The Local Advantage: Finding High-Paying Clients in Your Own Backyard

Finding high-paying clients might not require you to venture far beyond your doorstep. Local businesses are often overlooked but have a lot of potential that could benefit your service-based business. Today we are deep diving into how you can leverage the local advantage to grow your clientele while also improving your own community.

Topics Covered In This Episode:

1. Leveraging local businesses to find high-paying clients in your area can be a great option since there are businesses everywhere regardless of your town’s size!
2. Niching down doesn't always mean local; it can be location-dependent, like HVAC companies, restaurants, etc.
3. Making a comprehensive list of local businesses is crucial; start with those you frequent and notice within your community.
4. Consider the "four B's" (buses, benches, brochures, billboards) to identify businesses actively marketing themselves.
5. Various methods can be used to connect with local businesses: cold calling, cold emails, in-person networking, and asking for referrals.
6. Local networking groups provide opportunities to build trust more quickly with potential clients.
7. Facebook groups specific to your area can be gold mines for identifying local business opportunities.
8. Local clients often establish longer relationships with service providers compared to online businesses, providing more stability.

Find the full show notes at:  https://brandimowles.com/245

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Additional Resources:

Are you looking to find, pitch, and land high-paying clients? CLICK HERE for Booked & Banked, my step-by-step process to stand out in your marketing and find your next consistent client.

Episode 44: Using Local Workshops to Get More Clients with Shannon McKinstrie - LISTEN HERE

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Transcript

245: The Local Advantage: Finding High-Paying Clients in Your Own Backyard.

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Brandi: [00:00:00] Oh man, today we are talking about the local advantage. Finding high paying clients in your own backyard. Now I talk about niching down to either local, online, or e com all the time. And when I'm usually talking about local, I'm talking about location dependent businesses. So they could be anywhere, they don't have to be local to you.

But this episode is actually talking about finding clients in your own backyard and how the heck Do you do that? And do you even live in a big enough city to make that happen? So if you've ever considered working with clients in your backyard, let's jump on into this week's episode.

Welcome, welcome, welcome back, my friends, to another episode of the Serve Scale SOAR [00:01:00] podcast. My name is Brandi Mowles and I am your host. And as always, if you're a returning listener, thank you for being here. And if you're brand spankin new, we are beyond excited to have you. And the Serve Scale Soar podcast is all about helping you start, grow, and scale your very own service based freelance ad management business.

You can be a media buyer, an ad manager, whatever you want to call yourself. This is the place to do it. Now. I know some of you are like, wait, that may not be me, but I have a one on one service based business. Stick around. Everything I teach is applicable to you. Okay. So as we jump into this episode, I really want to talk about how, when I talk about local businesses, I'm usually talking about location dependent.

So that means they don't have to be local to you. They just have to be location dependent. So that may mean that their HVAC companies, so heating and air [00:02:00] conditioning, plumbing, handyman, brick and mortar stores, restaurants, those are all going to be location dependent. Even photographers, if they're not travel photographers, that is a location dependent business.

So when it comes to running ads for them, we're going to do a local ad strategy. Which changes then compared to online businesses where they can sometimes Connect with the entire world sometimes it's certain countries, but they have bigger reach. And usually when I talk about working with local I say I'm not just talking about local to you I'm talking about local in general.

But today's episode I wanted to get even further down to not just location dependent but Finding clients in your own backyard because some of you have clients just waiting to want to work with you. But you're not looking for them in your own backyard. You're too busy looking elsewhere and some of the best clients to work with [00:03:00] could be literally at the restaurant you're eating at or sitting at the baseball game or servicing your house.

And so let's tap into working with our local economy. So I know some of the people listening right now, and you may be one of them, is like, but Brandi, I live in a really small town. Oh man, so there's no businesses in your town? Is that what you're telling me? There's no plumbers, there's no heating and air conditioning companies, there's no lawn companies, there's no dentists, there's no chiropractors, there's no one that has restaurants.

There's no photographers. You don't have any of those types of businesses in your local community. And chances are, you're like, okay, Brady, yes, we do have those, but they don't have the money to be able to afford me. Oh, are you their accountant? Are you in their bank accounts seeing what their books are, seeing what they [00:04:00] budgeted for marketing, seeing if they have enough cash flow to work with you?

And chances are, Now you're like, okay, Brady. Okay. Okay. No, I'm not their accountant. No, I'm not in their books. And yes, we do have all those. Great. So now we've overcome the two biggest objections that everyone hits me up with. So now that we're all aware that you do have businesses in your backyard, does not matter how small your town is, And, we're not their accountant so we don't know how much money is in their bank.

We can say, okay, I have a pool of people that I can start reaching out to. And if you are, by chance, one of those people that live on, in a very small town, with one road and one stoplight, then, my friend, you have towns around you. And, if you're still like, Brandi, nope, they're small towns, they have no restaurants, the closest restaurant is two hours away from me, then you know what?

