Dekker Fraser - How to Find Web Design Clients: And How to Win New Clients! How to Start a Web Design Business, How to Get More Clients & New Clients, & Prospecting for New Clients

Get More Clients for Web Design or Development

You want more clients and dont want to sell websites for $1,000 when you could be selling them for $20,000. Ive been there, and Ill show you exactly how to grow your web design business profitably. Ill show you how to land more high-paying clients can you can even handle. More precisely, I will show you;

Specific marketing tactics to acquire new clients

How to get more leads

How to get new clients who arent price sensitive

How to charge a premium for your services by differentiating your firm

How to get noticed and book new client consultations

How to get referrals and more business from EXISTING clients

How to reframe your messaging around the needs of the client rather than talking about your firm and your services

So why is it difficult to get good clients? Why arent they just lining up at your door drooling over what you could do for them?
The root of the problem has nothing to do with YOU: its simply economics supply and demand. The supply of web professionals is outpacing demand. There are just too many web people out there who can build websites.

...so why would clients choose YOU?

If you were the only WordPress developer in town, then youd certainly have tons of business. But the reality is that there is tons of developers (supply) and only so many clients looking for developers (demand). What many professionals do to get around this problem is they game the market. They limit the supply of professionals through licenses--effectively making it illegal to compete with them. In this way, the supply is limited by the number of licenses while the demand keeps growing. With such shortages, even the freshest, most inexperienced professionals have a steady supply of clients.They dont really have to do any marketing because there just isnt enough competition. You cant game the market this way, but you can do something else

SPECIALIZE!

Theres a good chance youve heard this advice before. In fact, specialize is the single best piece of advice out there when it comes to marketing services. But rest assured, this book is not just high-level advice youve heard before. Ill get into the nitty gritty tactics as well because Ive actually been in your shoes!

The single most effective thing you can do to get more clients is to specialize. When you specialize, you effectively make the entire set of competitors irrelevant. Youve just created a micro-market where the supply is low and the demand is high. Youre suddenly infinitely better than all the other generic developers or designers in town.

Specialization becomes the reason to choose YOU.

There are so many benefits to specialization that I dont even know where to begin, but here are a few of the perks:

Clients are more likely to refer you because youre truly the expert in something

Because youre doing the same thing over-and-over, you can charge the same price for something that keeps getting cheaper and faster to do

Your business becomes more scalable because it involves repetition

Clients value you more

You are less replaceable

You keep getting better and better, deepening your competitive advantage

There are different ways to specialize

You can specialize by

Target client . Having a marketing strategy almost always necessitates choosing a target customer. The more narrowly you define your target customer, the more your specialization is defined by the target.

Examples:

Websites for lawyers

Ecommerce sites for clothing companies

Websites for personal brands

Web design for SaaS companies

Websites for the healthcare industry

Landing pages for real estate agents

Below is an example of a web design company that focuses on law firms:

Specializing in a specific type of client is the easiest type of specialization because it makes targeting incredibly simple. For example, if you build websites for roofers, then you can give a speech to the local roofers association. You can also buy a list of all the roofers in your country, import that list into Facebook, and hit them all with ads. The added benefit of specialization in specific clients is that it makes defining your value proposition easier. Just talk to a few representatives of your target group to see what they care about.

Often its best to choose target clients who have ongoing needs and will, therefore, generate lots of repeat business. You need to justify the initial investment you make in acquiring clients (the customer acquisition cost) with the stream of revenue youll generate from them in the future (the customer lifetime value). If every client is just a one-off project (one website) then its difficult to achieve scalable growth; you keep needing to acquiring more and more clients to grow revenue. Youll be more profitable if the same clients keep coming back to you again and again.

A good example might be specialization in Magento ecommerce websites.

Magento sellers tend to me mid-large, so they have the funding to be able to pay developers like you. They often deal with large, changing inventories. For example, they may need a fresh new batch of clothing for the latest fall fashions. As they grow, theyll need ongoing support from you to incorporate all the customizations available on the Magento platform with all of its plugins. Once youve secured your position as the trusted technical resource, theyll keep coming back to you.

Situation or problem . You could specialize based on the special situation or problem that clients face, such as:

Website hacking or fraud

Low lead volume

Expanding to more countries or locations

Expanding to ecommerce from brick-and-mortar

Service . You could get really good at a specific service and build your reputation around it. For example:

WordPress

Shopify

Lead generation

Cartoony design style

Automation

Marketing funnels

Above are some of the more common avenues of specialization. Look at your skills and experience to see what makes the most sense to you. As a default, I would say specialization by target client is the most reliable because it forces you to become a specialist in the areas that are most relevant to the people who are paying you. Specializing in a specific target client makes you a specialist in specific situations and services. Moreover, choosing a target client is something you need to do anyways as the foundation of your marketing strategy.

Choosing your target clients

Even if you dont choose to specialize by target client, you still need to make the strategic choice of who your target is. Amateurs often make the mistake of jumping straight into tactics like advertising on Google. You can easily spend thousands and get very little return on investment . After sinking so much cash into marketing tactics, you might quickly realize that the direction you took didnt make any sense. Youll end up pivoting, thereby negating all the time and effort that went into your marketing.

The first thing you need to do before any of that is really quite simple:

Decide who your target clients are.

This is the single most important strategic decision you need to make. Making this decision should feel a little bit uncomfortable. Why? Because it involves tradeoffs, and making tradeoffs is uncomfortable. If it feels too comfortable, then you probably arent making a true strategic decision.