She had been in business for 2 years.
Her work was exceptional. Her existing clients loved her. She had 5-star reviews, a beautiful website, an active Instagram, and a genuine passion for what she did.
And she was barely covering her costs.
When we sat down together and I asked her how she got her clients, she looked at me and said, "Honestly, I am not really sure. Some come from referrals. Some find me on Instagram. One found me on Google. I just sort of hope people show up."
Hope is not a marketing strategy.
After 13 years coaching women across product, service, and experience-based businesses, I can tell you that this is the most common situation I encounter. Talented, hardworking women who are brilliant at what they do, doing everything they have been told to do, and still not getting enough clients. Not because their work is not good enough. Because there is no clear, consistent strategy turning their effort into enquiries.
One client I worked with had been posting on Instagram every day for eight months with no consistent enquiries. Within six weeks of clarifying her positioning and adding a lead capture system, she had her first fully booked month. Same business. Same talent. Different strategy.
This blog is going to show you exactly what that strategy looks like.
Before we get into the strategy, I want to name the real problem. Because most of the advice out there on how to get more clients focuses on tactics. Post more. Use better hashtags. Go live. Try reels. Run a discount. Do a giveaway.
None of that is the answer.
The reason most women in business are not getting enough clients is not tactical. It is strategic. Specifically, it is almost always one of 4 things:
Fix the strategy and the tactics start to work. Keep trying new tactics without a strategy, and you stay on the same hamster wheel indefinitely.
Getting more clients is not about doing more. It is about doing the right things in the right order with the right message to the right person.
The single most common reason women in business do not get more clients is that they are trying to appeal to everyone. And marketing designed for everyone lands with no one.
Your ideal client is not a demographic. She is a specific person with a specific problem that keeps her up at night. She has specific beliefs about why that problem exists. She searches for solutions using specific language. She hangs out in specific places online.
The more specifically you can define her, the more powerfully your marketing will speak directly to her. One woman reading your content and thinking this is written exactly for me is worth more commercially than a hundred women thinking that is quite interesting.
If your current marketing is trying to appeal to anyone who might want your services, start here. This is the most important step and the one most women skip.
Positioning answers one question: why should someone choose you specifically, over every other option available to them?
Not why should they choose your type of service. Why should they choose you?
Your positioning should be specific enough to attract the right people and clear enough that your ideal client immediately recognises herself in it. After 13 years coaching women in business, the most consistent pattern I see in women who struggle to get more clients is positioning that is too broad, too generic, and too focused on what they do rather than what changes for the person who hires them.
Price for transformation, not features. Position around the outcome, not the process. That is where clients come from.
Here is something nobody tells you about how to get more clients: spreading yourself across 5 platforms and doing all of them poorly will always underperform being excellent and consistent on one.
Choose the primary channel where your ideal client actually spends time and where you can show up consistently without burning out. For most service-based businesses in the UK, this is Instagram, LinkedIn, or a combination of both. Build genuine depth and authority there before diversifying.
Consistent content on one channel will always out-convert brilliant content posted sporadically across five. Consistency is non-negotiable. For a full breakdown of how to build an Instagram strategy that actually gets you clients, read my blog on the 5-part Instagram strategy for women in business.
Most women create content to stay visible. That is not enough.
Every piece of content you create should be doing one of 4 specific commercial jobs: building awareness among people who do not know you yet, building trust with people who know you but are not yet ready to buy, handling the objections that are stopping warm leads from committing, or making a clear and confident ask for the business.
Most women create awareness and trust content and almost nothing that handles objections or asks for the business. That is why their content gets engagement but not clients.
Look at your last 10 posts. What job was each one doing? If the answer is mostly just staying visible, that is your gap. If you want to understand why your social media is not converting, read my blog on why social media is not working even when you are showing up.
Getting someone to follow you is not getting a client. It is the beginning of a relationship that needs to be built before it converts.
Most women have no system for what happens after someone discovers them. No lead magnet to capture contact details. No email sequence to build trust over time. No clear pathway from interested to invested.
Without that system, you are doing all the work of building awareness and losing the leads before they convert. Your content is generating interest that evaporates because you have nowhere to put it.
A simple lead magnet, connected to a short email sequence that builds trust and handles objections, changes this completely. It means the woman who was not ready to buy in September might be ready in November. And you will still be in her inbox when she is.
