5 Marketing Tips For Freelance Digital Marketers

Digital marketing is a BIG industry – every company, professional freelancer, and aspiring creative relies on their digital marketing skills to make it to the top.

5 Marketing Tips For Freelance Digital Marketers

We’re also in the thick of a serious freelance boom, as working from home becomes the new normal, and digital nomads showcase an aspirational lifestyle by selling their wares from far-flung tropical paradises.

However, if you’re new to freelancing or breaking into the digital marketing space, how can you stand out from the competition in such a high-paced sector?

Don’t worry; here, we’ll run through five marketing tips for freelance digital marketers that will transform your advertising and attract your ideal clients.

1. Build Your Digital Marketing Niche

Freelancing has grown massively, with about 30% of the American workforce working independently in 2021 – an increase of 22% since 2019.

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Therefore, snagging yourself a slice of market share is all about doubling down on your niche and marketing to a very specific potential client base.

Here’s what you’re looking for when building your niche:

An impressive online portfolio demonstrating your skills and showcasing why a new client should hire you.
Client testimonials advocating for your services.
A sector where you bring unique abilities and experiences to set you apart as a leading expert in the area.

As a new freelancer, you can evaluate the knowledge you have and build from there.

For example, if you’ve worked for a marketing agency specializing in NGOs, use that as your launching platform – you already have a solid resume of experience that demonstrates the value you bring.

It can be hard to create a portfolio if you haven’t been good at documenting your past projects or if you’re a newer freelancer. So offer to do a free project for local businesses or charities in return for the right to use the project in your portfolio. Be sure to ask for a client testimonial as well.

2. Offer Free Added-Value Skills Training

Another excellent way to broaden your marketing reach is to create value skills training.

Online courses, coaching seminars, and trouble-shooting sessions are fantastic tools to capture an audience, generate new leads, and provide an authentically helpful marketing service.

Yes, creating an online training course does take time, we know.

However, it takes on a whole new purpose if you look at it as a marketing investment.

Freelance digital marketers can host courses through their website, driving traffic and brand awareness.

You can also easily promote training opportunities through social media, email marketing, and paid ads to increase your reach.

3. Focus On Your Own Digital Presence

Telling you to spend time finessing your digital marketing website is a bit like teaching a teacher how to teach, but stick with us here.

One of the common challenges for freelance digital marketers is that they’re so busy working for clients that they fail to set aside time for their own website.

Revisit your site to make sure you’ve got all the crucial landing pages:

A slick, attractive home page that instantly conveys your personality.
An about me section that explains your ethos and sector experience.
Your portfolio to highlight the projects you are most proud of.
Contact information so prospective clients can reach out.

Just about every consumer will research a freelancer beforehand, and they’ll usually turn to Google to do so.

Therefore, it’s beyond vital that your site creates the right appeal. A business searching for a digital marketer isn’t going to be keen on a freelancer who doesn’t market themselves!

4. Create A Proactive Client Engagement Strategy

Ok, so you have a defined niche, have an amazing portfolio, and a great website.

Where are your clients?

You need to make yourself heard.

Assuming you’re going to have a much smaller budget than the big agencies out there, it’s always wise to take the personal approach.

Don’t dismiss this as being unprofessional – you’re a freelancer, so a client will hire you because they love your work, engage with your personality, or think YOU are the right person for the job.

Being suckered into creating personality-free corporate correspondence is not the way forward.

To create a personal approach to connecting with potential clients, you can:

List your services on freelance platforms.
Connect with businesses on LinkedIn.
Attend local business forums and events.
Answer questions relevant to your profession on Quora.
Create a Google My Business account (and use it!).
Establish dedicated social media pages for your freelance work.

Any opportunity to market yourself as an authority in digital marketing is a touchpoint for a new client to discover you.

Don’t be afraid to get messy and involve yourself in as many proactive marketing activities as possible.

5. Keep Building Your Skills Base

Great professionals never stop learning.

Digital marketing is a vast industry with countless niches, so developing new skills is a great way to stand out from the crowd.

If you can offer a baseline digital marketing service with complementary options or supplementary packages, you solve problems for businesses that don’t want to work with multiple freelancers.

Here’s an example – you have a regular client, you’ve been working on improving their digital marketing for several months and are gradually seeing positive results, translating into increased sales. Awesome.

That same client is likely looking to rebrand part of their business, launch a new product to their audience, or respond to a trend.

Conclusion

If you have packages available to create a fresh brand strategy, develop a launch plan for a new product, or offer background research into competitors, the client will want to stick with you.

A client who trusts you won’t want to work with someone else – and if you have a variety of skills in your back pocket to offer, they won’t need to.

With these five steps and some diligent effort, you will be well on your way to standing out from the crowd and landing your dream freelance jobs.

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