach, Facebook ads, Google ads, content, right? Like that's just every day. We should be introducing ourselves to new prospects. We should be out in front of them on Facebook, on retargeting, and we should be rolling out new short-form content. So monthly, there's two things I'm gonna encourage you to do every single month, kind of as your core marketing strategy. Every month, run one educational webinar. Once a month, you show up live, you talk about a very specific topic. Topic, how to get your website ranked for the most important keywords, how to leverage AI in your pool building company, how to make sure your pool website is built to convert, etc. You like cover one of those topics every month. You invite everybody on your prospect list, you promote it to your social following, and people register, and you can offer them an appointment, and it forces you to create new content. So once a month we do a webinar, and once a month we do a podcast. So podcast I'm just talking about interviewing somebody within your niche on how they market themselves, how they've grown, secrets to their success, key lessons that they've learned. And so in this case, we're saying pool build companies, if that's the niche, you try and find the most successful pool builders, maybe the guys that are on the magazine or the guys that were recently featured on someone else's podcast, and you reach out and say, hey, it looks like you're crushing it. I'd love to interview you on the Pool Success Podcast. right? And you do one of those every single month. The monthly webinar is forcing you to create good content and touch your database. The interviews connect you with people you would've never had access to, align you with expertise, and help you create great content that's magnetically attractive to your niche. And then quarterly, every quarter, we wanna find an industry event or conference. So in pool building, as our example, they're gathering, right? They're gathering at least once a quarter. And so once a quarter, we want to find like, where's the national or the local event happening that I can get out from my desk and I can go where my prospects are hanging out, where they're breaking bread, where they're doing continuing education, and plug into that and be there either with a booth or just be there in attendance and ask if there's some way you can add value by speaking or presenting. You start to get on that frequency where you're plugging in live, where they're seeing you add value, where you're starting to make those relationships. You start to become known as an expert within the industry. So every quarter, We do one industry event and every quarter we're gonna do one client case study. Anybody can talk the talk, right? Anybody can create content about digital marketing, about what they're doing to generate results, but very few have proven results where they can say, here's the client, here's where they were when we started, here's the problems they were looking to solve, here's what we did, and here's the results, right? Here's how much revenue they're generating. Here's how much growth they've had. And ideally you get them on an interview on Zoom or whatever platform you use and you ask them to tell their story and you ask them to talk about why they chose you and they talk, talk about How their life is different and better after engaging with your services. Promise, if you do these basic things daily, monthly, quarterly, you're gonna have consistent opportunity flow. You're gonna position yourself as a prolific thought leader in your industry, and you're gonna start to attract not just great clients, but great joint venture opportunities and strategic partnerships. So there you have it, the best methods for getting agency clients. However, you already know that client acquisition is just one part of the whole process. If you wanna scale to 7 figures, you need a proven plan to master all the other parts of your business. That's exactly why we're offering our free agency acceleration calls where we'll study your business's current situation and create a customized game plan you can follow to hit your goals. You'll find the booking link in the description. Just a disclaimer, we only offer these calls to agency owners who are serious about growth. So check out the booking page to see if you qualify. Again, we've helped over 100 agencies hit 7 figures using our frameworks and would love to share it with you as well. So book your free call and let's chat. And if you'd like to see a free course on how to grow your marketing agency to $1 million in 2025 completely free, then click here.