One of the things that I often get questions about from my clients and students is how to attract high-end clients. They have trouble finding those clients, figuring out who is a high-end client, and then how to actually book them. It’s easy to feel like high-end clients are unicorns, and that actually scoring one is virtually impossible. But, trust me, that’s simply not true! If you do feel that way, it’s probably a combination of both (a) you’re insecure and unsure of your ability to attract high-end clients, and (b) you just don’t have the knowledge of how to do it.
I’m not a life coach or a business coach, so I can’t really help you if you having “imposter syndrome” or suffering from insecurity. But what I can do is teach you exactly how to find, identify, and attract high-end clients. Having that knowledge in your tool belt is going to go a long way to help make you feel like you can do this. (You totally can!)
Why Do You Want to Attract High-End Clients?
Let’s start at the very beginning here. The biggest reason why I see people out there shifting their marketing towards attracting high-end clients is because they want to make more money. They are sick of trading time for dollars, and are getting burnt out because they can’t take on one more client without losing their minds.
But there are actually a few different ways that you can make more money in your business. You don’t necessarily have to attract high-end clients.
The three main ways that you can uplevel your business and make more money are:
- Transition into passive income products
- Take on more clients by converting to the agency model
- Reduce client load by charging more money
Transitioning into Passive Income Products
This is one of the more popular ways that I see people upleveling their business. They realize that, instead of trading time for dollars, they can stop working with clients and instead focus on growing their audience and creating multiple lower-priced products to sell instead.
A great example of this model would be Krista Dickson from Blog Beautifully. She originally started out as a virtual assistant specializing in Pinterest makeovers, but eventually she realized that she was getting super burnt out on client work. Ultimately, she made the leap to focus solely on infoproducts, and now is very successful at selling courses (like her Pageviews from Pinterest course) and other infoproducts (like her Blogging Babe’s Handbook).
This is the best path for people who do not have as much time on their hands (i.e. if you have kids or suffer from a chronic illness), and if they are really good at community building. For example, Krista has been able to grow a really successful Facebook group (Blog-Woo Babes) because people love her and flock to her. They want to learn and grow from her and with her, so they will purchase anything she sells!
If you’re a big introvert, or just seem to have trouble growing an audience, this may not be the best path for you.
Take On More Clients by Converting to an Agency Model
Another way you can uplevel your business is converting to an agency model. This is what I’ve done with my digital marketing and virtual assistance team, but it can also work for other types of online business (graphic design, wedding planning, personal stylist, etc.).
It may be a difficult transition, and it’s probably the hardest out of these three models to get right and sustain, but it’s a lot of fun and allows you to work with dozens of clients.
This path is best for people who have a lot of time on their hands, enjoy teaching, enjoy marketing and networking, kill it on discovery calls, and don’t have a hard time delegating tasks. But, if you’re a “control freak,” don’t have a couple thousand dollars saved up to use during the transition (subcontractors are expensive, and you might lose money at first!), and dislike pressure and responsibility, this won’t be a good career decision for you.
If you are going the agency route, learning how to attract high-end clients can be a great skill to have as well! You don’t necessarily need to only have high-end clients, but it’s nice to have a mix of different types of clients in your business. And having a couple ideal, high-end clients is going to make your life a lot easier. So stay tuned!
Reduce Client Load by Charging More Money
The third option for upleveling your business and making more money is to become an exclusive service provider, raise your prices, and only work with a select few clients who pay you a lot of money. A lot of people really like this option because they don’t necessarily have to spend a ton of time actually working, and you only need a handful of clients each month to maintain your business.
Plus, because you only need a few clients to meet your income goals, the amount of time you will need to spend networking also goes down.
But, if you’re going to go this path, you’ll need to know how to find, identify, and attract high-end clients, as they will be your bread and butter!
What is a High-End Client?
It may seem like an obvious question, but I think it’s important that we tackle this first. I don’t often see a lot of my students marketing themselves towards high-end clients, and I think it may be because they don’t really know what a high-end client looks like. There’s a lot of stigma, misunderstanding, and confusion about who “high-end clients” actually are.
High-end clients tend to fall closer to that “ideal client” you are probably looking for. A lot of people who are just getting started as an online service provider have this expectation that most of their clients are going to be an “ideal client.” This is totally what I used to think! But after a few months of working online, I quickly realized that those really awesome clients are super hard to find, and you actually end up spending most of your time working with people that are either only okay, or who you actively dislike working with.
