How to find (and keep) web development clients

Let’s be honest, web development is a hugely competitive field with many highly talented and creative agencies and freelancers looking to find new clients to keep the coding flowing.

It takes more than just a high-quality portfolio of creative work to satisfy the changing needs of potential clients – you have to know how to find them in the first place, and then how to keep them.

Use your existing network.

This can include present and past working colleagues, clients both active and potential, friends, suppliers, or your connections from previous employment. Sit down and make a list.

Sounds obvious, but the more people you can reach out to when spreading the word that you do great work and are looking for new clients, the more chance you’ll have of finding them. It need only be a brief email or LinkedIn message, a coffee or lunch meetup with people who have a connection with your business or might know someone who does.

Stay active on social media.

It’s vital to actively build and maintain a strong social media presence because you can use these platforms to create a visually stunning online portfolio that really shows off just how good your work is.

You should have a top-notch LinkedIn business page with examples of your best work that encourages people to like and share it. Do the same with Instagram’s visual platform; it’s perfect for web developers and designers to show off their aesthetics and creativity. And be sure to post regularly, and respond to those who comment on or share your content.

Try networking events.

Attending networking events or exhibitions, in person or virtually, where your target audience is present, is an ideal way to meet potential new clients. By meeting and chatting in person, you’re no longer just a stranger who designs websites; you become an expert who knows their stuff and can speak authoritatively about it.

Whether it’s an in-person or virtual event, you should have the means of showing off your work to a prospective client while you talk about what you can do for them.

Create helpful content to drive new people to your site.

In addition to the special content you create for your social networks, writing regular blog posts for your own company website that offer advice informed by your expertise in the business is an excellent way to find web design leads.

Besides showcasing your professional know-how, it’ll give potential clients for your web work a permanent location where they can see and read about, an entire series of your designs. What’s more, a blog allows you to build keywords into your written posts to help your Google ranking.

Find your niche.

If your web development skills happen to lend themselves to a specific industry you could offer specialist services that favour particular markets. This would allow you to position yourself as the go-to resource, rather than trying to be a jack-of-all-trades.

For example, you might have bags of experience working on ecommerce businesses, or a particular feeling for software and technology.

One advantage of focusing on a niche is that you’ll be recognised as the expert that clients will seek out for help with that particular specialism. And you’ll be able to create content that plays to your expertise.

Some popular niches include:

– Ecommerce web development
– UX/UI web development
– B2B web development
– SaaS web development

co.agency: helping you keep clients once you’ve found them.

co.agency is an entirely new form of customer engagement platform designed to provide you with a centralised, easy-to-use technologically driven solution to the common issues you can encounter when managing a client’s website.

If you provide on-going hosting, support or maintenance for your web development clients, co.agency makes everything easier. The live ticketing system allows clients to raise tickets and send a direct notification to the account manager or developer at the agency to squash any bugs before they cause problems. The system also notifies agency staff when website maintenance is due, and monitors your servers so you’ll be notified quickly if a client’s website goes down.

With co.agency software you’re able to modernise your client offering and amalgamate other solutions from multiple different ‘off-the-shelf’ providers.

Not only does the software give your clients a visually engaging user experience and improve communication, it also provides a file transfer area for sharing larger files and reporting tools which include direct integration to systems such as Google Analytics for transparency around results in one clear and centralised place. To learn more about how co.agency can help to make managing your client’s website easy, sign up for a free 30-day trial.