Finding the Perfect Clients for You
When it comes to marketing yourself online, there is simply nothing more important than finding the right clients. If you find the right clients every time then you will not face the majority of problems that hurt small businesses. A lot of people consider the old phrase “the customer is always right”, but I would say there couldn’t be anything further from the truth.
I mean let’s put it this way: a guy walks into a Nike store and buys shoes. He wears them for three months and ends up cutting holes in them due to overuse. This same guy walks back into the Nike store, three months later, hands the store his cut up broken shoes and asked for a full refund.
Does it sound like the customer is always right when it comes to stuff like this? Well no, and of course somebody who bought from Nike would probably not even think about going into a major corporation’s workplace and ask for such a refund, because they would know they are not going to get their money back. Yet people talk to small business owners like this every day, and being that you are a music producer or artist, you are going to need to know how to protect yourself from Clients from Hell.
Small business owners have to deal with this all the time and especially those people in service. A good example for this would be, if a customer contacted you and wanted custom production done and paid you to do it. Then you do hours upon hours of work for them and they love it for a while but then ask you to go an entirely different direction. This is going to hurt you by losing you time and money, not to mention the fact that the client could then try to get a refund regardless of how much work you put in or how much they told you they loved it.
This is incredibly important. If you can get the right clients- those who are serious and ready to make something happen, you will find that your overall success rate, satisfaction rate and refund rates are at their all time best. Not only do you get happier customers, but you also get higher sales and the selling process is a lot easier.
So how do you find these clients? Well first of all you have to figure out what the age group is. In my experience, it’s better to target an older audience, even if you’re the young guy. I’m 25 years old and the majority of people I work with are in their high 30’s or 40’s, easily. But these are customers who are a lot easier to work in my experience. Web advertising allows targeting of age groups pretty much no matter which advertising platform you use. It could be Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Bing Network or any other ad network and you can always target your demographic.
If an advertising platform is selling premium advertising space for your banners on their actual website, then do demographic research before ordering. Quantcast is awesome and free, it will tell you exactly what the demographics are like for a website. I like buying media ads personally but you can purchase ads of any type. It’s crazy how far you can go if you just start spending on advertising and actually profit with a big enough margin to continue that form of advertising. Realistically though, you need to get your offer to at minimum 200% profit. Meaning if you spent $1000 for advertising, you should be able to make $3000 minimum back if you expect to keep up with that advertising source.
Think of it this way, the more money you spend on advertising, the more sales you get. But since the total amount of money you earn has to take into account the money you spent, advertising technically takes a “commission”. You have to make sure that you make enough to pay for the advertising, pay for your service, and the licensing of the artistic material, plus perhaps pay another employee to do some of the production work for you. This means you have to have offers that are highly priced ($1,000-$5,000) and sell to a market that can afford it (30-50 year olds).
But don’t be afraid to turn down a client if it seems like a good idea.