Beginning from scratch is not easy in the world of freelancing. You need to work hard and give the best result for every project. Beyond that, you need to showcase your skills and experience as an individual to get better jobs and income.
Today, we are discussing how to promote your business as a freelancer.
There are no "5 Rules of Being a Good Freelancer". It's not as easy as to say. On the other hand, I can help you to grow your business with some tips.
I can tell you how to make a marketing plan, especially for those who do not have a big budget and want to grow their organic audience.
It's so simple, but you need to be able to answer some questions for a plan that will be enough for you to be systematic from the beginning. Below this paragraph, I share the most crucial questions.
What are Your Marketing Goals?
It is better to be clear about your goals. I think 1 or 2 goals are ideal for a good start. Your goal may be to grow your audience, tell us how perfect your brand is, communicate more and get potential customers.
If you have not yet clarified your goal, then there is no point in answering the other questions.
Who are You Looking For? Who is Your Target Audience?
Shortly, your target audience is the ideal customer profile with certain characteristic features. You wish to access one or more groups.
The thing is that you need to define your target audience well and categorize it correctly. Because the people in front of you are the ones who will form the basis of your plan, it doesn't matter what you're saying if you don't know who you're talking to.
While defining your target audience;
You should think about specific things such as the languages they speak, their interests, the topics they want to learn, their job, industry, talents, and income.
Based on the 80/20 rule, you can determine that a 20% customer percentage will bring you the most revenue if you have more than one customer group. This group should be the audience ready to give money for your service/product and have enough money.
Getting in touch with more than one group is often hard initially. Restricting yourself will help you put your energy in the right place.
Where are Those People? and Which Medium do They Use?
If you have determined your target audience, you should decide on the social network that your audience uses most and choose which medium you will be active in.
There are various communities on Facebook groups, Twitter, and Instagram. Although everyone has multiple social media accounts, everybody has a favorite one. The thing that you must do is choose the medium. So, you'll get to know the medium where you need to produce content in your limited time.
By growing your audience on the medium you are into, you can contact the people you want to reach out to, get to know them closely, talk to them, or have them follow you.
Note: It's never a good idea to only get stuck on one platform. Directing people to your website or email address keeps you safe. Social media platforms may disappear one day, you may close your account unnecessarily, your country may not allow access, or your target audience may leave this medium because of an update.
So it will be good for you to introduce yourself and advertise your website, and a word of advice, invest in SEO.
Do You Know The Nature Of The Platform?
Each social platform is a different world in itself. The behaviour of each person in each social environment also changes. For example, I would like to see beautiful images on Instagram. In contrast, I would like to read intimate things (sometimes dramatic and painful tweets) on Twitter and learn about real stories and experiences on Medium.
On the social media that you want to grow up on, you should adapt to the nature of the channel. You don't need to be 100% committed to the algorithm. Being original will work more than the algorithm, but there are still things you need to pay attention to. Firstly, you should research the channel you have decided on well and prepare a content strategy.
For example:
- Share Reels on Instagram, and it should also appeal to the eye,
- Interact on Twitter by throwing a mention and being a little intimate,
- Explore groups instead of pages on Facebook,
- Do not ignore alternatives such as Discord, Slack, and other chat-oriented platforms.
What is Your Target Audience Talking About?
Knowing and categorizing your target audience well will help you find them more easily. What tags do they use? In what words do they write? What types of content are they interacting with? Knowing the topics, they are interested in will also help you create content on them.
If you also know what questions they are asking, you may be interested in the content that answers such questions.
Remember, you come across as someone who claims to know something about your target audience. You have to prove your knowledge. The best way to do this is to answer the questions they have in their mind and produce a lot of content about the topics that attract them.
How does Your Target Audience Speak?
Besides the topics mentioned by the target audience, language features are also important. Since you will communicate in words (and sometimes only in writing), speaking in their words will help you to be accepted. That is not just a" you-you" distinction. You should consider many things they use, such as jargon, idioms, and trending words, and create a language accordingly.
In addition, the degree of sincerity of your style is also quite important. Being sincere too much usually makes you unattractive, but for some groups, it can make you stand out with a good strategy.
You need to determine well how you will approach your target audience. You can be a friend, parent, brother-sister, mentor, leader, or information authority for them. Choosing your "title" from the beginning will be an advantage and help you adjust your style.
What Problem Are You Solving?
Many entrepreneurs are not able to express clearly the problem they are solving. I don't think they know the job. After all, no one knows your own business better than you. But if you don't explain and detail the problem you have got over enough, it may look a little easy and unimportant to others.
Once I was into a custom mug design. What I presented in sight was a unique design printed on a coffee mug, but when I solved it, I knew that I had saved people the trouble of searching for a gift, saved them time, and made the person who received the present feel special by getting a unique gift. My marketing strategy was not based on a unique design; I created it as a unique gift and got good results.
There may also be a different benefit in your business that you have not considered.
- Why do people buy your product/service?
- When they receive your product/service, are they using it for its primary purpose, or have they developed a different field of use?
- To whom does your product/service benefit? To the person who received it, or to another one?
Before answering the question of what problem you are solving, I recommend you think carefully about who buys your product/service and who uses it. Talk to your customers and find out all the benefits you offer.
