The key to get more clients for your design business isn't posting more

Small Business

Oct 21

Posting more on social media does not lead to more clients…automatically. And yet, the most frequent advice most business owners get when they want to grow their business is some version of “post more” or “post consistently.” The premise is that you have to show up in some volume before the algorithm and/or your desired client will pay attention to you, but this premise, in my experience misses some important nuance, especially for busy service-based business owners.

I've been on both sides of this. Before Exhale, I ran a coaching business entirely on social media. For a stretch, I posted 10 to 12 times a week and grew that business to six figures as a result of “posting more”. But posting that often didn't guarantee the clients kept coming. There were months where, even at that same pace, I was lucky to clear $100. That cautionary tale doesn't mean posting can't work. It means getting clients from your marketing was never as simple as getting content out the door.

If you're a designer, photographer, or other creative business owner who doesn't consider yourself a marketer, being told to post more is overwhelming on top of a client list you're already managing day to day. The good news: generating more clients from your marketing isn't rocket science. It just isn't about posting volume.

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How to get more clients without posting more on social media

Why "post more" doesn't get you clients

Most business owners think that if client interest is slow, the first move is posting more. That advice falls apart for two reasons.

Posting more doesn't necessarily drive design clients (or consulting clients or marketing clients). More content doesn't automatically mean more of the right people see it, and even when they do, posting volume on social media says nothing about whether social media is the channel that converts for your specific business. If you're an interior designer, the client who wants to hire you might be influenced by what they see on Instagram. If you're a brand designer, they might be influenced by a referral, a LinkedIn post, or a rebrand case study they found through a Google search. Until you've confirmed which channel is pulling in your clients, either in your business or in your space, more posts on the wrong channel just means more effort for the same (lack of) result.
"Post more" doesn't tell you anything about how to post more. Telling a busy business owner to post more is like telling a seven-year-old who wants to be an Olympic gymnast to flip more. It gives her nothing about the mechanics that determine whether those flips, or those posts, deliver the result she's after. Should she be working on a stronger hook, a more specific offer, a different format? "Post more" answers none of that.

Once you've ruled out the wrong channel and the wrong execution, there's still a layer most advice skips entirely: the difference between what you want, what you create, and what you do to create it.

What you should focus on first if you want to get more clients

Most business owners think they have two options for getting more clients: ask for more referrals, or post more on Instagram.

Here’s the thing - referrals are great. But saying “just focus on getting more referrals” runs up against the same issue raised in #2 above - it’s recommending you focus on the output you want to create, with no insight or detail into the actual steps you as the business owner could or should take to get there.

Think of it like you wanted to have deeper friendships, so you decide you’re going to bake a cake for each friend's birthday. First off, we have to confirm whether making baked goods for people actually leads to better friendships? If not, this whole exercise is futile. But if you decide that it does, saying to someone "bake more cake" is equally as unhelpful as saying “bake more pies.” Neither of these pieces of advice help you build better friendship. What helps is the recipe underneath it: the ingredients, the steps, the oven temperature. The result you want is a better friendship. The output is the cake. The input is the flour, the eggs, and the time you spend baking it.

For your business, the result you want is more clients. The output might be a social post, a referral ask, a podcast pitch, or a blog post optimized for SEO (how you show up in Google search). Your job, the thing you control day to day, is the input: the specific effort that reliably produces that output, which will be different depending on whether you’re trying to create social posts, book interviews or write blog posts.

I worked with a client who wanted more traffic to her website so she could book more clients. I suggested she start publishing blog content consistently. Her response was a perfect example of this common misunderstanding: she said that she “wasn't interested in blogging right now because she was focused on getting more traffic through SEO.” She already knew the result she wanted (more traffic and more clients,) and she'd even landed on the right output, SEO. What she hadn't connected was that the input she’d be responsible for to create that result was blog posts. This was directly tied to why she hadn’t seen success because she wasn’t even clear on what was required of her to create it.

Whichever marketing method you've chosen — social media, PR, podcast interviews, SEO — the thing to focus on at this stage isn't the result you want, and it isn't even the output you're trying to create. It's the input you need to be doing, consistently, as the business owner, to produce that output.

What it takes to convert clients from social media

If social media is the platform you’re focused on to promote your business, you’ve already landed on the output of posts. So what matters now is getting clear on what the process is for you to generate social media posts that are actually built to attract your ideal client and, most importantly, how can you generate enough volume to see those results. In my business, I refer to this as my content system - the set of steps I complete regularly to generate good content to promote my business.

This is key because even if you make a top 1% post on social media, only doing it once isn’t going to be enough. It’s my belief that you’re better off generating 20 pieces of B+ content then obsess over making every piece of content A+ such that you only get 2 pieces of content out the door. On the other hand, it doesn’t matter if you procide 20 or 200 pieces, if it’d D+ content, it’s probably not going to do what you want for your business.

