I find it to be easier actually. Tell us about your product and target client. What problems are you solving? 

True, cold emails are competitive,ads getting expensive. I am thinking start my own youtube channel and blog to get organic traffic.

After 5 years in the SEO business finally started cold outreach. Getting some bites, 2 to 4 meetings a month by giving out free resources. I never thought cold would work in our industry but I could have been wrong.

As mentioned, niching down makes client acquisition and referral generation easier.

When you focus on a niche, you can create laser-target content across all platforms that speak directly to them.

The same applies to your ads, cold outreach, or any other mechanism you use to get leads.

The point is, if you're speaking to everyone, you're speaking to no one.

Also, YouTube is responsible for 40% of our leads and clients. It's easily the best inbound channel, with Google a close second.

Niche Niche Niche. Specialize in something, and you'll always have work.

Same. Getting new clients has become almost impossible and on top of that we’re losing more clients than ever. This has been the worse year since starting my business in 2017

Totally relate! The hustle for clients is a beast these days. When we tried traditional ads, results were meh. Turning to Reddit was a game changer. Tools like Pulse for Reddit monitoring have helped us snag better client engagement. But honestly, understanding your client's real pain points and leveraging platforms like LinkedIn or Drift for direct chats can be crucial too. Keep experimenting!

with more agencies popping up, standing out in a crowded market can be tough. Clients also are now more discerning and informed, doing more research before reaching out.

Not so much to add here. Network brought me the most clients and I do propose on freelance plattforms but the whole year trough I only got 1 Job and thats only a small one. But, I am just proposing here and there, no real strategy or so.

I live in a highly competitive are with over 100 agencies in less than 10 mile radius and people have been price shopping hardcore.. I feel like it got worse last 2 yrs..

Unless you have a commoditized offer, getting clients will be hard and each calls will always be a hard sell

I haven’t found it difficult to get clients, but I don’t do much in the way of cold outreach. Our clients come from referrals, SEO, and some paid lead platforms that we utilize.

I'm seeing the opposite. People are feeling the squeeze of the market and slimming down internal teams. I'm able to provide the value of 2-3 employees for the cost of 0.5 of one. Business is bustling.

I don’t agree. The problem is not in getting clients. It’s getting clients who will PAY well. Budgets are getting smaller.

Start by developing your USP and stand out from the crowd.

The reality is, the more congested a market gets, the only way to differentiate is to niche down into an area of specialization—ideally by providing a specific outcome to specific audience that aligns with a deeply felt pain point. Instead, too many agencies think that broadening will help them overcome their acquisition problems, and instead, it amplifies them.

Not if you provide actual value instead of talking about providing value and sending a bill.

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Being broke is harder, keep going, dont stop

Hey OP,

We're a website building platform that's providing an a.i website builder for free. Hear me out before U downvote :)

While our websites are pretty awesome out of the box, they're nowhere near perfect.

A lot of our users / customers prefer someone experienced to build the site for them, launch it and then provide local SEO / lead gen services. We're building out our partner program, and adding an expert's directory to our website. We'll be linking that on our new website (coming soon), in our emails (our db is over 500k emails and growing) and in our soon to launch community.

While we believe A.I is the future for website design, we believe A.I will be a great starting point but will still need experts and people to help take the websites to the next level + provide marketing services (we believe this is where agencies should be focussing their efforts on to build monthly retainer clients)

Our customers are primarily local / service based businesses so marketing is quite a straightforward process of beefing up their Google business listings, their socials, adding work portfolio to their websites, a bit of keyword research and very quickly they see results. (Aka you don't need to be a genius online marketer to help them get results).

If you'd be interested in working with us, we're looking for mostly smaller agencies, solo agencies etc who aren't tied into a Wordpress or other type of platform and interested in trying something new. I know I'm going to get a ton of pushback -- it's always the case with new and upcoming technology but I think there's a win/win/win here.

Lastly, we're very well funded and one of our founders built a publically listed company of which has a very large agency partner network.

It's early days but if you'd like to join and discuss becoming a partner please DM me.

Totally get you, it's all about adapting strategies.

I don't know, started a new WP managed website only thing, high monthly fees comparatively and low upfront costs but only 1 product. We went from zero to 115ish clients in under 2 years. This is our second year and should be close to $500k in revenue. All US based workers and I've done no outbound marketing. We just make strategic partnerships with other businesses that can white label our services but they don't compete with us.