Then you can determine a content strategy through this benefit.
What's The Message You Want To Give?
The message is the most important thing that you want to tell everyone. What do you want everyone to know about you? You can edit your message through your utility, as well as edit it through your most different features.
You can highlight your message by turning it into a slogan, or you can share content based on this message.
When choosing your message, be sure to find the most significant thing that will allow you to gain an audience.
Work on a single sentence that will make your customers notice and start following you, and attract them without focusing directly on the sale.
What Is Your Offer?
You don't want people to follow you simply. You also want them to buy what you offer them. So, what is your unique service or product to your target audience? Have you been able to define this clearly?
There are certain products or services you serve, and they must have a clear price. You don't have to share this offer with the price everywhere. But make sure that you give the same price to all your customers and again make sure that the price has a formula. If everyone says $25, while yours is $50, you need to explain why.
In addition, to avoid confusion and ensure that people understand what to buy, I recommend you prepare a minimum offer - even if your service is very variable.
If your job is social media management and your price varies depending on the industry, and brand, prepare a minimum package such as" 10 pieces of content + Monitoring per Month" and make this offer available. Put your offer on your site.
If you are transparent, you will increase your reliability and avoid confusion.
Do not hesitate to voice your offer occasionally and make campaigns to announce.
What Can You Offer For Free?
Offering something for free is the easiest way to prove yourself. You can gain awareness by distributing products such as a simple checklist, strategy guide, form, template, mini-course, or ebook with your name, provided that they are relevant to your business.
This is a good way not only for you to gain recognition but also to prove your business. It is quite a long process to meet with your potential customers individually, convince them and prove your skills. Your job will be more difficult if you don't have a lot of familiar references or you can't share them. Instead of trying to overcome this whole process, you can promote yourself through a free product related to your business.
In addition, by distributing your free product by email, you can collect many relevant email addresses and launch a special newsletter for your audience, so you will get rid of getting stuck to a single platform.
What Should My Content Plan Be?
We have outlined the marketing strategy; we can start making a content plan now. I think you should set 10 main topics to share at least one original per day.
Let these 10 topics be related to your business (there may also be side branches). Add your previously defined benefits, message, service/product promotion, and offer to the content types. So you will have 14 topics in total.
Mix these 14 topics so that there is at least one post every day, and decide which topic to mention on which day. Create a 30-day posting list. After scheduling the topics and days, start writing your content.
After writing your texts by the nature of the platform, prepare images with Canva and plan all your content with automation tools. If you schedule the posts instead of doing it manually, it saves a lot of time, and you can find more opportunities to create new content and interact.
If you run out of ideas, you can use a tool that generates content. After you have determined the subject headings, you can print your content to the tool and share it by making small edits.
Explore what topics and questions are talked about in your field by visiting platforms such as Quora and Reddit, and you can create them after getting these ideas. You can share them by summarizing the topics covered in the blogs.
The only way to produce good content is to produce a lot. At first, it will be difficult, and maybe you will not even understand what is useful and what is unnecessary, but after a while, you will solve it by looking at the interactions.
Try all the content that comes to mind when your profile has not yet grown much so that you will learn faster.
If you answer 11 questions in detail, you will have a marketing plan in its simplest form. You'll start getting happy results if you practice your strategy daily without getting bored. I advise you to update your answers as your work changes, and answer questions for different social networks again.
Advice On Social Networks
- Write threads to share your experience and knowledge in detail.
- Prepare memes about your work.
- Communicate with people who tweet about your field.
- Use trend tags decently in your tweets until you get 1000 followers.
- Reply to" Share your work" style tweets with your link.
- Constantly look for and answer questions related to your business.
- Promote your business and site several times a week.
The followers you get are your potential customers, and you can earn new customers even when you have very few followers. Post a free product before it reaches 1000 followers.
- Share 3-7 reels related to your business every week.
- It is better if the videos are original, but if you do not have the opportunity, you can also progress by sharing the relevant videos on your profile.
- Share your knowledge about your profession with a live broadcast several times a month.
- Offer to broadcast to people with whom you work in the same field.
- Give some information about scrolling posts.
- Advertise your most beautiful posts.
- Find all the relevant groups and reply to the posts in these groups.
- After a while, start posting yourself.
- Promote your business, ask questions, share your products and services and distribute your free product.
- Add at least 1 pin every day.
- Make sure that these pins look perfect.
- Do not forget to add your products from your site.
- Highlight the pins you have added from your site with tiny budgets.
- Learn the SEO logic of Pinterest.
- Share a long story once a week.
- Make sure this story is something related to your work.
- Respond to anyone who comments on your shares.
- Comment on the posts of people who may be related to you.
Which Tools Do I Use?
If you are thinking of doing this on your own, I also recommend that you take a look at the tools I have used before;
- TopicMojo
- ContentBot
- Rytr
- Peppertype
- Nichesss
- Ocoya
- Socialbu
- Hypefury
- Canva
- CC Express
- InShot
- Mojo
- SleekBio
- Envato Elements
- SendSimple
- SendFox
- Airtable
- Comments
That's it. Today, we talked about how to promote your freelance business from scratch. Getting good figures in your bank account may take time, but everything starts with the first step.
Start your journey today and keep reading freelancer.guide to get more ideas on the way to success.
