Many freelancers struggle with marketing to find clients, which can directly limit their earning potential. Whether you are new to freelancing or not, ineffective marketing will likely result in fewer clients. Even highly experienced freelancers sometimes find marketing difficult. While it may not be possible to perfect your marketing overnight, there are steps you can take to help ensure a steady stream of clients.

Start and Keep Everything Professional

Clients expect freelancers to operate with the professionalism they experience from businesses. Meeting and exceeding these expectations can help you build a better reputation, making it easier to market your freelancing services to current and future clients.

• Maintain a strong online presence with a business-oriented website or social media profile showcasing your expertise, clients, and projects.

• Use professional-looking proposals, estimates, and invoices, even if you have to use specialized software instead of a word processor to create them.

• Formalize verbal agreements with written documents that describe the scope, milestones, deadlines, and payments for projects and tasks.

Almost everything freelancers do affects marketing, so don’t cut corners on professionalism.

Focus on Consistency for Marketing Efforts

Sporadic marketing is unlikely to build the momentum needed to attract clients regularly. Even worse, clients may interpret inconsistency in your marketing as unreliability in your freelancing services. While it may seem counterintuitive, it can be more effective for freelancers to use a few types of marketing regularly than many types randomly.

• Following a calendar that shows what marketing activities you will perform daily, weekly, and monthly can help to keep things consistent.

• Avoid overdoing your expectations for how much marketing you can do since it can be challenging to find time to continue when client work increases.

• Focus on improving a marketing activity until progress slows before trying a new one, and avoid giving up on a marketing activity while it’s still working.

Avoid creating chaos for potential clients by thrashing across different marketing activities.

Consider Building a Simple Marketing Plan

If you’re having trouble making your marketing effective at finding clients, you might benefit from a marketing plan that rebalances your efforts towards planning over execution. The marketing plan doesn’t need to be complex or large. Try starting with one strategy and a few tactics to help find clients, and consider changing tactics before strategy. One way to get started is to answer a few questions.

• Who are your ideal clients? The correct answer reveals clients that want to work with you, not clients you want to work with.

• Why are clients considering freelancers? Filling in for staff on leave versus replacing someone’s unusable work involves different client wants and needs.

• What work will they assign to freelancers? Clients won’t allow freelancers to do some kinds of work, so don’t get distracted by pursuing unwinnable projects.

Even a one-page marketing plan can guide marketing activities and create success.

Ensure Clients Understand Your Work Helps Them

Marketing helps clients and freelancers. Start by clarifying your services with jargon-free language describing what you do and how it benefits clients. Consider sharing a brief document summarizing your expertise, the types of clients you serve, and your work and its outcomes. Aligning expectations minimizes the chances of misunderstandings.

• Share information about your services and examples of past client engagements, emphasizing the work performed and how it helped clients save money or make money.

• Invite potential clients to describe their specific needs and ask specific questions to get detailed answers because this will allow you to share more relevant details.

• Summarize discussions in memos and formalize proposals and estimates with a written agreement or contract to avoid misunderstandings later.

Demonstrate the professionalism you want to experience from your clients.

Conclusion: Strive Towards Less Marketing

Marketing quality is better than marketing quantity for many freelancers, especially those wanting a few ‘great’ clients over many ‘average’ ones. Freelancers rarely need to spend the money and waste the time required to perfect many different marketing activities. Instead, they will likely experience better results by mastering one or two things that help them get noticed by future clients.

Download the AI Guide to Marketing for Freelancers for additional information that can help freelancers market to find clients.