But the higher your prices and the longer you’ve been in business, it does get a little bit easier. When you raise your prices, you’re automatically excluding a certain groups of people, and only a certain percentage of other online business owners out there are going to want to work with you. And, typically, the people who can spend more money to hire you are easier to work with. They have experience delegating and managing a team, and they probably care less about perfection and more about speed and consistency. Those kinds of things make it a lot easier to have a good relationship with your client.
I think the main thing here is to differentiate between a “high-end client” and a “pain-in-the-ass client who thinks she’s high-end.” If you’re feeling an internal aversion to the idea of reaching out to find high-end clients, it may be because you just don’t know what a true high-end client looks or acts like. So let’s define that!
Someone who is a high-end client is not a diva. I think that is probably the biggest misconception out there.
When I went to the Create Your Laptop Life LIVE network event in Chicago, my mentor Julie Stoian did a class on the different types of client personas. One of the client personas we discussed was “The Diva Client.” Unlike a real high-end ideal client, a Diva is demanding, has a strong sense of entitlement, doesn’t think the rules apply to her, and appears as if she has it all together but has crazy problems in the back end of her business.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that high-end clients = Diva clients. There are high-end clients out there who will actually be completely ideal clients for you and will not suffer from the personality traits of a Diva client. You just have to figure out how to find them!
How to Find, Identify, and Attract High-End Clients
There are a lot of different problems when it comes to find high-end clients, so first, you have to find clients, then you have to decide whether they’re high-end or not, and then you have to network with them and ultimately book them as a client. So we’re going to talk about the whole onboarding process of high-end clients in this post.
Related Post: How to Automate Your Client Onboarding System for Free
How to Find High-End Clients
First things first — let’s talk about how to actually find these high-end clients. There are a couple of different ways that you can find high-end clients and start to network with them.
Search For and Discover High-End Clients on LinkedIn
If you’re looking to find a bunch of high-end clients, the first thing I would suggest is checking out LinkedIn. LinkedIn is a social networking channel that is specifically set up for business owners and people that work in the corporate world.
When I first was starting out as an online service provider, I had a LinkedIn profile from back in the day. But once I started my own business, I never really looked at it again. I thought it was useless for online business owners. Like — what entrepreneur is going to be on LinkedIn when it’s geared mostly towards the corporate world? It just didn’t make any sense to me. And I think that a lot of people have this same mentality. But what I learned over time is that are actually a ton of entrepreneurs, business owners, coaches, etc. on LinkedIn. You just have to be on LinkedIn to find them!
It’s actually really easy to find high-end clients on LinkedIn, because the people who are most active on there are more likely to have come from the corporate world. This is important, because there is huge difference between being a graphic designer as a freelancer and being a graphic designer in a corporate world. In the corporate world, it’s typical for graphic des igners to make $60,000 per year (or maybe even more). They’re super highly paid, and people are used to spend a lot of money on graphic designers. Big corporate agencies have marketing budgets and design budgets, and they’re used to dealing with huge chunks of money and throwing insane amounts of it towards those areas.
The key here is to use LinkedIn to try to find people who have past experience in a corporate world, or who are transitioning from corporate to small business, or even people who are still working in corporate but also have some type of side hustle (there’s a lot of those!). There are tons of people out there who are in the middle of transitioning away from the corporate world because they are so unhappy working the 9–5 lifestyle. But the corporate world has kind of given them this idea that certain things are really expensive. So, by going after those types of people, you are more likely to come across high-end clients in the process. And these high-end clients are probably going to be willing to pay more for your services than your typical clients.
For specific tips on how to use LinkedIn to its full potential, check out the blog posts from Sarah Santacroce on her site Simplicity.
Do Some Digging in Your Facebook Groups
Well you knew that I’d have to bring up Facebook groups eventually, right? Facebook groups are my jam, and they can also be a really great place to find high-end clients. (We’ll talk more about how to identify them in the next section of this post.)
The first tip I have is to check out the owners of Facebook groups. Go through all of your Facebook groups and identify the owners of each of them (hint: put them in a spreadsheet!). Then, make a concerted effort to network with those people specifically.
