How to get more clients: choosing marketing channels for a small business

Knowing how to get more clients is less about tactics than about choice. Pick one channel that suits the way your buyers decide, run it properly until it brings clients without your daily attention, then add a second. The opposite is easy to fall into: a bit of Instagram, a boosted post, a new tool every month, and nothing run long enough to work.

Marketing can be annoying, but it is not optional. My own clients come first from referrals, then from cold emails, then from SEO. In this guide I compare nine channels on what they cost, how long they take to bring a first lead, the quality of those leads and the effort they demand, using what I have seen in my clients’ campaigns and my own.

Each section links to a detailed guide on its channel. Treat this page as the map, and the linked articles as the directions. Once a channel brings people to you, my guide to sales funnels and newsletters covers how they become clients.

Where my clients come from, and why referrals are not a plan

Referrals are my first source of clients, and they brought me some of my best. Pilotech, the air conditioning installer near Paris I have worked with for about two years, came through a relative of mine: its founder had heard about my work and wanted a website like one I had made for someone else. When his old WordPress site was hacked, he called me in an emergency, and since then I have looked after Pilotech’s websites, SEO and cold emailing. The Edenel group came to me because I had built a website for its owner in the past.

Referrals work because trust arrives with the introduction: someone the prospect respects has vouched for you. Their weakness is that you do not control them. You cannot decide to get three referrals next month, and a business that lives on word of mouth alone has quiet months it can neither explain nor fix.

You can still make them more likely:

• Do work people can point to. Pilotech’s founder came for a website he had seen; a visible result recommends you when you are not in the room.
• Ask at the right moment, when a client thanks you or sees a result, and name the kind of person you can help.
• Give people something to forward: a clear website and a Google Business Profile with genuine reviews.
• Stay in touch with past clients. The Edenel work started with an old project. A newsletter is one way to do it: my guide to your first 100 newsletter subscribers starts with the clients and contacts you already have.

Treat referrals as a bonus that good work earns, and build at least one channel you can turn up when you need more clients. That is what the rest of this guide is about.

How to get more clients: compare channels on four criteria

Every channel has a price, and the price is rarely only money. I compare them on four things:

1. Cost: the money it takes, or the time it replaces.
2. Time to first lead: how long before the first enquiry arrives.
3. Lead quality: how likely an enquiry is to become a paying client.
4. Effort: the work it takes every week to keep it going.

One more question settles a lot of choices: can you turn it up when you need more clients? Ads can within days and cold emailing within weeks; SEO only slowly; referrals, press and organic social media hardly at all.

What can you afford per client?

Before you choose, work out what a new client is worth, because that sets how much a channel may cost. Say an average client leaves you £2,000 of margin and you sign one enquiry in four: each enquiry is worth about £500 to you, and a channel that brings enquiries for well below that is worth running.

If a client is worth £300, LinkedIn Ads will struggle to pay for themselves. If a client is worth £20,000, you can afford channels that look expensive per click.

Cold emailing: the channel I would start with in B2B

I will be open about my bias: I believe cold emailing is the one channel that can take a B2B business to the moon. Your competitors will do it anyway, so the real question is whether they reach your future clients before you do.

Cold emailing means writing to businesses you have chosen, one short and personal message at a time, before they search for anything. Done properly, it looks nothing like a newsletter blast:

• sending addresses on separate domains, so your main domain’s reputation stays protected (Pilotech’s campaigns run on 30 addresses);
• a precise list of the right businesses, cleaned with a verifier before the first send (I use Reoon);
• no more than three plain-text emails, the first one three lines at most: who you are, what you offer, how to reach you;
• no links and no images, but a phone number and an invitation to call.

For Pilotech, campaigns to three audiences (Paris restaurants, Paris offices and shops, and above all architects) brought 15 new clients in a year. Architects were the main focus and the ones who called most: many rang instead of replying. My reading is that a call is quicker than writing back, and people like talking to a real person; I come back to this in cold calling vs cold emailing. In my campaigns, the first results usually arrive within 36 hours of the first send, and A/B tests improve the response over time as I learn which copy works.

The objection I hear is that cold emailing is illegal. For B2B, it is not, within rules. In the UK, you can email limited companies without prior consent, but sole traders and some partnerships count as individuals and need consent, or the soft opt-in if they are existing customers (see the ICO’s guidance on business-to-business marketing). In France, the CNIL accepts emails to professionals about their work, provided they were told their address could be used this way and can object simply and free of charge. My cold email GDPR checklist has the details.

To set it up, start with the complete guide to B2B cold emailing. The architects case study shows a campaign in detail, and PPC vs cold email compares it with paying for clicks.

SEO: slow to start, then enquiries without a cost per click

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work that gets your pages shown, unpaid, when people search for what you sell. Its strength is intent: the person is already looking. Its weakness is time. Google’s video on hiring an SEO, on its page Do you need an SEO?, says that in most cases an SEO needs four months to a year to make improvements and then see a potential benefit.

A narrow offer can move much faster. Pilotech’s website took about a month to build, reached its ranking within a day or two of publication, which surprised me, and brought its first lead three weeks after going live. The leads were better too: more serious clients, including high-end commercial clients in Paris. Today Pilotech’s Teknopoint site ranks first or second on Google.

What made the difference was specificity. A broad site I built for the same founder, offering too many services, did not work at all; the one that ranks sells a very specific offer. I tell that story in multiple websites for one business.

For a local business, SEO starts with a free Google Business Profile, then one clear page per service and per town you really cover. The small business SEO guide covers the method, and how long SEO takes gives realistic timelines.

If you are torn between paying for clicks and waiting for rankings, SEO vs PPC sets out when each one makes sense.

