Every successful business has a sales and marketing department. This should also be the case for freelance businesses. It is unfortunate that many freelancers do not give this department a lot of thoughts. How can you overcome this in your enterprise?
Understand your business thoroughly
You cannot market what you don’t fully understand. Having a detailed knowledge of your chosen business will help you have a targeted market to concentrate your energies on.
This will also help you identify every aspect of your business and the various monetization methods open to you. With this it will be easier to market them and improve your sales.
Choose your area of business
In a word, this means choosing a niche. Some niches are too wide and so you will need to be more specific and choose a sub-niche. For example freelance writing is a niche but it is too broad. You will need to go for sub-niches relevant to your area of interest or expertise such as:
- Health which can further be subdivided into other niches such as alternative health, complimentary medicine and many others.
- Legal writing
- Copywriting
- Fiction writing
Concentrating in a particular area makes it easier to make targeted marketing efforts for your business. It helps to attract a specific group of clients who are interested in that particular service or product. Needless to say, this will boost your sales and make them more consistent.
Create your brand
A brand will be an effective marketing tool for your freelance business. It will help to tell your target customers who you are and the values that define your business. It will bring out certain qualities that will be associated with your business.
To get it right, read more about how to do your branding and if your budget allows it, get professional help to get it right. Your chosen brand must be prominent in everything associated with your business. These include websites and all associated marketing efforts such as email campaigns.
Make the customer come to you
Make the customer come to you already prepared to spend money on your product or service. How do you do this?
- Create an information package that is relevant to your targeted customer.
- The information created must be able to convince the customer that this is what they really want and that it will help them overcome a specific need.
- Narrow down the call to action to a specific need to a specific customer.
- Give and don’t give too much. Make the customer want some more which will be available only on taking a specific action.
Closing the deal
Any marketing efforts ultimate aim is to make a sale. This is an art in itself and every freelancer must be able to do it effectively. It would be unforgivable to lose a customer at this point. To do this successfully:
- Have a pricing policy in place. Whatever price you decide on, let the customers feel that they have had value for their money.
- Provide a convenient payment method
- Offer a guarantee. This convinces the customer about your products or services’ reliability.
Sales and marketing may initially appear difficult and even impossible for many freelancers but the effort and time invested in it will pay continued dividends for a long time to come.
