I found you online.
How Our Clients Became Our Biggest Marketing Channel
A few years ago, most of our new business came through traditional referrals - happy clients recommending us to their networks. Today, that’s still happening, but in a different form. Increasingly, new clients find us not because someone told them about Make Me Local, but because they’ve seen our work.
They land on one of our client’s websites, love the experience, and scroll down to the footer where they spot “Website by Make Me Local.” They click, and that’s where their journey with us begins.
In fact, in the past year, more than 60% of our new enquiries came from people who first discovered us through a client’s website – either from the footer link or by asking that client who built their site.
Our clients’ visibility has become our visibility. Their growth, our growth.
It goes to show, when your work performs, it markets itself.
The Shift: Traditional Referrals to Digital Referrals
The modern equivalent of word-of-mouth happens online. It’s no longer about who you know, it’s about who can be found, trusted, and chosen.
When a business we’ve built a website for ranks at the top of Google or gets discovered in AI-driven results, it’s proof in action. That business becomes a live case study, a digital endorsement visible to thousands of potential customers, and in turn, potential partners for us.
These “visibility referrals” are often the highest-quality leads we receive. They’ve already seen what we can do, experienced the value through someone else’s success, and come to us pre-qualified and ready to invest.
We’ve found that leads who come to us through a client’s site are 3x more likely to convert than those who find us through paid ads or social media, because they’ve already experienced what we can do.
“Our website looks amazing and the enquiries have tripled through the website enquiry form. Those enquiries typically end with someone asking who built it.” Tom Gubby, Director of Operations, Oakley House (MML Client).
The Growth Partner Model in Action
This shift perfectly captures what we call our growth partner approach. We don’t just deliver websites, we build marketing machines that continue to generate results long after launch.
When our clients thrive online, their visibility compounds, and it carries us with it. Every time one of their websites performs well in search, wins awards, or gets featured locally, our name is right there in the community of credibility.
After going from 10 to 200+ monthly enquiries (all tracked in our CRM) following our website rebuild - one of our clients (a rubbish removal and waste clearance company) dramatically cut their ad spend, expanded from 1 van to 4, and even launched a new skip hire service.
It’s a mutually beneficial loop - a referral engine.
When Your Work Becomes the Marketing
We often describe marketing as a machine, and in our case, our clients are the proof that our own machine is working.
Every project we take on is designed to fuel both our clients’ growth and ours. We make sure their marketing engines are finely tuned - from objection handling and differentiation to website performance and conversion strategy - because when their engines run smoothly, ours does too.
We’ve built over 300 websites in the past decade, and we’ve learned that when they run smoothly – fast loading sites, consistent branding, clear CTAs – everyone benefits.
That’s the essence of being a growth partner: shared success, measurable results, and long-term visibility.
What Businesses Can Learn from This Shift
The idea of clients as a marketing channel isn’t unique to agencies, it’s something any business can harness. Here’s what we’ve learned:
Invest in excellence, not exposure: | When your product or service delivers real results, your clients become your best advocates — digitally and otherwise. |
Optimise for visibility, not vanity: | The modern customer journey happens across Google, AI tools, maps, and social platforms. Presence everywhere matters more than position anywhere. |
Connect the dots with data: | We’re integrating our new CRM system, Zoho, to track where each lead originates, including those who find us through client websites. It’s helping us measure real-world visibility, not just clicks. |
Think partnership, not pipeline: | Think partnership, not pipeline. Long-term growth comes from helping your clients grow first. |
Our most successful clients treat their marketing machine like an ongoing process, not a project – which perfectly aligns with our own long-term growth partner model.
The AI Search Era: Visibility Compounds
The AI Search Era: Visibility Compounds
AI-driven search tools like ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Bing Copilot are changing discovery again. These tools don’t always drive traffic, but they do amplify trusted brands and recognisable names.
That’s why we’re evolving traditional SEO into what we call Search Everywhere Optimisation, ensuring our clients (and by extension, Make Me Local) appear wherever people search, ask, or explore.
We’re already seeing AI-driven platforms like Google’s AI Overviews cite local businesses that have strong visibility signals – rich data, clear branding, thought leadership content, and consistent local listings. That’s exactly where our clients are winning.
It’s no longer about chasing clicks. We’ve seen our clients’ enquiries rise even when their traffic numbers stay flat, because AI surfaces them as trusted sources – that's the new era of discoverability
we’re finding ourselves in.
When people see credible, high-performing work consistently, trust compounds, and trust converts.
The biggest lesson we’ve learned this year? When your work is visible, you don’t need to shout.
Our clients’ success stories speak louder than any advert ever could. Each site, campaign, and SEO success fuels a cycle of visibility that benefits everyone involved.
That’s the magic of being a growth partner: when your clients win, so do you.
In the last 12 months, over half of Make Me Local’s new clients discovered us through the success of another client. That, to us is the clearest measure of growth partnership – shared visibility leading to shared results.
If you’d like to learn how to build your own marketing machine, one that drives visibility, leads, and long-term growth, get our free guide:
If you’d like to learn how to build your own marketing machine, one that drives visibility, leads, and long-term growth, get our free guide: