Samir Sampat

Too often, mid-size businesses that have experienced some success will start to let things like client acquisition go by the wayside. It’s easy to feel like you’re in a place where you might not need to put as much work into generating new business because the business is doing that on its own. However, if you’ve got a spa or salon, you have a highly competitive business that needs dedicated attention on finding and retaining clients, both now and for the long haul.

There is a lot of competition out there, and they’re growing just as fast as your business. If you want to outpace them, you have to know how to beat them at the most important part of the game: attracting new clients. We’re talking about more than generic promotions and fluffy PR—it’s time to think about what tactics you can use to strategically improve your client intake without breaking your marketing budget. Here are five tactics that should be on every wedding planner’s list.

Budgets are a bear, but they’re a necessary part of business. It can be so hard to squeeze all your “must haves” into a space as small as just $10k each month, but it can also yield a lot more results than you might anticipate. In fact, in today’s world of client outreach, $10k can get you a lot further than ever before, thanks to the plethora of affordable and free solutions that you can find online.

When you’re looking to draw in new clients for your event planning business, you’ve got a lot of different options out there. If you want to get results, you need to get past the PR and shameless self-promotion and take a look at your tactical options for making real changes. Here are five tactics that are sure to help you grow your event planning client list.

Before you can start planning tactics and strategy for client sourcing, you need to know and understand your firm’s unique value proposition (UVP). Put simply, what makes you better than competitors? What do you have to offer that the other recruiting and staffing companies don’t? Figure this out and make sure everyone in the firm knows it so that they can maximize their opportunities, too.

Clients are the bread and butter of your business. It’s expected that you’re going to spend a significant part of your budget on finding and retaining them. Unfortunately, the market right now is fierce with competition, and it can seem nearly impossible for your firm to bring in enough clients to keep profits up and keep you busy.

All too often, professional services like architecture and design rely on passive business growth and development, hoping that will be enough to keep your business strong. Clients are the backbone of your business. Knowing how to attract them and keep the leads coming is critical to your success. There are a lot of different resources out there to assist you, including those that don’t cost a dime and those that require a bit of an investment—both are useful in their own right.

Hiring an answering service can be a great way to streamline your communications and free up your own time from all those calls. These days, people tend to lean toward local services because they feel they’re more connected, more personable, and more trustworthy than large, multi-national chains or nationwide businesses. However, that isn’t the case at all. In fact, many larger companies are just as capable, if not more so, when it comes to delivering that personalized service.

Local Service Ads, or LSAs, are an important part of your marketing arsenal. The process of getting your account approved and set up can take a lot of time and effort, which means that when it comes to actually putting the ads out there, you could be a little out of breath, as it were. You have to be active, stay focused, and optimize your efforts at every turn.

Maybe you’re just starting out in the franchise. Perhaps you’ve been growing lately and realized your existing resources aren’t cutting it. And yet with a limited budget, it’s hard to find the best solutions unless you know where to look. Thanks to the modern answering service, you can get a full team of agents to field calls, chats, and more and it will cost a fraction of what you would spend on hiring people to do the work in-house.