5-Step System to Get High-Paying Clients from Social Media in 2025

if you are struggling to land clients on social media right now then this video might be for you I'm going to break down a five-part process that I've been using to help creative business owners land five and six figured deals all through social media hey it's Matt essm here over the last decade I've been coaching creative Studio owners and helping them to grow and scale their business now a big part of that is winning new clients winning more business right and most of them rely on Word of Mouth and referrals which is great because it means that they're good at what they do but it's also a little bit unpredictable and so one of the things that they were looking for was a system they could use to take people from total strangers to becoming clients and that's exactly what I'm going to break down today so to start with we need to understand what stops people from actually buying our services and what stops people from trusting us and engaging with us and giving us their attention and their time I took this principal from Zig Ziggler and he has a pretty old but amazing book called the secrets to closing a sale now obviously we're talking mainly about marketing here but really these are the five things these are the five key obstacles that need to be overcome when you are trying to get somebody to buy what you do so when we're thinking about social when we're thinking about getting clients outside of referrals these are the five key pillars that we need to keep in our mind and so what I'm going to do is going to break down each one and I'm going to give you a strategy or a principle or an idea of how you can actually implement this in your business one thing I will say quickly is that I get approached by a lot of creative business owners and when I ask them what they want they tell me they just want clients who get what they do they just want clients who see the value in what they do and they're happy to pay for it now there's an assumption built into that that those clients are just going to arrive and they're going to be like wow Matt you're amazing you're incredible how do we pay you how do we work with you right and like they've never seen anything that I've done before that's really unlikely to happen even if you've got an incredible portfolio even if you've won a lot of War Awards because ultimately those people who have never heard of you before don't really care that much about Awards and portfolio that really just shows them that you are good at your particular craft but what they care about is they care about their business they care about their challenges they care about their desires they care about where they're spending their money if it's safe if they can trust that person and so we can have those clients that just see the value in branding or animation or design the problem with them is if they see the value then first of all they're probably going for the best of the best like the top 1% especially if they've got a budget they've got lots of people that they can choose from the second is if they really understand the value of it they're probably looking at multiple suppliers and so then as a agency or as a creative business you get into this kind of this pitch Fest right where you're up against all these other people and you're kind of engaging with that person at the wrong stage of the decision- making process and so really good marketing is about engaging people that you want to help that you want to work with and helping them to see their problems in a different way than they currently see them to give them some kind of insight or to educate them in some way about how they can get from A to B faster more effectively how they can overcome this problem that maybe they just thought they couldn't overcome or maybe they believed that that was just part of running a business like really good marketers do this well and because they do this well they build the trust of those people and more importantly they get seen as a creative partner as a problem solver rather than just a worker rather than just a pixel Pusher who's going to do what that client says and so that's a big distinction here I just want to make before I dive into this CU as I go through you might be thinking oh I don't really want to do all these things like this person should already want branding they should already trust me they should already trust the process Etc and that it that it would be like an incredible world right if everyone was just bought into what you do they came across you and they were like Matt's amazing he's incredible I want to work with him right now I didn't have to put out any kind of videos I didn't have to put on any kind of content I didn't have to build trust with anyone I didn't have to do any of that stuff people just arrived at my door and they were like hey I want to work with you that would be amazing but that's not really how the world works I mean maybe it works for people at the top 1% but they've spent decades and decades and decades getting there so they've got such an incredible reputation that people just trust them automatically so for the rest of us this is what we have to do and there are five parts and so as I said I'm going to break down each part I want to start with this top one now this might seem really obvious if this person doesn't need this thing then they're not going to buy it right but here's the thing they might not know they need this thing right now in fact you've probably had this experience you've probably come across some kind of product or service that you just didn't really know that you needed until you actually started using it right and you like oh my God how have I lived my life for so long without this thing you didn't know you needed it maybe because you didn't know it existed or maybe because you didn't know it was possible so the first thing is we've got to spend time helping people to understand why they need this thing like why do they need a consistent brand why do they need a visually impaling brand why do they need the thing that we can help them with right it's our job as creative problem solvers as business owners to educate people around that and again I'm going to I'm going to show you some ways that that we can do that the second thing is they've got to want it and again this might seem obvious but going to use the metaphor of say like a gym membership or a personal trainer there might be someone who knows they need to get in shape and they