So the job of a business owner is to educate themselves on what works for their specific business and build a system that helps them sustainably product a good volume of their desired output, balancing quantity and quality.

If you've ever told yourself, "I'm a designer, systems just aren't how my brain works," consider that you already run a system every time you take a client from a first call to a final reveal. Building a marketing system is the same instinct, pointed at a different part of your business.

Start by sketching out the steps you go through to create one unit of your input. For a piece of social content, that might be idea, script, film, edit, caption, schedule. Then pay attention to where you consistently get stuck. That sticking point is usually the same spot every time, and it's often the biggest reason your output has been inconsistent (not a lack of discipline).

Imagine walking into your kitchen to make penne alla vodka. You get your sauce going, and then it's time to boil the pasta, except you don't have dry pasta on hand, so now you're making fresh pasta from scratch in the middle of a recipe that wasn't supposed to need it. That derailment is enough to make most people abandon the dish entirely.

In my business, that derailment was editing. I'd get an idea, film it, and then dread the edit so much that I'd abandon the whole piece of content, the same way I'd probably abandon that penne alla vodka. Then, I built a system inside my Claude to edit for me. It's become one of the biggest time savers in my business: it scans the content I'm already creating and gives me a first draft I can work from instead of starting from a blank page. I still do real rewriting on top of it, but the blank-page paralysis that used to tank my content goals is gone, and I started hitting or exceeding them almost immediately.

Turn your process into a system you can repeat every week

Once you know your bottleneck, you can build around it instead of hoping you push through it every time. A system has four parts:

Figure out where you do each step, and whether any of them need to connect. Where do you write scripts? Is there a separate place you save finished client work that should feed into your content planning, so you remember to post about it?
Decide who does each step (usually you), where you do it (which tools), and when you do it (what tells you it's time to start).
Write out the actual steps, in order, the way you figured them out.
Build in room to adjust. A before-and-after post and a video explaining a saved architectural issue probably don't follow the exact same steps, and your system should account for that.

Software is not a system. Saying "Notion" or "Metricool" is not a system.

For example, I got on a call with a long-time client who wanted to post more consistently on Instagram. When I asked her what was going on, she described that she'd open the camera and not know what she wanted to talk about, so content wasn't getting out. She had a bunch of random ideas throughout the week but when it came down to filming, she want blank.

When I asked if she had a system for creating content, her answer was, "Yeah, I have a page in my Notion." That was the red flag. A tool, whether it's Notion, Buffer, or Metricool, isn't a system on its own. So we spent time identifying how she likes to create, where she consistently got stuck, and what would help her get content out the door, then I built the actual system for her inside Notion, since she was already familiar with it. Within two weeks, she was consistently getting twice as much content out the door in half the time.

This isn't only a social media problem. The same logic applies to pitching podcasts, where the system is how you identify, develop, and pitch interviews every month, not the wording of any one pitch. Whatever your marketing method, once the system is built, you sit down at your computer already clear on the first specific step, instead of starting from scratch every time.

You don't need to post more. You need one system.

If you've been beating yourself up for not posting enough, let that go. Social media may not even be the right output for your business, and posting volume was never the real lever. Start with the input that's already working, find the one step where your process keeps breaking down, and build a system around that step before you touch anything else.

If you want help building that system, this is exactly what we do for clients inside the Bottleneck Breakthrough.

Frequently asked questions

Does posting more on social media ever help you get more clients?

Posting more can help, but only when social media is already the channel your clients convert through and you know what you're posting about. If you haven't confirmed the channel, posting more just produces more content on a platform that was never going to produce clients in the first place. An interior designer and a brand designer might need completely different channels to reach the people who hire them, even though they're both "design businesses." Before you add volume, confirm the channel is the one doing the work, not just the one that feels the most active.

What's the difference between an output and an input in marketing?

An output is the thing you publish or send: a social post, a referral ask, a podcast pitch, a blog post. An input is the actual work you do that produces that output, the ingredients and effort behind it. A client of mine wanted more website traffic through SEO, which was the right output, but she hadn't connected that the input behind it, for her business, was consistent blog content. Knowing your output isn't enough if you haven't identified the specific input that creates it.

How do I find the bottleneck in my content process?

Map out the steps you go through to create one piece of content, start to finish, and notice where you consistently stall or abandon the task. That recurring stuck point, not a lack of discipline, is usually your bottleneck. For me, it was editing: I'd film an idea and then dread finishing it so much that I'd drop the whole piece. Once I built a system to handle that one step, I started hitting my content goals almost immediately, because the rest of my process was already working fine.

Is a tool like Notion or Metricool a marketing system?

No. A tool holds your plan, but it doesn't tell you what to create, when to create it, or what to do when you get stuck, which is what an actual system does. I've worked with clients who had a page in Notion and still didn't know what to post on a given day, because the tool was never the missing piece. If you've already built the tool but not the system underneath it, this is exactly where we start inside the Bottleneck Breakthrough, you can book a call here.