How to pick the client acquisition strategy that actually works.

CRE Success Principle: Before chasing shiny objects, cover the basics properly—because referrals, repeat business, and prospecting leads are the lowest hanging fruit to grow your revenue.

Ever felt overwhelmed by all the ways you can pay to get more clients?

There’s SEO, online ads, email funnels, organic and paid social media, just to name a few.

To make things even harder, you can visit three different marketing agencies, and each will likely recommend a completely different strategy.

This can leave you feeling even more confused than when you got started.

Some business owners, scared of throwing money down the drain, then settle with the status quo.

And, because it can feel all too hard, they end up losing their motivation to scale their business.

So, if you’re serious about a paid client acquisition strategy, where do you even start?

Here’s the truth: ALL the strategies can work—but not all of them will work for YOU.

So, before you invest in any method of lead generation to grow your business, ask yourself:

✔️ Do I believe in this approach?

✔️ Can I commit to executing it properly?

✔️ Do I have (or can I get) the support to make it happen?

If you’re reading this blog, there’s a good chance that you’re committed to growing your business.

Join me for episode 208 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership and I’ll show you the best way to maximise the return on your marketing spend.

And, if you’re a commercial real estate principal who wants a proven way to invest in your business and grow your revenue, send me an email with the ‘GROW’ and I’ll show you how we have gotten this result for our amazing clients.

Episode transcript:

“There is more than one way to skin a cat.”

Have you heard that expression?

It means that there's just more than one way to get the result that you're looking for.

And in 2025, it seems like there is an almost endless number of options to acquiring clients.

You might see some of your competitors in the market doing some things, you might be getting recommendations from various experts and they're all telling you something different.

So how do you know the right strategy for you to ramp up client acquisition?

Well, in today's episode, we're going to help you answer that question.

Hello! Welcome to episode 208 of Commercial Real Estate Leadership. I'm your host, Darren Krakowiak.

Really appreciate you joining us.

If you're a commercial real estate principal who would like to find more ways to get the right people on your team serving ideal clients inside a business that just works, you are in the right place.

In fact, our last 3 episodes were all about helping you get the right people onto your team using recruitment.

And we talked about why it matters. We talked about, well, how you can get it done and also who should be involved, specifically the importance of your involvement in certain steps of the hiring process.

And if you want to grab our process, our 7-step recruitment process, you can still get it at cresuccess.co/recruitment

We are going to do 3 episodes on client acquisition, and this is the first one in the series.

And before we get into this episode of looking at some of the different more leveraged strategies that you may want to get an expert to help you with, I just want to say something about the work that you're currently doing with client acquisition.

Because I do notice sometimes clients, they are attracted to these new and shiny objects, ways to acquire more clients, to activate more growth in their business, but they're not doing some of the core fundamentals.

They're not doing everything that they can to make sure that we're encouraging our existing clients to refer us business.

They don't have a referral mechanism for people within their network who would be often more than willing to send the right people their way.

They haven't activated that lever.

We've got to turn that one on.

We've got to make sure that our existing clients have an extremely high likelihood to become repeat clients, repeat business.

It's much easier to win business from an existing client than it is from a new client.

So, if we're trying to ramp up our revenue and acquire clients, but we're not actually doing everything or at least the basics that we can and should do with our existing clients, then I'd recommend that we do that.

And finally, if we are not doing the basics of prospecting, at least prospecting our existing contacts, the low hanging fruit, the people who we can get a warm referral into.

Then I would say that a far better use of your time if you want to get more clients into your business, is to make sure that you are doing some of those core things first.

And one thing that, for example, getting more prospecting done in your business is going to help you with is understanding your message, understanding your target market, and it will help you refine the messaging that you then want to use to amplify lead generation and client acquisition, using some of the strategies that we're going to talk about in today's episode.

So, with that being said, just thought I'd give you a little backstory as to why we're talking about this today.

Because, I keep getting stories from my clients and also, I had lunch with a good mate of mine last week and he was telling me that, he met with 3 different agencies, he's a mortgage broker, about how it is that he can ramp up lead generation and client acquisition in his business.

And they all told him something different, and he said, it just seemed like, “Well, who am I supposed to believe when I go along to 3 digital marketing agencies and they're all giving me a different strategy.”

And I've heard similar things from my clients, and it can make you feel skeptical about, “Well, who's telling me the truth? What is actually the right strategy for my business?”

And just to run through a few of those strategies that you may be familiar with, optimizing your website and making sure search engine optimization (SEO) is bringing us potential leads is one of those simple strategies.

Supercharging and taking that to the next level can be buying keywords on Google and then paying for clicks that will then bring people to your website.

Another strategy that, again, my mate told me that one of the agencies he met with recommended was an email funnel strategy.

So basically, a series of emails, we get people to opt in, and then they receive some emails which nurtures the lead or the prospect until such time as they are ready to pick up the phone or reply to the email.

The emails are strategically written in a way which provides value but also positions you as an expert.

Popular strategy right now is personal branding, so creating organic content on a particular channel, and using that to generate interest and to hopefully then get people to get in contact with us.

You may also have a paid strategy; Facebook, Instagram, Meta Ads.

