Finding Your First Client as a Brand Strategist
By Levina Kusumadjaja
You have labored day and night, sent DMs and emails to 500 people whom you would love to work with, only to come back with 10 unenthusiastic replies and 5 polite rejections to your invitation to connect.
What happened there?
That’s exactly the problem with cold leads—strangers, people who don’t know you. These people don’t have a relationship with you yet, so there’s no reason for them to trust you. To them, you are just another message in their inbox—no different than companies or sales people who contact everybody they could reach to offer a product or service.
Far too often you get so caught up in trying to reach people who are at the ends of the earth, people who are far from you and way beyond your own community. And it’s not that you’re not allowed to dream big about working with clients who don’t yet know you exist. Yes, dream big and don’t limit yourself on what’s possible. But when you are just starting your business, starting your journey as a brand strategist, and you are looking to get your first clients, the best place to look for them isn’t the places that are far from you. It is actually best to start with your own circle, your own community.
Start reaching out to people in your community because these people would already know who you are and would already trust you and your work.
Ask yourself, who would you want to work with? Think about your family and friends, and the community groups that you are involved in, and think about what you can do for them. You don’t have to start with 100 people right away. Just think of 3-5 people that can benefit from your process, from brand strategy, and reach out to them. DM that friend or family member and begin to have a conversation about where they want to go with their life or business and what’s stopping them from getting there. From those conversations, think about how brand strategy can help them get to their goals. You will never know when and where an opportunity to work together might come.
Your main goal is to build meaningful relationships so that the people within your reach understand the value of what you do. Then, they can hire you or refer you to the people that you want to work with.
It’s possible that most of your friends and family don’t need brand strategy or other services that you offer. But, if they trust you and see that you’re doing valuable work, they might refer you to the people you actually want to work with. We get so busy working hard to impress people who don’t know us, when we can be working hard to build meaningful relationships with those who already know us and are within our reach. It is through these meaningful relationships that we will most likely find great clients and purposeful work.
So today, if you’re wanting to find your first brand strategy client, stop trying to impress and proving your expertise to all the strangers you stumble upon on Instagram and LinkedIn. Simply ask yourself: With everything that I’ve got and everything that I’m good at doing, who might benefit from that in my community and in my circle of family and friends? Who might emotionally connect to that? And start from there.
Cheers!
Levina
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About the author:
Levina is a writer based in Indonesia. Because of Melinda Livsey, she recognized the power of brand strategy for every creative. She is sharing about her learnings as she goes to help creatives have fun in their growth and journey of building brands. Connect with her on LinkedIn and say hi!