tell themselves I really need to eat better I really need to exercise but do they actually want to do that do they actually want to go to the gym do they actually want to cut out these Foods they need to cut out and it's only when they get to the point where they really want to be in that shape it's not just telling themselves I really need to like I know I need to be healthier it's like I actually want to be healthier I have a desire to be healthier and that has to be an element because someone might know they need something but they might not actually want it and there's a big difference between a need and a desire the third thing is they have to trust us and today this is becoming more and more important because we don't live in the information economy anymore information is freely available look at YouTube as an example right but how do we know who to trust trust how do we know what information to trust right how do we know what person to trust to guide us on the journey that we want to go on so I believe now more than ever we live in the trust economy and so there are some mechanisms that I'm going to walk you through that are going to allow you to build trust then we have got uh this one which is really obvious right they have to be able to afford it and going to talk a little bit more about this but we're not going to ask about budget because often if people aren't aware that they need something or they don't necessarily know why now is the right time to have that thing they haven't set aside budget for it and so we want to qualify people to see whether they have money but we need to do it in a slightly different way and then finally there has to be urgency and this is the one that most people will really struggle with so when I'm coaching creative agencies creative Studios one of the things they tell me is they have great conversations with potential clients but they potential clients say yeah this is great uh we'll get back to you when we've got some work or we'll get back to you next week or next month and then they just don't hear from people so they really struggle to create this sense of urgency okay so let's talk about these five elements how we build them in into our communication on social media and by the way this doesn't have to be you sitting there creating hours of content this can be through direct message this can be just simple things that we feature on our social media profiles but it is essential that we do these five things if we want to get high value clients from social media so let's talk first about need why do you need this particular thing right what is the thing that I offer going to solve for you and this is a very typical mistake that I see a lot of creative business owners making is when we talk about what we do we're very very focused on our services the things that we offer branding web design animation whatever it is and that doesn't really clearly communicate to me why I need the thing that you do it just tells me what you do and unless I've already come to the conclusion that I need graphic design or I need an animated video then I don't need it right it's just nice it's good for you hey it's nice to hear that you're doing this thing and I know when people are really struggling because they literally just post something on LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever which is hey guys just a reminder I do this thing if you need some animation then give me a shout right and it's just not enough it's just not something that's going to communicate the need to that ID CL so if we are communicating the need what we need to do is we need to link what we provide as a service I.E branding graphic design etc etc to two things we need to link it to a pain or problem that it solves or a desire that our ideal client has so rather than talking about what we do we need to talk about our ideal clients challenges and goals and then demonstrate how our process or our service can help them to solve those challenges or help them to reach those goals and so in one of my previous videos or one of the things that I say quite often is the way to do that is to swap talking about services with talking about symptoms so when I say symptoms I literally mean what is your ideal client experiencing right now like we need to one of the jobs of marketers is to get into the world of our ideal clients to try and put ourselves in our shoe in our ideal client shoes so we really understand what is going on in their world and talk about what they're experiencing and that really going back to this trust down here this is really one of the fastest ways to build trust with people is to show them that you understand what is actually going on in their world right so if you don't know this and if you struggle a little bit with this the best thing to do is to find a client that you enjoyed working with in the past and go and interview them go and ask them like what is going on in your world right now like what is happening for you dayto day what are some things that frustrate you what are some things that you want more of what are some things that you want less of like really kind of put your detective hat on and imagine you're trying to get into that person's world so that you can paint a picture of what it looks like and that is one of the first things that really good marketers do they paint a picture of that person's current world so that that person feels like they understand them better than they understand themselves and there was a great phrase which I again use quite often and I can't remember so apologies to whoever came up with this and believe gets passed around the marketing World which is this idea that when you can articulate somebody's challenges and goals better than they can they then unconsciously give you permission to solve them said another way is once you can show someone you understand their world they then trust that you know how to help them with their problems and their challenges right so the first part of overcoming this Obstacle of need is hey we can help you get more of this thing and less of the thing that you don't want and if you don't have this then you don't get those things and that is why you need it right so that is the kind of first concept or first big idea of addressing this concept of need we have to show them that we understand their specific situation and we have to talk about their pain points their frustrations their desires and their goals and really demonstrate how and why they need the thing that we do and