The reason why you want to do this is because, typically, people that own a Facebook group are further along in their business than other people. This means that they tend to be ready to hire people, or maybe they already have some team members in place. If they have a Facebook group, it means they’re really trying to build their audience and grow their business. That’s a good sign that they have the budget for high-end services like yours.
Especially pay attention to the owner of a Facebook group if you see that they have moderators or additional admins in their group. The fact that they have a moderator means that they’re probably paying that person to help manage their community. And it’s just common sense that if they’re paying one person to do something, they probably have it in their budget to pay other people (as in, you!).
Go through your spreadsheet and vet each owner, then choose five that you really want to snag as a client. Then, just make sure to show up and be present in their groups moreso than in other groups. (On top of the other types of networking you use in your business.)
Related Post: 7 Easy Steps to Book Out Your Services
Check Out Testimonials from Other Service Providers
The next place where you can find high-end clients is within the testimonials of other service providers!
This is a really great sneaky trick that I came up with a few weeks ago. It’s such an awesome way to find these high-end clients! Again, it’s just common sense…if they have purchased a high-end service from somebody else and gave them a testimonial, (a) they’re way more likely than other people to purchase another high-end service in the future, because they’re already known to have previously purchased one in the past, and (b) if they were nice enough to give that service provider a testimonial, they’re probably a good client and therefore might be open to giving you a testimonial later on, too!
The best way to go about finding these testimonials is to search out service providers in a parallel niche.
So, for example, if you’re a graphic designer, you wouldn’t want to go and look at your competitor’s testimonials. Those people already have a graphic designer — your competitor. Unless they wrote a testimonial and then fired that person, they’re unlikely to reach out and hire you, because they’re probably still working with that person. So, keeping up with this example, if you’re a graphic designer, you might want go to a site for someone who sells high-end copywriting services or social media management and read their testimonials.
How to Identify High-End Clients
Now let’s cover how to identify these high-end clients. Often, they are hidden in plain sight! Let’s talk about a few tricks you can use to figure out who the great potential clients are. For example, let’s say you see a post in a Facebook group that someone wants to hire a graphic designer. How do you decide whether that person is high-end client or not?
This is actually something that we go into more detail about in my course The Four-Figure Facebook Formula, so if you want to learn more about the specific ways to successfully network in Facebook groups, I highly recommend to checking out that course.
Identifying High-End Clients in Facebook Groups
Sometimes it’s really hard to tell if someone on Facebook is a high-end client or not. There can be tens of thousands of people in a Facebook group, so how the heck do you tell them apart?
The first thing that I would suggest is joining groups that specifically target high-end clients. So don’t just hang out in Online Business BFFs. Yes, it’s a cool group, but it actually attracts a lot of new business owners and bloggers.
You are more likely to find high-end clients by interacting in groups like High-Ticket Selling, ClickFunnels, etc. Look out for groups that both attract high-end clients because they’re about what the high-end client is doing (i.e. High-Ticket Selling) and groups that are more likely to have high-end clients in them (i.e. ClickFunnels, because it’s a product that starts at $99 per month, so these are people that you already know have a big online marketing budget).
9 Facebook Groups to Join if You Want to Attract High-End Clients:
- 60-Second Persuasion
- ClickFunnels
- Ecom Empires
- High-Ticket Selling
- Facebook Ad Buyers
- Mindset Strategy for High-Performance Females
- Six-Figure Brands
- The Six-Figure Freelancer
- The Successful and High-Vibe Entrepreneur
Related: 191 Facebook Groups for Bloggers and Online Biz Owners
Identifying High-End Members by Their Profile
Once you’re in those Facebook groups, the next step is to identify which of those group members are high-end clients. (Pro tip: not all of them will be.)
One thing that I like to do is scout out who is posting in the groups (posting, not just commenting). Then, see which of those people have professional headshots as their profile photo. There are multiple reasons why this works.
The first reason is that, if they’re posting in other Facebook groups, they’re working to position themselves as an expert. Typically when people do this, it means they’re not just starting out. They have something to say, especially if they’re sharing business tips or stuff like that. So this can be a really great way to identify people who are further on in their business.
Secondly, their use of a professional headshot can be a good way to tell if they’ve been in business for a while. Plus, it’s an indicator that they’re fairly successful. Usually people who are just starting out and/or who are not profitable yet don’t have these yet. If someone has done a fancy photoshoot, it shows that they’ve purchased a high-end service in the past (the photoshoot). This means they’re more likely to purchase other high-end services in the future (yours!).