Paid ads: fast, measurable, and they stop when you stop paying

Ads are the one channel where you can buy speed. Most Google ads are reviewed within one business day, and a campaign can bring its first enquiry the same week. The catch is that the enquiries stop with the budget, and learning what works costs money.

Google Ads: for people already searching

Google Ads shows your ad to people typing a search, so it suits demand that already exists: an emergency plumber, a wedding venue, an accountant in Leeds. It is not that tricky to run, but it needs research first: what your buyers type, what those clicks cost and which searches show an intent to buy. Skip it and you pay for curious clicks.

On budgets, Google may spend up to twice your average daily budget on a busy day, but it never charges more than 30.4 times that average in a month. Start with Google Ads for small business.

Facebook and Instagram ads: to get known, and to test

Meta’s ads reach people by audience rather than by search: location, age, interests, or people who resemble your customers. They work for awareness and for sales, but you have to spend money on A/B tests to find what works, and that money has to be planned.

There are no keywords to bid on, so the research is about your buyers’ words and problems, which then shape the ads and the targeting. The two mistakes I warn founders about are skipping that research and skipping the tests; Facebook ads mistakes covers the rest.

LinkedIn Ads: costly, and worth it for high-value B2B

LinkedIn lets you target by job title, seniority, company and industry, which is hard to find elsewhere for B2B. It also burns cash fast. At the time of writing (October 2026), the minimum budget is $10 a day, or the equivalent in your account’s currency, and LinkedIn suggests a default of $25 a day to new advertisers (LinkedIn’s budget advice).

In my view, done right, it brings bigger deals than the other ad platforms. How to advertise on LinkedIn walks through a first campaign and what it costs.

TikTok Ads: awareness first

TikTok Ads suit consumer brands that want reach and can produce video regularly. At the time of writing (October 2026), TikTok sets minimum daily budgets of $50 per campaign and $20 per ad group, or the equivalent in your currency (TikTok’s budget rules).

I find that people on TikTok are not really there to buy, so I treat it as a brand awareness channel. If you need enquiries this month, start elsewhere. To compare the four platforms by goal, read Google Ads vs Facebook Ads, which also covers LinkedIn and TikTok.

Press coverage: proof you cannot buy

Press coverage is less predictable than the channels above, but it gives you something followers cannot: proof that a journalist found your business worth an article. “I have 10k followers on Instagram” and “a magazine published a whole article about my business” do not carry the same weight.

I am not a PR specialist and I barely tried, yet I got a friend, a personal trainer, into the French magazine Match. I put it down to the copywriting and targeting habits that cold emailing taught me: keep it short, aim at the right journalist, and have a website or page that shows the work. You do not need followers, only something interesting to bring to the table.

Start small: your town’s paper, then the regional press, then the national titles. An online article can give your website a backlink, and any article gives your sales pages a piece of proof and your social accounts something to share. Outside mentions also help AI assistants decide which businesses to recommend, as I explain in how to get recommended by ChatGPT.

PR platforms such as Prowly, now called the Semrush AI PR Toolkit, are valuable for finding the journalists who cover your subject, though your first article does not need one. How to get press coverage has the method, from finding the right journalist to writing the pitch.

Social media: where your time pays off

To be clear: I am not a social media manager, and I do not sell social media services. When I helped a client on social media, engaging on the platform and posting content brought 60 new relevant followers in a month. That is real, but I prefer channels whose results are more tangible: a call, a form, a signed quote.

My strong opinion is that Pinterest and YouTube Shorts are probably a small business’s best allies in 2026. Once a Pin or a Short is out, it can keep bringing views and visitors for months: those platforms work for you. Instagram, TikTok and Facebook work the other way round. You have to keep posting and keep finding new ways to catch attention just to be seen, which turns you into the platform’s unpaid employee. Even a Google Business Profile gives more back for the time.

Those platforms can still work if you have patience, money or both. With money, hire an agency with strong, proven results, and give it time rather than expecting results straight away. If you work alone, start with Pinterest for business or YouTube Shorts for business; my guide to the best social media for small business compares every platform.

Which channel first? Match it to your situation

The first table shows the trade-offs; this one helps you decide. Start with one row, not three.

Whatever the row, check the time to first lead against your cash. SEO can be the cheapest channel over two years and still be the wrong one if you need a client before the end of the month.

Before you add a channel, master the ones you already run

The trap I warn small businesses about is the shiny new channel: a new platform, a new tool, the tactic everyone is talking about this month. Marketing is noisy by design, and small teams fall for the noise easily. Focus on the channels and strategies you already run, and make them work before you add another; I explain why in my piece on shiny object syndrome.

Mastering a channel also means being ready for the leads it brings. At one point I brought Pilotech more prospects than it could handle, and it asked me to build an internal app to see every prospect clearly and never miss a call back. Before you pay for more enquiries, make sure each one gets a quick answer and that your website turns visitors into calls: website not getting enquiries shows where visitors drop off. My sales funnel example for service businesses follows the whole path, from first visit to booked call.

Your next steps: one channel, then the next

1. List where your last ten clients came from. That is your starting point: the channel that already works deserves your attention first.
2. Work out what a client is worth to you, and what you can pay for an enquiry.
3. Pick one channel from the decision table that fits your buyers and your cash.
4. Set it up properly with the guide linked in its section, or hand it to someone who does it every day.
5. Give it a fixed test period and decide in advance what you will measure: 90 days for cold emailing or ads, six to twelve months for SEO, counting enquiries and signed clients.
6. Improve before you add: test the copy, fix the page that converts, answer faster.
7. Add a second channel only when the first brings clients without your daily attention.

If you hand a channel over, ask for a written plan, a timeline and the numbers you will see each month. A good provider will also tell you when a channel is not right for your business, even when it is the one they sell.