how and why the thing that we do relates to those goals and those challenges so that's the that's the first thing the second thing is desire how do we get people to actually want this thing well we just talked about desire here right so one of the key ways that we can attract more clients on social media is by talking about what they want right getting really clear in specific terms this is the important part and this is the part where people kind of generally mess up and I'll give you some tangible examples here so what typically happens when I say to people you need to talk about what your ideal clients want is they start saying well they want to grow their business right or they want more money or more revenue and that's fine but most people want that so you haven't necessarily got my attention if I go on to social media and I see someone saying like hey you can have more clients hey you can have a bigger business you can have more money hasn't really got my attention and so the key to desire is being specific and so I'll give you an example one of my clients is an audio production business and he's worked with Incredible people he's worked with the BBC he's you know big big names and one of the things he wanted to do is he wanted to kind of install a system that allowed him to stop relying on referrals and word of mouth so one of the first things we got him to do is really focus down on a type of person that would benefit from audio and audio branding and So based on his background and his story one of the areas he focused on was Sports and so specifically when we're talking about desire what he drilled down into was a sports club's desire to create raving fans to create people who not only just kind of came to a few matches but bought season tickets that they really wanted to have an incredible atmosphere on Match day so instead of talking about audio branding which his clients probably didn't really care much about or didn't really know anything about he started talking about their desires and he got really specific around them right he didn't just say hey you can have better audio for your match days he said what you really want is you really want to have people that keep back that keep spending money you really want to have like a better atmosphere at your games etc etc so he got really specific about what those outcomes were so needs is more around sort of problems and things that people are experiencing we touch on desire but desire is really about this it's about being specific so that they start to want those things like yeah I want that right and then we're going to link that to our to our so the the pain and the desire kind of cover these top two things now we're going to talk a little bit about trust and this is a really interesting one because as I said I really believe that we are in the trust economy right now and it's harder and harder to get people's trust so I'm going to share a little diagram with you here which is basically about trust so if you ask a client or a person to commit to something which is long-term and potentially recurring I.E a retainer like hey sign up to a Year's retainer if they don't know much about you they will perceive that as extremely high risk right that feels very very risky and so the way that we build trust with people is we offer things to them that feel very low risk very low commitment and we demonstrate value and so I call this the prospect pathway because it's really about this concept of if somebody is cold like they've never met you they are down here and they are very risk averse okay and so what I see a lot of people doing a lot of creative business owners doing is they will talk about a particular thing they might even get on a call with a client and talk about a particular thing and then they will send this proposal for like multiple five figures and this client doesn't really know them that well and so it's a little bit like going on a date you have an incredible time you meet this person and then at the end of the date you go wow this is amazing do you want to move in with me right it's like okay some people might say yes to that but I would say the majority of people would be scared Away by that and that's happening to our clients right now that's actually happening because we're going in with an offer which is way too high risk and so what we've got down here is something I call the irresistible offer and the irresistible offer has a few key attributes the first attribute it has is that it's free so we're actually going to offer something to somebody upfront of value that is free and it's going to be irresistible it's going to be based on their desires it's going to be based on their pain points and it's going to be based on things that they actually want right so the things that we talked about earlier down here like that's what our irresistible offer is going to be based around now I'm not going to go into a huge detail about this because I actually recorded a video for this Channel all about how to build an irresistible offer and what it is so I will link to that video but before you go racing off watching that stick around so I can tell you how to create urgency and qualify to see if they have any money so the first thing we're going to do is we create an irresistible offer this is like hey there's this thing that solves your pain points and your challenges and it's free and so hopefully a bunch of people are going to want that and this is where the qualifying criteria comes in so remember up here I said one of the obstacles to the sale was money right can they afford it and so what we do is we offer a lot of value up front in our irresistible offer and we in that irresistible offer we frame it in a way that demonstrates that this thing can solve those people's pain points and those people's challenges for example with the audio branding that I just used my client gave away a guide which showed people how to use audio to create fan engagement and then the irresistible offer was I will create a custom version of this for your sports club that you can go away and Implement now there's lots of questions around this like oh why would they not just go away and do it themselves right totally get that but that's our irresistible offer and what we're going to do is we're then going to qualify people so when people say like oh that'd be amazing I would love a custom plan for my brand I would love to see how this particular thing you're talking about applies to me and how I can use it in my business we're