So taking your content, whether it's the organic content that's performed well, and then as a result of that being, if you like, proven as good content by the algorithm, we then put some money behind it or creating specific paid content which is designed to get people to opt in or to visit our Instagram page, and to follow us and to go to our profile, and then the profile makes it clear on what the next step is.

I can remember back in 2023, I hired an agency to help me with LinkedIn, and their strategy was all about direct messaging.

And the story that I'll tell you about this agency, I think is probably, relevant for different agencies that do different things.

I didn't feel like they were that concerned about my long-term reputation.

They were just trying to send out DMs and trying to get some evidence that the strategy was working, but after a month I canned it because I just didn't feel comfortable with the way that they were messaging people.

And one other strategy, probably more of a brand awareness than a client acquisition strategy that one of my clients did.

And we talked about it with him on episode 181 of the show with Darren Lucchese from Tewksbury Commercial, was radio advertising.

And of course, you can do advertising on many forms of legacy media in order to create that awareness.

So, there are so many different strategies that are out there, and the question I guess that you will probably be asking yourself is, “Okay, well, which one's the right one for me?”

Here's the truth, all of the strategies work, but not all of them will work for you.

So, I want to help you understand, or at least tell you what I think about which is the right strategy for you.

Firstly, I think we've got to pick a strategy that we believe in.

So, if you're sitting in a meeting with an agency and they're telling you about a certain strategy and it just doesn't feel like it's going to work for your business and you don't believe in it, then I wouldn't go with it.

The second question to ask yourself is, “Well, can I commit to this?”

So, for example, if it's a personal branding strategy and that involves you having to go and get new photos done and perhaps speak to video on camera and you don't feel comfortable with that, then, don't do it.

Now I'm not saying you shouldn't do it if you're not comfortable with it.

If you can commit to it, do it.

It might make you feel a little bit uncomfortable.

In fact, I've got clients that do videos that aren't naturally people that want to do videos and they just get better at it.

But they know it's the right thing; they believe in it.

So, they believe in it, and then they commit to doing it.

So, we've got to be believing in it and committing to do it and finally, we just need to have somebody who can help us execute it.

So that might be someone on your team, maybe it's because you go out there and educate yourself on it, or it's using an external provider and agency to help us execute on the strategy.

So, very important if we're going to use an agency.

And I am a little bit skeptical of agencies. I've heard negative stories from clients. I've had some negative experiences.

That's not to say they're all bad, but I would be very cautious about moving forward with one until I'm satisfied that we have an alignment of the results that we're trying to get.

So, what are the objectives? Also, what the evidence that they can execute on this strategy?

And I'd want to speak to some of their existing and past clients to understand the experience and the results that they got.

And I'd probably also want to be very clear about what the total cost is to execute the total strategy.

And what that looks like, a total timeline including any recurring expense that they believe will be required, whether it's an expense for them or an expense to other partners like photographers, videographers, advertisers, etc. for the strategy to work.

So, I know that today's episode was about the best client acquisition strategy, and maybe you feel a little bit like I click baited you.

You got rickrolled because you didn't get what you wanted.

But let me give you a few things to think about.

First of all, we've got to begin with the end in mind and think about, well, who is it that we're trying to talk to?

So, we want to have one specific audience that we're trying to reach through this client acquisition strategy.

Next, it should probably be for one particular channel.

So, what I mean by that is it's not just a personal branding strategy, but it's a personal branding strategy that we're going to execute on Instagram, for example.

And if you follow one of my clients, Dan O'Brien of X Commercial on Instagram, you'll see that, that is a well-executed strategy, which is being implemented on one platform.

Now I've noticed that Dan does occasionally repurpose some of those videos onto LinkedIn, for example, but they are made for Instagram.

So, we get a little bit of leverage off the back of it by repurposing, but ultimately, it's been made for that purpose.

And the last thing that we need is one mechanism.

So, what is the mechanism that is going to actually produce the result we're looking for, which is generating leads and acquiring clients?

So, it could be in the case of an Instagram personal branding strategy, is that we've got a very clear call to action from the content that we're producing, or on our profile.

And we're betting on the fact that our content is good to the point where people get curious.

They click on our profile and it's very clear about who we're speaking to and what the next step is.

And then people take that next step, and that is the mechanism by which we acquire those leads.

And then we need to then have our own mechanism to turn those leads into clients.

It might be a phone call, it could be an application, whatever it is that is going to turn that lead into a client.

So, which is the right strategy for you?

It's the strategy that you believe in, that you can commit to and that you or somebody else has a track record of executing.

And before we wrap this up, I just really want to reiterate, because I've had clients come to me like, and say, should I do this, should I do that?

If you're not doing the basics, if you have got existing clients that are disappearing, if you're not receiving inbound referrals, or at least you're getting referrals, but maybe you don't actually have a strategy behind it, it just sorts of coming to you.

What about if you put a strategy into that, you'll get more.

And also, are you prospecting the business, are you actually working the leads that you have?

That is going to produce more results than I believe some of these other strategies.

So do some of the core things first before we get interested.

And we want to max out our opportunity in these obvious areas, I think, before we start trying other strategies, or at least that's my belief.

That is our episode for today.

We're going to talk more about client acquisition in our next two episodes, so make sure you stick around for those.

Thank you so much for listening. I will speak to you soon.