How to get customers for your product, or service with a small budget
If you don’t know by now, we like to keep our posts short and concise.
We do this because very often we cross-post on websites like Linkedin and Reddit. So let’s get straight into the juicy details.
My favorite platforms for communication:
Linkedin
X (Twitter)
Reddit
Quora
Slack Communities
Tumblr
Blogging
Meetup / Eventbrite (offline events)
Activities that I perform (while on platforms):
Being helpful on other people's posts.
Creating content on Linkedin, Reddit, X (Twitter), Facebook
Liking, commenting, sharing, and re-posting.
Optimizing profiles (check out mine)
Blogging on my website
Analytics Review (important)
Social Arbitrage. This means posting the same piece of content on each platform to see what sticks against the wall. You never know what might work. Here are a few points to consider:
Reels and videos work best for new followers, period.
Keep clips 6 - 13 seconds long. Most viewers who don't follow you won't be won over with long pieces of content.
Longer clips for followers. As followers grow, they will return to view your content.
Analyze data. Who's viewing, what age group, and what countries are they in? I focus more on the United States.
Platform-specific. Pinterest is great for products, mood boards, fashion, and sort of "softer" things. TikTok is a brain-drain, you gotta snap people into loving your stuff within 3 seconds, it's wild.
Have something interesting. I know people like what I have, my web traffic follows my social trends heavily and they are referred quite a bit. I won't discuss that here.
Stay in a position of authority, always. It doesn't matter what type of agency you are building if you want to have clients and make people come to you. I could be wrong here, but I never saw anyone advertising their services, just to land a Fortune 100 company through those ads. If you want large-budget projects talk less about your services, and more about the life, or career a person can have after being in business with you.
Mix up your strategy. Creating short-form content on social media is an approach, blogging on websites like Reddit and Quora is pretty great, including your own website. Creating e-books with Chat GPT, while mixing it up with real experience and knowledge is pretty great. Also placing yourself on job placement sites like Upwork and Fivver will surely give you something. Lastly, partner with agency platforms like Bubble.io or Adalo.com, they have referral networks, and we receive tons of monthly emails on new project requests. There may be other low-code platforms out there, so recommend them to me if I missed them.
Know your strategy. Everyone's experience with this one will be different, but we almost never have projects that exceed $25,000.00 from online leads. They do get pretty high, but they are limited. Any project that has ultimately exceed $100,000, has been from a local handshake. It took many months of relationship building and socializing to get this type of work, it continue through referrals, and quite frankly wouldn't have happened without boots on the ground. By the way, these were not crowd-surfing contacts, we met them at local tech events in LA, NYC, and SF, and also sponsored any event we attended. This made sure that the people who wanted to see us saw us. You'll get lucky if you even find this type of client in the crowd, if not holed up in a booth, or blocked by other interested parties.
Optimize your funnel. So let's say you start having success with times 1-3, now you need to optimize yourself as an authority for [when people need you], not the other way around. I'm guilty of this myself, and sometimes get downvoted, it happens to the best of us! Here's a way you can optimize your funnel:
Create helpful content/answers.
Optimize your banner, profile description, and profile image.
Have a clean landing page, with a low attention/ratio.
Make sure that the product/offering is clear.
Provide something free like a consultation, or blog content as a continuation from social media.
Note: This works great for Linkedin, X, Reddit, Quora, etc..
Let's break this down (the funnel) even further:
Awareness: You are capable of generating web traffic through social outreach. (This is hard, but do-able).
Interest: You have a website or landing page that people go to (needs to be clean, simple, etc..)
Desire: You have a product offering, or service on your website that people can learn more about (preferably nested within a page, or on the front LP).
Action: The user rolls into a free trial, pays with return guarantees, or takes advantage of a sale or discount.
That's an oversimplification of a funnel and the AIDA sales cycle.
If you don't have one of these in place at the bare minimum or need to work to get people in your funnel (drive awareness), then you can as a team decide which one you need to prioritize. You need to be prepared or risk losing a Mermaid to the sea.
Location, location, location. If you're not in the US, you need to understand your market. The United States is sort of the Wild West of business in my opinion. Everyone's looking to grow, build or do something. Europe moves a little slower, and I can speak really for Canada. Taxes and access to capital also play a big role in this. So if you're not in the US, get a partner, or work to better understand the sentiment of how people feel or do business.
We hope this information is helpful. If you want to learn more about how our growth strategies drive 10,000 - 20,000 monthly organic visitors to our site, click here!