going to qualify them and we're not going to qualify them there's a few things that we're going to ask but we're not going to qualify them and say okay what's your budget for this because as I said before most people won't have set aside a budget they won't know what we're going to qualify them on on is things like Revenue team size how much do they currently spend on marketing like we're going to talk about things that signify that they would have the money and the budget to spend on this and so one of the things I tell people one of the things I tell my clients is when you're thinking about your qualification criteria think about what would you need to know about this potential client if you only going to get paid when you help them to achieve the result that they want what would you need to know about this potential client if you are only going to get paid when you achieved the result they want I.E what are all the things that they would need in place for the thing that you're offering to actually work for them right and that's a great starting point for those questions right so that's how we're going to get the money objective and again the qualifying can take place via like a form or a call and again on this channel I've recorded a video about the qualifying call and the clarity call and there's a whole framework and a whole structure of it so I will link to that below as well uh if you want to check that out but that can happen on a call ideally when you're first doing this that happens on a call because you can ask more questions you can understand more about that business right so that's the part with the irresistible offer where we're building trust we're demonstrating value and this idea is we kind of like ease people in to this so from qualify we go into what I call The Logical next step and The Logical next step is really just a way that that client can spend a bit more time and a bit more money with you so they can build that trust they're not having to take this huge leap so let's say your average project is like 30 grand okay your logical Next Step would be something like three grand they can spend a bit of money they can get get some output they can get a result but they're not actually going all the way through with the core offer so we're gradually just kind of building trust we're gradually demonstrating value we're leading them by their hand and being like hey here's how you get more of this thing here's how what we do can help you but we're asking for this massive commitment upfront and that's really what this Prospect pathway is about it's about taking someone down here who's totally cold and turning them into a long-term client but doing it gradually and actually doing it step by step right so let's talk about the final part which is urgency how do we create urgency well there's a few ways that we can do this so I'm just going to open up another notebook down here just to talk a little bit about this cuz it's almost like its own I could probably do a whole presentation on on urgency but I'm going to give you a few things now we've all experienced urgency and we don't want that we don't want this kind of like this is going to sell out in 10 minutes if you don't get it buy now with like countdown timers on pages and things like that we want to create authentic urgency and there's a few ways that we can do that one of my favorite ways to create authentic urgency is through price now this is really really simple and I actually encourage most of my clients to do this a few times a year and what we do is we simply increase our prices and we tell people that we're increasing our prices so let's say you get on a sales call with somebody and you present an offer and they say yes this is great you know let's get back to you it's really really simple you just say okay great you know take as much time as you need just to let you know that at the end of this month we are raising our prices so the price I just quoted today is this but in a month's time it's going to be this and we do this several times a year every single year and we do it because it reflects the Improvement in the quality of our service and the skills that we're learning but we also do this to keep up with inflation all of these reasons why you should continue to increase your prices right so most people do this they increase their prices every now and again but they just don't communicate it with people and I think ethically you should communicate when you are raising your prices and so a price raise is one of the easiest most ethical most transparent ways to create urgency cuz it's like hey you can have it for this price or you can have it for more the exact same thing in a month's time now I've got clients that actually put this on their proposal so they have a proposal and that price is valid for a certain amount of days it expires but what they do is they actually show them what the new price would be now obviously you can do this the other way around where it's like a discount if you sign up before a certain time the reason I don't like doing it that way is because psychologically people think in their head that you're then the kind of business that gives discounts pretty easily so I don't like that psychological way of doing it I prefer the increase the other one is capacity right now this is something that we all have but we don't really talk about so right now in your business you have a certain capacity to work with clients you can only work with a certain amount of clients per year now when I say that to people often they say well we just hire more people and usually that's the wrong way to go about business because as hosi says and as Daniel Priestley says there is no supply and demand tension so in order to actually have urgency in order to actually have a business that makes profit you need supply and demand tension so if you think about things that sell out like the big Festival in the UK like glastenbury or the recent scandal with the Oasis tickets like what happened there was there was just more people that wanted that thing then there were that thing available so Daniel pry talks about this in his book over subscribed and it's a really cool principle and if you want your business to be profitable and you want it to be successful then you should be aiming to get oversubscribed I.E you should have more people that want to work with you than you have capacity for so the way that we do this and the way that we create urgency is we continually announce or signal to the market