How do you get clients?
This is one question that repeats itself endlessly. You’d think the answer would be common knowledge by now, and it is. The answer lies in a concept called “groups”.
We fail to understand the power of groups, and that’s where the struggle begins. How do you use the power of groups? Let’s find out.
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Let's say you're single and looking for a partner. Where would you find someone suitable?
The short answer is: everywhere. Possibly, everywhere and anywhere. Yet, no one would ask you to start “anywhere” or “everywhere”. Finding a partner is no easy task and a flippant answer doesn't help anyone. Even so, the problem persists, doesn't it.
You could find your partner at a dance, while buying groceries, or even on a dating app. If you ask ten million people how they found their partners, you will probably get ten million completely different answers.
We have the same nagging problem when finding clients, don't we?
Where do these clients come from? At Psychotactics, we don't have to guess. We ask clients where they found us, and they tell us how they got to our website. Even so, they seem to come from everywhere. Ugh.
The short answer seems to be “everywhere” and “anywhere”, doesn't it? The flippancy is back, or so it seems. However, once we dig beneath the surface, we can find a pattern that works better than everything else. It's called “groups”.
There are groups everywhere.
At first, we tend to default to the ones online. The online group seems to work, at least for a while. When we first started Psychotactics, I was not sure where to find anyone offline. However, at the time, people tended to congregate mostly in forums.
People would ask a question, and they'd get a quick answer. Our answers would be long—very long—much like an article. The answer would often span several posts, which means it explicitly covered a lot of ground. A client reading such an answer would be keen to follow the trail of the person who gave that answer. That's how a lot of clients made it to Psychotactics.
Bear with me a while because this route is slightly chronological.
Just like we'd done with forums, we also continued with other groups. I'd get in touch with people who were already sending out newsletters, and when they sent our articles, we'd get clients who subscribed to the Psychotactics newsletter. The same strategy was in place as podcasts became more popular and podcasters needed people to interview.
In every case, the group already existed.
We had to work out how we could get inside the group (in the case of a forum) or go through the rather long method of developing a rapport with bloggers, podcasters etc, so we could get interviewed. However, there's nothing new in what you're reading, is there? Quora, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and even LinkedIn are all groups.
Yet, some groups work better than others. In the case of user-generated content, it can be a hard grind. You may post on these networks, but then so is everyone else—and usually a second before and after you've just submitted your content.
This is a bit like just showing up to a rock concert, hoping to find a date.
Yes, there are a lot of people, and you're likely to find someone, but the odds are not usually very good. If, on the other hand, the rock band talks about you, then you're more likely to instantly rise in status.
Offline groups tend to be curated.
Let's say you have a book, or a training course on “advanced storytelling”. It's likely that there will be many audiences ready to hear your message both online and offline. The offline route is often more troublesome.
You have to get to a location, prepare some kind of presentation and get people interested in what you have to say. Because it's a much steeper route, most of us would tend to avoid it. However, the groups generally tend to be smaller and definitely more homogeneous.
When we sold The Brain Audit, we spoke to people in business.
We spoke at dental conferences, at insurance conferences, but mostly at very small networking groups. We did this activity both locally in New Zealand, while also travelling across to the US, speaking in California, Chicago, Nevada and as far as Pittsburgh on the East Coast. Each of these events were tremendously expensive in terms of time and travel, but it helped us steadily get clients.
A client tends to subscribe or buy a tiny product, but then if you do your job well, can. move on to buy a lot more. The offline expense was consistently hard to justify, at least at first, but at least in our case, it more than paid for itself.
So is there a formula?
The formula is not to shout into the void. It takes a lot of time to create a physical product, or a digital one. It takes oodles of work to create a training program or sustain a membership site. To get somewhat of a just reward for your efforts, you may well end up a scatter gun approach.
That's fine, because we all want to do things that are quick. Yet, the bigger rewards come from getting a spotlight within a group.
For this, you'd need to have a sort of strategy.
Where would you start? It's never a one-size-fits-all situation. At Psychotactics, we have a lot of products.
To name a few, there's The Brain Audit (which is about client hesitation), the cartooning course (where you learn to create your own cartoon character) and a book on talent called Suddenly Talented. These products or services sound pretty diverse.
However, you can quickly see that you might have to go to different groups to get your message across.
All of this entails a lot of work and many people are not prepared to do that.
They want to just post something on social media and hope that it works. However, you're going to find that you get very limited or even no results and then you feel deflated. We'll look at a book like “Suddenly Talented”.
How would you take a book like that and then get it across two various groups?
And I'm promising you this is a lot of work. This is a big list. You might even get bored listening to the list. But it's how we got The Brain Audit off the ground. It's also how movie stars promote a brand new film and an author promoting a book.
Just to finish this podcast, here's a little story and it's about Joseph Pilates.
You've heard of Pilates. He was a foreigner when he got to the United States and he had this system but how did he promote it? He had to look for a group, of course. He found a bunch of dancers and they always have injuries.
So he positioned himself near the dance studio. He did other things, of course, he created scarcity etc., But the core was he found the group. And this is the fundamental problem that we all seem to have.
We're all trying to get one person at a time. And yes, it's possible. But it's just very slow. If you're gonna get one person at a time, then that should be supplementary to the group.
But your biggest focus, when you're trying to get clients, is to get in front of some group, some person that is influencing a group, and that's how you get a whole bunch of clients.
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