Scour Their Website
Once you’ve joined Facebook groups that attract high-end clients, and started to identify members who possibly might be good people for you to network with, the next thing you can do to “vet” them is check out their website. There are a few things you can look for on their site to judge whether or not they are high-end.
Do they have an “as seen on” section?
Look at their homepage, or their “media” page and see if you can find an “as seen on” section. This is where people display the logos of the sites that have featured them (places like The Huffington Post, Forbes, Inc., or other smaller magazine-style sites).
This is a great way to tell if they are a high-end client or not. Sites like these don’t typically feature “nobodies” who are just getting started out in their business. They are much more likely to feature people who are leaders in their niche or experts on a certain topic. And those people are much more likely to own a successful business and have a higher budget to spend on your services!
What do their social media channels look like?
Another way to vet potential high-end clients is to find their social media channels. First of all, if they have a LinkedIn profile — ding ding ding — that’s a great sign. Like we talked about earlier, people who are on LinkedIn are more likely to be high-end clients. But, regardless, take a look at all of their social media channels and see what’s up.
A few questions to ask yourself might be:
- Are they active?
- Are they posting every day or multiple times a day?
- How many followers do they have?
- Do they post professional-looking graphics and/or photos?
- How many likes, favorites, or retweets are they getting?
- Which and how many social media channels are they active on?
How to Attract High-End Clients
Be Strategic About Your Facebook Group Posts
One great way to attract high-end clients is to be strategic about what you post in Facebook groups.
One way to do this is to ask questions that target high-end clients. For example, a question I see posted a lot in Facebook groups is “If you randomly got an extra $1000 this month, what would you do with it?” In my opinion, this is a bad question to post if you are trying to attract high-end clients. At a certain point in your online business career, you’ll start to make a big profit each month. So, for high-end clients in particular, that type of question becomes a little irrelevant.
Instead of asking something like that, good questions to ask might be:
- “What’s one thing you have trouble delegating to your team?”
- “How many times per year are you reviewing your homepage for ways to improve conversions?”
These types of questions reference things that attract high-end clients (like how to improve the cohesiveness of their team, or how to generate more conversions).
One extra tip I can give you is that a lot of high-end clients are mostly concerned about time management. They have tons of things on their to-do list and no time to cross any of them off. So try asking a question about this, or give them a top that helps them save time. That type of post will work to attract high-end clients moreso than other types of people.
Here’s a great question from Rachel Pederson that helped her attract high-end clients in the ClickFunnels Facebook group:
Create Content Designed to Attract High-End Clients
We just talked about how to post stuff that will attract high-end clients in Facebook groups. Now, take that same mentality and apply it to other areas of your business. So when you’re drafting your blog posts, newsletters, social media posts, webinars, and low-priced products, make sure that you are asking yourself “Will this attract high-end clients to my business” before you create and publish it.
For example, my blog posts typically do not attract high-end clients to my business. But this is because I am not trying to attract high-end clients! Obviously this post would not be helpful to someone who is a high-end client. High-end clients most likely do not need help finding or booking clients…they’ve got that in the bag! Same thing for my post on how to automate your client onboarding for free. They would probably just go off and buy 17Hats instead of trying to create a jankified system.
Instead of focusing on stuff like that, you will want to talk about stuff that appeals to them. Topics like: sales funnels, conversions, productivity, team management, time management, growth hacking, etc.
Great examples of content that will attract high-end clients are:
- Bushra Azhar’s blog post on How to Find JV Partners and Affiliates to Promote Your Launch
- Julie Stoian’s blog post on What to Do When Your Facebook Ad Account Gets Shut Down or Disabled
- Stephanie Melissa’s course on sales funnels: Rise Up: Automate Your Income
- Reina & Co.’s blog post on How to Create a Seamless Content Marketing System That Converts
Networking, Networking, Networking
Finally, I’m going to leave you guys with one last tip to help you attract high-end clients. Network with other online business owners!
Now that my business is 18 months old, the main way that I get new clients is from referrals. In fact, just a few nights ago, a friend of mine referred me to a new client. (And she has over half a million total social media followers!) Not bad, right? And it all happened because I followed this system from start to finish, plus I networked my booty off!