to people we're talking to what our capacity is is so let's say for example you can only work with let's say 12 clients a year right and that's your capacity currently as your business stands that's your capacity that's one client per month so when I was talking about helping people and when I was doing my irresistible offer and when I was communicating on social media I would be constantly communicating we only work with one new client every single month we take on one new client every single month and then when I sign that client providing that they allow us to talk about it we don't even have to say who they are we could just say hey we filled our quota for this month we're now signing clients for next month right and then what you actually want to do is continue to have sales calls but say to that client hey we only take on one client a month we're currently signing for next month and see if you can get a deposit from them to start that project next month now you've got we're booked up for the next two months we're starting in X month and it does a few things number one it creates genuine urgency because people realize you you do have a capacity and you can't help everybody right you don't have capacity to help everybody the other thing it does is it signals to people that you are in demand so going back to oversubscribed Daniel Priestley has this concept in the book where he talks about people buy what other people want right so it's like if someone's signaling they want this thing our brain goes well this must be cool right everyone's buying this thing so there's a psychology behind this as well right so price is a really easy way to to do to create urgency capacity is a really great way to create urgency and the other way that I like to create genuine authentic urgency is through bonuses now these have unfortunately being tired slightly because people use them in the wrong way and people use them in a way that feels very salesy and feels very sort of scammy but in your business right now there's going to be a bunch of stuff that doesn't cost you a lot to deliver but is actually really valuable for your ideal clients and so I would really think about what those things are I would list them down and I would have these bonuses available and look you can call them something else if the word bonus feels a bit salesy to you call them something else like extras or for Li mited time so for example we've got a web design client a web design development client and when they do a proposal and when they create an offer for somebody they actually include a yearfree hosting right because it doesn't really cost them that much they include a yearfree hosting they include SEO audits they include like two or three things but they only include it for a certain amount of time so it's like hey if you want to go ahead with this these extra things here we're going to include this to kind of sweeten the deal but they're only available for Limited time right so that is a genuine way of creating urgency for people the final way of creating urgency is by talking about the cost of inaction we talk about return and investment which is Roi you might have heard before hey if you do this thing this is what it will help you with this will be the return on investment but very rarely do we talk about COI cost of inaction right what is it actually costing you to not have this thing right now on a monthly basis on a daily basis whatever it is right Alex hosi has got a great example that he always uses where he talks about what people actually want to be earning and what they're really earning now and he looks at the difference calculates the difference and says that is what you're currently paying to not know how to reach your current earning goal so it's a little bit of a salesy way of doing it but it's really important that we demonstrate to people so in my client's case does the audio branding what is it really costing you like how many people are leaving the stadium like coming for a game and leaving the stadium and not coming back those people that could be buying tickets could be spending money on food could be supporting your team what is it actually costing you right now to be losing those people and so again when we're talking about content when we're talking about communication it's really about communicating this to our ideal clients because they probably haven't thought about it and so when people realize how much it's actually costing them to not have this system in place to not do this thing then it creates a sense of urgency so these are the five things that that we need to overcome and this is the best way that I know to overcome them this is these are the five things that we need to do so just to quickly recap first of all the client must have a need they must understand why they need this thing and the way that we help them to see that is we talk about their symptoms what's currently going on the pain of what's going to happen if they don't do this or don't have this thing properly then we create Desire by talking about the things that they want and linking it to their business and we need to be specific right it's not enough just to say hey get more clients get whatever if you can link it to specifically what they want more of in their business then you will be way more successful so that's kind of how we communicate then when we actually engage people to build trust we want to deliver value upfront we want to deliver value for free and go from low risk to high risk slowly we want to take them on a journey and we do that by using something called the irresistible offer and so that shows them that they can trust us because we're giving a lot of our best ideas away for free we're giving a lot of our best thinking away for free we're offering something upfront of value we're not asking for anything in return we then want to know that they've actually got the money to invest and that's where our qualifying criteria comes in down here and then we need to have some urgency and the way that we create urgency is through price uh through communicating our capacity through giving bonuses or taking away bonuses and then talking about the cost of inaction so they are the five things that you need to do if you want to get clients on social media more consistently I would love to know your biggest Insight or takeaway from this video if you have any questions drop them in the comments below I read all of them and hopefully you found this valuable my name is Matt essome I'll see you soon