I along with my wife run an animation studio for promotional and explain videos, so far we've been selling on Fiverr and Upwork.
We want to start selling directly to clients so I built a landing page on Instapages and will run an AdWords campaign for it.
I hope to get a cost per conversion lower than $35, which is close to what I pay to Upwork for every minute we sell.
How did you manage to start gathering clients directly? Can AdWords be effective for B2B services?
As a SEO - take caution when you start an Adwords campaign. If you're unsure as to what you're doing and do not optimize your campaign you can easily waste your money. I would hire a cost-effective PPC specialist with a proven track record if you have no prior PPC experience.
I digress.
To sell directly, you need to do a lot of self-marketing to gain a reputation aside from Upwork and Fivver. Cold-call, email, or walk into businesses that can benefit from your services and try to sell to them.
Become an authority within your niche. Find related blogs where you can write content for them as well as include a link back to your site.
You can advertise your services on Craigslist as well as find great promotional opportunities. Writers, bloggers, and podcasters (depending on your area) are always looking for guests and stories.
You should also define where you want to sell your services and run SEO campaigns to increase your search engine presence. Not too many people hiring a company (or team) without Googling them or searching for the service to find companies in the first place.
Running promotions is also a great way to bring people in (who doesn't like a deal?). I personally run a promotion that gives clients 1 free month of SEO work (anywhere from $300-$1,000 in free work depending on their site) if they refer someone to me that purchases my services - no matter how much they spend.
This is a win-win for me (may not work for you) as I'm able to gain new clients who I can upsell to later on as well as regain trust in clients if that free month of work provides good results they will usually want more. I've had clients send me 4-5 new clients in a year as well as choosing to purchase additional services.
Adword can be very effective for B2B or B2C advertising. There's more that goes into PPC conversions than one may think. Not everyone that clicks on your ad may click intentionally, when the user is on your site you need to SELL, and the page that they land on needs to be optimized to convert. You need to have a sales funnel.
Not every user is ready to buy so you need them to come back so they don't forget about you. Having an email list that appears on all pages is great - but a custom prompt for your PPC landing page(s) is even better. "We don't expect you to hire the first animation studio you find. Let's keep in touch".
While @Memj offers good advice, an alternative approach would be to reach out to marketing companies and try partner with them. Send samples of your work - don't do anything for free (they might ask you to do one or two jobs for free so they can test you out - if your samples are not good enough for them to decide then whatever other work you produce is more likely fort their profit, and unlikely to win you future business).
I would also "think up" a few clients who might be interested in your work, create a few samples and send them for their consideration. Its a numbers game - if you succeed more than one in ten tries you have a talent that should not be wasted.
Best of luck!
