How to find clients for your web, marketing or design agency

Why agencies struggle to find steady clients

Most agencies run on referrals. That works until the month it doesn’t. The usual next move is to buy a list or blast the same email to hundreds of addresses scraped from a directory. You get stale data, generic messages and very few replies.

Yet your best pitch is already public. A restaurant with no website, a well-rated dental practice with only a handful of reviews, a garage whose listing shows no opening hours or photos: these are concrete needs you can see before you ever speak to the owner. The job is to find those businesses quickly and write a message that starts from what you noticed. Our guide to lead generation for agencies walks through the method.

Which searches should an agency run?

A Google Maps search in Yalors is a keyword plus a place. You can then set a minimum rating (3+, 3.5+, 4+ or 4.5+), filter by business status, keep only verified listings or places open now, and sort by highest rating, lowest rating or most reviews. Each result shows its category, rating, review count and available channels: website, phone, email, social profiles. A few example searches:

• Websites: “restaurants” in Manchester, sorted by lowest rating. In the Channels column, look for the ones with no website.
• Local SEO and reviews: “dentists” in Lyon, sorted by most reviews. Practices with a good rating but few reviews are strong candidates.
• Reputation management: “hotels” in Hammamet, minimum rating 3+, sorted by lowest rating. Places stuck around 3 stars have a problem worth solving.
• Social media and ads: “gyms” in Casablanca, sorted by most reviews. A busy gym with no social profiles on its listing has room to grow.
• Bigger accounts: a LinkedIn company search for “e-commerce” with 11–50 employees and open jobs. A store hiring a marketer might want help in the meantime.

Qualify before you reach out

Don’t contact everything a search returns. Save the promising businesses into a list per offer (say, “Brochure sites – Sousse”), add a note on what you saw (“no website, 4.6 from 230 reviews, old photos”), a tag and a status. Then reveal contact details only for the leads you keep. For businesses found on Google Maps, emails and phone numbers come from the public listing, then the business’s own website and social profiles. No reveal is counted when a lead has neither an email nor a phone.

Already have prospects in a spreadsheet? Import them by CSV (up to 500 rows per import) so everything lives in one place, and export your lists whenever you like.

An example multichannel sequence for agencies

Businesses found on Google Maps rarely come with a LinkedIn profile, so this sequence starts with email and only moves to WhatsApp after a first contact. Adapt it to your offer:

1. 1
   Day 0: personalised email

   Sent from your Gmail, Outlook or IMAP mailbox. One line on what you noticed, one concrete offer, one simple question. AI can suggest a personal hook for each lead.

2. 2
   Wait 3 days

   Sending windows (days, hours, timezone) keep you from emailing at 11 pm or on Sunday, and random delays space out the sends.

3. 3
   Condition: email opened?

   If yes, a short follow-up that adds something new, like one specific idea for their listing. If not, a follow-up with a different subject line, which you can A/B test.

4. 4
   Condition: has a phone?

   If yes, a brief WhatsApp message a few days later that refers back to your email. If not, the sequence ends there.

5. 5
   Stop on reply

   When a lead replies, the sequence stops for them. The AI copilot tags the intent (interested, question, objection, not now…), summarises it and drafts an answer.

For larger companies found on LinkedIn, start with a profile visit and an invitation instead, then a message once the invitation is accepted. See multichannel outreach for other combinations.

A sample first message

Short, specific, no flattery. For example, to a restaurant with no website:

Skip the ten-page audit attachment and the “first place on Google” promise. Nobody can deliver that, and the owner knows it.

What to watch out for

• Deliverability: don’t send hundreds of emails on day one from a fresh mailbox. Yalors applies daily caps and a 14-day warm-up to newly connected accounts; also read our guide to cold email deliverability.
• WhatsApp: keep it for follow-ups after a first contact, and write like a professional message, not an ad.
• The law: in the EU, GDPR also covers named business email addresses; in Tunisia, Organic Law 2004-63 applies. Say who you are and remove anyone who asks not to be contacted, right away.
• Volume: a few dozen well-aimed messages a day beat hundreds of generic ones.
• Promises: don’t guarantee rankings or revenue. Show real work instead.