5 top tips for planning your marketing

Marketing is an essential activity for freelance workers. Successful marketing can lead to more clients and better pay. Yet many freelancers don’t commit time to learning how to go about marketing their services. Here we look at five top tips for planning your marketing to help you improve your level of success. 

1. Remember that marketing is a skill

Marketing is a skilled activity and as such can be learned. You may be a great translator, but that doesn’t mean you are good at marketing. So do some research online and hone your marketing skills – the rewards will be worth the time committed to doing so. 

2. Think it through

A surprising number of freelancers take an ad hoc approach to marketing, just sending out an email or two when business is quiet. If this is you, then stop right now! Thinking through the purpose of your marketing activity before you fire off an email is essential. Is your goal to get new clients or to get more work from your existing clients? Or would you prefer to put your rate up so that you can earn more money in less time? Only once you have thought through questions like these will you be able to prepare a proper, focused marketing plan. 

3. Get ready to analyse

Before you engage in any marketing activity, plan how you are going to assess the results. If you don’t analyse the impact of an email campaign or a telephone campaign then how will you know which was more effective? You should plan your marketing in such a way that each activity has been shaped and improved by those already undertaken. 

4. Review your offer

Another essential tip for planning your marketing is to look at the services you provide. Perhaps business is quiet because you are not offering quite what clients need. Think about changing your committed turnaround time for documents or branching out into new fields. For example, if you translate medical documents but struggle to find enough clients, consider approaching pharmaceutical companies as well.  

5. Add value

Ultimately, clients want the best service they can get for a reasonable price. This means that if you can add value to what you are offering them, you may attract more clients. Special offers are a great way to do this, so think about offering a 24 hour turnaround time for a couple of weeks, or to translate the first 100 words for free – whatever works best for your particularly circumstances. And of course be sure to analyse the results to find out how well the added value offer worked!

Final thoughts

What are your top tips for planning your marketing? What have you found works best? Share your thoughts via the comments.