The following method has been used to generate 10s of thousands of dollars in revenue for a micro dog training business, but the same methods can work for any local service or products business. It is important to use all of the steps and not just focus on one however, simply implementing any of these steps will improve your organic reach and help drive traffic to your website or social media page.

How to Get Clients Without Paying for Ads:

Create Social Proof:

In todays digital space, social proof is key to driving potential clients to your business. The upside to using platforms like Facebook, Yelp, and Google My Business is that your potential clients can look at who is leaving the review. This ads to the credibility of the review and whether or not it should be taken seriously.

One easy way to get reviews is to send out a customer survey asking for pain points with your business. If you focus on getting meaningful feedback from your favorite clients, typically they will give you both positive and constructive feedback on how to improve your business or what they enjoy about working with you.

Once this survey has come back, you can then ask them if they would be open to leaving that feedback on your social media, Yelp, Google My Business pages, etc. Make sure that you send them a link to where to leave the review and ask them to leave the same comment they provided you.

Pro Tip: If you get feedback here that is negative or would not make a great review, remedy the situation. Offer them a discount to do business with you again (where you will go above and beyond to remedy the situation), this can turn a negative review into a raving client who will ultimately become a promoter of your business.

Survey Your Clients:

Sending out surveys to your clients is a great way to generate new clients that has some great side effects. How can surveying my existing clients lead to creating new ones you may ask? Great question.

It can do this in a few ways, but the main one is that it makes your clients feel heard. When you genuinely ask for their feedback your clients will feel like they are part of your tribe, and that you care about what they think. This is a great way to build additional value and will make them more likely to tell other people about your business. Have you ever gotten a meaningful survey from a business you enjoyed, and then told someone about them? Or posted on social media about their business?

It can often function as a nice reminder that you exist as well.

Apart from the above, you will get valuable data that can tell you were to post, interact, and speak to potential clients organically. In the post- Covid landscape, organic marketing has exploded. For better or for worse, people have become much more focused on who they are doing business with. By gathering data on what your clients want, you can focus more deeply on providing those specific things to them.

Pro Tip: Use the survey as a way to provide coupons or make your clients aware of special events or deals that are currently going on. A lot of times your clients may have simply forgot that you were there and you could be giving up on average 20% in additional revenue annually by not reminding them. They also may not be aware of the additional services you provide. For example, in the dog training business, often the clients also need dog walking, pet sitting, vet help, etc. Without letting them know that those services are available, they may go to another provider that advertises these services.

Identify Watering Holes (and post in them):

This one is my favorite. Keep in mind that the previous steps will make this process MUCH easier if you have completed them and put some time into identifying WHO your ideal client is. If I were to ask “who is your client” and your answer is “Anyone that is willing to pay me” this method will be VERY difficult. However, if you know who your ideal client is, and you’ve polled them on where they hang out online, how they found you, and why they like you, you’re 75% done.

A watering hole is anywhere that your ideal client is already congregating and while I keep referring to social media with these methods, you can also use these techniques to create business in the real world (shocking). I typically use Facebook groups as my watering holes, local groups are great.

If you’ve listened to my podcast at all ( Shameless Plug: Working ON Your Business (Not IN It) ) you’ll be familiar with this concept. The trick to posting in watering holes is to not just constantly be selling your offer, in fact you will probably get banned for doing this.

Think about being at a party and there’s that one annoying person who just talks about themselves the whole time, they’re selling you on themselves the whole time. However, there are those people that are conversationalists, great at feeling out the room and having a good time. Inevitably you will find out what that person does anyway, and when you do you are much more engaged. This is exactly how you will use a watering holes and organic posting.

I’ll use my dog training business’s posts to explain how to do this further.

First, identify your watering hole, either by asking your clients, or by doing a little research on Facebook (you can also reach out to us for help). I use the Madeira Beach, FL Facebook group for this method. Most of the time I’m posting about this Heron, named Gandalf:

This group LOVES this dude, and why wouldn’t they. As you can see, it generates a good amount of reactions. Some get much higher. Now, if you’re still following, this is the second part and remember DO NOT SPAM the group with sales posts. You should be posting 8-9 Heron posts for every sales post. (8-2 ratio)

Make sure that the sales post focuses on THE CLIENT and not your business. You will know what your clients pains are if you surveyed them correctly.

Now if you follow the directions, posts like these will lead to sales that ultimately costs you nothing. The other beauty here is that it takes almost no time at all to do. It took me 10 times longer to write this article.

I have generated thousands in sales off one Facebook post using this method.

You can often accomplish “free” advertising by solving a problem that another business has. For me that was veterinarians. Typically they had a dog trainer they already referred people to, however they rarely had a dog trainer that would work with the dogs that they had to muzzle, or who’s frazzled owners could call to help them care for their ostentatious furry friends.

This one was a no brainer for me, I’d offer the vet a more pleasant experience with the dog and a happy owner, and they’d offer me ideal clients.

This also came with the unintended consequence of the vet and their clients seeing the behavioral change, and often hearing about it. Now that client and their dog became a walking billboard for my services.

You can scratch the vets back by sending clients their way as well.

For the dog training space, other examples would be:

- Independent Pet Stores
- Farmers Markets
- Bars
- Realtors
- Home Owners Associations
- Local Renter’s Insurers

The trick here is to find businesses you don’t compete with, but who’s lives will be much easier by knowing you. They will GLADLY send you business if you can make them look good and provide the goods.

Affiliate with Paralell Businesses:

PS. If you are struggling to get your organic reach going, or need help implementing the strategies in this article; feel free to reach out!

- Scott Somerville