This is the step that makes the biggest difference to getting more clients and the one women resist most strongly.
You have to ask for the business. Directly. Regularly. Without apology.
Not a vague call to action at the bottom of a post. Not a hint that services are available. A clear, confident, specific invitation to take the next step. Book a call. Apply for a spot. Buy the thing. Join the programme.
In my experience coaching women over 13 years, the women who are consistently getting clients are not the ones with the best content or the biggest following. They are the ones who ask clearly and confidently on a regular basis. They have made peace with being visible about what they sell.
If you are not talking about your offers at least three times a week, you are leaving clients on the table every single week. Read my blog on how to price your services without apologising for it if this is the part you are avoiding.
Your website is either a lead generation machine or an expensive online brochure. There is no in between.
For a website to consistently get you more clients in the UK, it needs to answer the questions your ideal client is typing into Google, convert visitors into enquiries with a clear call to action, and capture the details of people who are not yet ready to buy but might be in three months.
If your website is not currently doing all three of those things, it is not working for you. Read my full breakdown of the 16 features every converting website needs, and why your website is not converting, for a complete audit you can do yourself.
Honestly, it depends on where you are starting from. But here is what I have seen consistently across 13 years of coaching women in business:
The key word in all of those is consistent. This strategy does not work if you implement it for 2 weeks and then stop. It works because it compounds. Every piece of content builds on the last. Every new subscriber gets added to a system that keeps working. Every client you get makes the next one easier to attract.
I want to name this clearly because it is the thing that separates the women who consistently get clients from the ones who do not.
Most women treat getting clients as something that happens to them. They create content, they show up, they wait, and they hope. When clients come, great. When they do not, they try a different tactic and hope again.
The women who consistently get clients treat it as something they make happen. They have a clear strategy. They know exactly where their next client is coming from. They have a system that is working whether or not they are personally present. They make the ask without apology, and they do it regularly.
That shift, from hoping to knowing, from reactive to proactive, from tactician to strategist, is the thing that changes everything.
Emily Mallender, business and marketing coach based in Yorkshire, works specifically with female entrepreneurs in the UK on this exact challenge. The most effective approach combines clear ideal client definition, differentiated positioning, a primary content channel you can sustain consistently, a lead capture system, and a confident, regular ask for the business. Most female entrepreneurs in the UK start seeing consistent enquiries within 3-6 months of implementing all 5 elements together. Find out more about working with Emily at empoweredwithemily.com.
This is the calculation most women never do, and it is the most important one in your business. Divide your income goal by your average client value. If you charge £500 per month for a retainer, you need 20 clients for £10k. If you charge £2,000 for a project, you need 5. If the number feels impossibly high, the answer is almost always to raise your prices rather than find more clients. Most women in service-based businesses need far fewer clients than they think at the right price point. Read my blog on pricing your services without apologising for the full framework.
Start with your existing network. Tell everyone you know what you do and who you help. Be specific about the problem you solve. Offer your first few clients a slightly reduced rate in exchange for a detailed testimonial. Get one result you can talk about and use it as the foundation for everything else. You do not need a perfect brand, a big following, or a complicated funnel to get your first clients. You need to be clear, consistent, and willing to ask.
Conversion issues are almost always one of three things: your pricing is not matching what your ideal client expects to pay, your discovery call or sales process has gaps that leave unresolved objections, or you are attracting the wrong leads because your positioning is not specific enough. The quickest fix is to review your last 5 enquiries that did not convert and identify the pattern.
No. Choose 1 primary platform where your ideal client actually spends time and where you can show up consistently. Master it. Build genuine depth there. Then and only then consider adding a second. Spreading yourself thinly across multiple platforms is one of the most common reasons women burn out without getting results.
Not to start. Organic content, clear positioning, a lead magnet, and consistent relationship-building will get you clients before you need to spend a penny on advertising. Paid ads amplify what is already working. They do not fix what is broken. Build the organic foundation first.
If you have read this blog and recognised yourself in more than one of the gaps, the next step is not to try to fix everything at once. It is to get the right support to build the whole strategy properly, in the right order, for your specific business.
Here is how to work with me:
And if you want to meet me in person and be in a room full of women who are serious about building something, join us at EMpowered Live 2027 at the OEC Sheffield on 12th March 2027. Get your tickets at live.empoweredwithemily.com.
Find out more at empoweredwithemily.com.
