How to make lots of money from a relatively small client base

You might be surprised to know that a property or finance business doesn’t need to keep attracting lots of new prospects to be very profitable.

Author Kevin Kelly believes it’s not about clients, it’s about true fans. And you might only need 1,000 of them.

A true fan is different to a client because a true fan will happily provide you with repeat and referral business.

This model is most suited to businesses that have regular clients, like financial advisers, accountants and lenders.

If you focus on getting 1,000 true fans, instead of a million potential clients, your marketing will be more focused. Once you have true fans, it should be easier to get repeat business, because your true fans already love what you do.

Of course, you would work out the optimum number of true fans your business needs based on how much profit you make from them. So if you want to earn $1 million per year and you make an average profit of $3,000 per client per year, you might only need 334 true fans. As your business grows, you’d need more true fans to cover your employees’ wages.

That doesn’t mean you’re going to forget about your regular clients or ordinary fans. True fans may introduce you to their friends and family who may become regular clients. True fans sustain your business; regular clients help it grow.

How do you get true fans?

Modern technology has made it easier to get true fans. Instead of spending hours on the phone or knocking on doors, you can now find them on the internet.

But just having a website and social media pages is insufficient. You also need to follow these four steps:

Publish a lot of helpful content on both your website and social media pages. The more information you have, the more likely you’ll have the answer to someone’s question.
Use plain English and explain things clearly without using industry jargon. Your style of writing should match the way people ask questions, so avoid being too creative or formal when writing your website text.
Organise your website content so when someone clicks through from the search results they can easily find what they’re looking for. Use headings, sub-headings, bullet points and infographics. These features make your website easier to skim, which is what most people do.
Provide enough information to turn the visitor into a client. Ideally, you should tell them what the next step is by including call-to-actions at the end of each article.

Once you have clients, you need to provide an excellent service and nurture the relationship to turn them into true fans.

A way you can nurture the relationship is by continuously giving your clients information they can use. For example:

An accountant can give tax advice
A lender can give tips on how to qualify for a lower interest rate
A financial adviser can explain how your personal risk tolerance affects your investing style

This type of information not only builds your relationship, it could also lead to repeat business which will help turn the client from a regular fan into a true fan.

That means your business needs to produce blogs, social media posts, emails and newsletters. You could also add a personal touch like sending your true fans a birthday greeting.

Using content marketing to turn clients into true fans can take a lot of time and effort. And you may not have that time when you’re running your business. That’s why you should consider outsourcing it to content specialists that specialise in property and finance, like Hunter & Scribe.

Creating great content is only half the battle. You also need to promote your content to get it in front of your target audience.

Here are some ways to promote your blog:

Share your posts on social media
Include social sharing buttons on your blog posts to make them easy for readers to share
Use email marketing to promote your blog posts to your subscribers
Participate in relevant online communities and share your blogs when relevant

We can provide you with well-written website content, social media posts, blogs, newsletters and email content. Contact us for more information.