Then this may not be the episode for you. That is totally okay. But I would say for 99. [00:05:00] 9 percent of us that is not the case. So how do we connect with them? How do we build trust? How do we land local clients in our backyard? And the first thing that we have to think about is how do we identify local businesses that we could potentially work with?

And the first and easy one is write down everywhere that you frequent. What restaurants do you go to? What dentists do you go to? What doctors, maybe chiropractors, maybe specialists, where do your kids go? Are they in swim lessons? Are they going to tennis practice? Are they, like, I don't know, what are places that you are frequenting?

Every single day, week, month, what stores do you walk by? We live in a smaller town in Georgia outside of Atlanta. So, yes, I do have big, big cities around me. But, our tiny little town is not that big. It is fast growing since 2020 apparently. But, it's still [00:06:00] small in reference to all the areas around us.

And so, when I go to the downtown, which I love, there's all these cute little shops. There's all these cute little restaurants. So when I'm walking past those Let's start writing them down. When you are just out and about driving around, if you're in the passenger seat, I'm a passenger princess. My husband drives me everywhere, and I like it that way.

And I could be looking around and just seeing what businesses are around, what car washes, what local shops, what jewelry stores. and start writing things down. So the easiest way is what businesses are you already frequenting and writing those down, making a list. The second place that we can look for is the four B's that I teach, which is buses, benches, brochures, and billboards.

Now, where I live in my small town, we do not have buses. We do not have benches. [00:07:00] We do not have billboards. When I lived in St. Pete Beach, we had all those. Now, where I live, we don't have any of those. But, one thing we all have is brochures. So when you get the brochures that come in the mail, or when you're eating in a restaurant, or when you're out and about at the coffee shop and you can pick up the local magazine type thing, I've lived in some small towns, and they all have magazines.

Like, they all have magazines. Still to this day, they all still have magazines. And when we pick those up, let's flip through and see who's putting ads in those. Those ads aren't cheap. So using the ForB method is really effective. So let's start writing those businesses down. And then, we can start Looking at, if you have kids, I always think like when you go past the high school or the middle school, this was when we lived in Sarasota, this was more prevalent because we would walk Riley to school or we would scooter to school.

And when we passed the school, there was like all these like [00:08:00] signs on the baseball field fence. And it was all the sponsors. And maybe you're on PTA and you get that book of sponsors. Those people were paying for advertising. So let's write those down. There's Facebook groups, local Facebook groups. We have a great local Facebook group around here where people post and ask questions.

It's just like our county connect Facebook group and people will say, hey, I'm looking for a dentist. Whenever someone says, hey, I'm looking for a dentist, you better be writing down every single recommendation that there is. Or maybe they're saying, I need a nail salon. You write down all those businesses using Facebook groups.

And we're just going to start making a list of all the businesses that we could potentially reach out to. And not all of them are going to be right for ads. That's not our place to place judgment on there. It's our place to create a list. So then once we've identified that there are so many businesses in every single [00:09:00] community.

And we start writing all those down. Then we have a full list. You can also go to Yelp. And start looking up what businesses are on there. Yelp also lets people advertise. So you'll see sponsored. That's a good way to see if they're already running ads. And as you make this list. I want a hundred people. A hundred businesses on this list.

And we're not prejudging any of these right now. We're just making a massive list. And we're going to get a massive list of a hundred people. And then we're gonna start starring the ones that we found in brochures where they've clearly paid to be there. Buses, benches, billboards if they were sponsored on Yelp.

We're gonna start, like, putting, or on Google, if you see, like, ads, you can type in Google, like, HVAC company's local to me. And it'll come up, the sponsored ones will be at the top. So you can either make a list there and then start starring the ones who are already doing some type of marketing. It doesn't have to be Facebook marketing or Instagram marketing, but just [00:10:00] marketing in general.

So we're starting to put those down and we're going to star those. Then once you have this whole list, It's time to start connecting. And when we start connecting with them, we can do cold calling. We can do cold email. We can do in person. I mean, there's so many ways that we can connect with this and we teach you all of this in two different places.

We teach it through our booked and banked system, our bootcamp, and inside of conversions for clients. Inside of conversions for clients, we teach 10 different ways to land clients. But, when you're first getting started, you want to use the risk reversal method, which is what we teach in either our Confident Ad Manager series or booked and banked, and then in conversions for clients.

I'm going to talk about that a little bit more in this video, but I'm going to talk a little bit more in this video about how you can do it even deeper. So when we talk about that and we're like, okay, now I'm going to start reaching out. You start reaching out. Follow ups got to be part of that. Great.

That's one method is to have this whole list. And now if you're like, Brittany, I [00:11:00] don't want to do cold calling, cold email. Awesome. There's another backup plan that you can do. And that is you join local networking groups. And so local networking groups, I, if you've watched the trust ladder, it. We'll link that up.

I did an episode on the trust ladder and cold calling and cold emailing are at the lowest. Like it is going to take the most follow up connections to get a client from that way. It's not a bad way. It's a great way, but you need more numbers. Then we have Facebook groups and stuff like that, which we'll talk about in a minute.

