You can tell a massive amount about a business by looking at its client list.
- When you look at successful small businesses, you’ll find they are very selective regarding who they choose as clients.
- When you look at the typical small business, you find their clients choose them!
The difference?
When you are selective regarding who you accept as a client, you get to work with people who value you and what you do. You get to work on projects that inspire you. You get paid on time, every time. You also do your best work under these conditions, resulting in happier clients and more referrals.
Plus, because birds of a feather flock together, the referrals from these high-value clients are likely to be high-value too.
When you are less selective, you end up with too many low-value clients. Too many bland projects. Too many past due invoices. Too few referrals.
Whilst it may be tempting to accept whichever clients come along, there’s no medium or longer-term benefit. Yes, if you’re 30 days away from not being able to pay the rent, take it. But get selective as soon as you can.
How do you attract the best clients for your business?
I’m glad you asked.
Go deep and narrow
Focus on the very best prospective clients. And only focus on a limited number. In other words, build a list of fantastic prospective clients, which is deep enough for you to be able to study. You can then get to know more about them and what’s important to them.
How narrow? If you would smash your current revenues, profits and general growth goals with 20 more fantastic clients, focus your efforts on 40.
Targeting
Target your marketing, so that it reaches the right people. Use your inner Sherlock Holmes to discover who your ideal prospective clients are.
Okay. You don’t need to be Sherlock.
Simply use your preferred search/answer engine and look for clients who get great reviews from their own clients or customers. There’s often some valuable clues there. Also, do a bit of digging in the social platforms their industry tends to use.
Be just what they wanted
Next, craft your marketing messaging, so that it’s exactly what your ideal profile of client wants to hear. If at all possible, don’t use AI to copywrite your marketing messaging. If you do use AI, get someone who knows more about marketing than you, to review it. AI is okay(ish) for content, but ineffective for copywriting, which is a lot trickier.
Note: You’re not saving money by refusing to pay a local copywriter a few hundred dollars to write this properly.
Finally: Provide the substance
Our prospective clients are a lot less trusting than they used to be. It makes sense. We live in the age of fake news, deep fakes and amazing AI images. Any service provider can claim anything and look the part, too.
This is why it’s essential to provide substance to any promises and/or claims made in our marketing. We can be sure that before any prospect decides to contact you, they will do a degree of research first. This has always been important.
But in 2026 it’s essential.
IMPORTANT: If you want to make more sales, boost your profits and grow an amazing business, this will help you!