And then we move up the trust ladder. And at the top of the trust ladder, we have in person. And so when we think about in person, there are so many networking groups, even if you live in a super tiny town and start going and meeting people in person, that's going to take the least amount of connections and you're going to be connecting with all [00:12:00] local businesses.

So can you take advantage of local networking? The second way that you can take advantage of local networking is not actually by going to the event as a guest, but in person. I'm going to show you how you can get in touch with the leader of the group and asking to do a workshop and we'll link up Shannon back in 2021, I think it was, did a whole podcast episode about how she does live networking events and does training to land clients for social media.

So we'll link that up as well. So you can go to these networking events as a guest trainer or as a guest, that's going to build more trust and be able to get clients in your backyard. And then. The third way is through referrals. Who the heck do you know? And so asking people you already know who have businesses, if they want to start doing ads, or even better, tell them that you're running ads for local businesses and if they know [00:13:00] two businesses that they can refer you to that would need their services, because then the thing is, if they need your service, they're going to be like, wait, I need your service.

So putting yourself out there and asking for referrals. So at this point we've made a whole list. We have a ton of ways to reach out to them. We can cold call, we can cold email. We can do in person events by networking or speaking. And then we can be asking for referrals from other business owners that we already know.

And then last but not least, and this won't be applicable for everyone, but inside of local Facebook groups, mom groups, business groups, there's always so many Facebook groups. They're gold mines. And there are some, like we, in our county, we have one that's for the whole county and you can pay 100 a month and you get to promote your business twice a week in there.

That would be great. A hundred bucks a month. Heck yeah. Like even if you paid for the whole year and you landed one client [00:14:00] that paid you for a whole year and you were at 1, 500 a month. Let's see. So let's say it took you two months to get a client. So let's do 1, 500 times 10. That's 15, 000 you would make after spending 1, 200 for the whole year in that group.

That's worth the investment. That is worth the investment to get your name out there. There's also mom groups that will post like, hey, I'm a mom business owner. There's business groups. Like there are Facebook groups local to you for everything. People are always looking for help and support and I feel like especially since 2020 more people are looking for media buyers, so ad managers, and they're looking for people who work remote.

So when You are saying like there's no one in my backyard. I'm sorry. There are people in your backyard You just need to start reaching out to them. And the first step is to make the list The second step is to decide on your marketing method. Are you gonna do cold emails gonna do [00:15:00] cold calls? Are you gonna ask for referrals?

Are you gonna do in networking? In person, or are you going to focus on Facebook groups? Pick your method. Then, you're going to start reaching out with our daily touchpoints, five touchpoints a day, and you're going to build momentum, and you're going to start landing clients in your own backyard. So then once we start landing clients in our own backyard, why is this exciting?

One, there's that local connection. Local businesses tend to stay overall longer with their service providers than online business. It's just a pattern I've seen after working with over So we have over 2, 000 freelancers at this point. We may be actually pushing over 3, 000 freelancers. And one thing I know, no matter what the service is, local businesses tend to stay longer with their service provider than online.

And I think online, it's just, it's kind of like the whole tender effect, like is there something better out there? And so, with [00:16:00] So at least within that process, I haven't been able to say, Oh, I want you to open up one of my brands, which I could use it as a case study, but it's the first step of, oh, I could open up an app.

It gives me another way of recognizing that my brand needs to be important. It hopefully not destroy my brand so that I can have direct connection with another startup. No matter how So I'm going to talk a little bit about how you can create a relationship that's harder to break. So if you're a local, it doesn't mean you need to meet with them to do your risk reversal.

It doesn't mean you need to meet with them to do meetings in person. It just means that you have the opportunity. And if that's something that lights you up, that's exciting. That's something now you have available to you. And it will create a relationship that's harder to break. And so I encourage you, if you're someone who wants to work with local businesses, start by looking in your own [00:17:00] backyard.

Make your list. Make your list and then send me a picture on Instagram. At BrandyMiles. Because I know that once you make the list, it's going to break the belief barriers that you don't have any businesses in your area. And remember, we don't know how much money they have in their bank account, we don't know how much they're willing to spend, so it's not your business.

To decide if they have money in their bank account or not. That's for them. And so y'all my first client was a heating and air conditioned company Local to me and he was my client for three years and he took a shot on me running ads And I learned so stinking much. And so working and seeing like, then my parents became a client of his, a customer of his, and then we had other people that became, and it was so cool seeing like your work directly affect your local economy.

And there's something special about that. And what we do as ad managers is the ripple effect. [00:18:00] And when it's local, it's really cool because you see your community and you see how it's helping them get out to more people. And so I would encourage you. If this is an area you want to focus on, take these tips, go apply them and do the dang thing.

There's businesses that want to work with you in your backyard. They just don't know who you are yet. It's your job to let them know. So, if you want to dive deeper into this, go on and head to brainymouse slash, or brainymouse. com slash ad training. We'll link up our training that we have going on now, the best place for you.

We'll link up all the episodes I talked about in the show notes. And until next week, my friends, go out, do the dang thing, serve your clients, scale your business, and soar into the success you [00:19:00] deserve.