The guide to marketing yourself as a freelancer

Being "the best" will always be relative

You may be lucky (and skilled) to be so good they can't ignore you, and it is also the best way to build a solid brand that will pay the bills for many years to come.

But it is primarily about being good at marketing yourself as an entrepreneur and freelancer, communicating your value, understanding your (future) customers and helping them see you as the "best" to solve their problems.

To get there, your biks must be marketed and some noise must be made about yourself. And here's the "funny" thing: 99% of all freelancers hate it for a good word.

Imposter syndrome has a way of creeping into our jantelov-infected minds. Am I even good enough? What will everyone else think? I must seem pretty desperate?

You can continue the thread yourself. Because these are thoughts we all go around with, and these are most often the thoughts that stand between you and the business you dream of creating.

The world needs to hear about you and your abilities before the dream customers acknowledge your pitch with a resounding “YES THANKS”.

So let's look at concrete tactics for how you market your business and place yourself firmly on the map. Even if you don't have a single penny to market yourself for.

We allow ourselves to have a quiet suspicion that you have your niche under control. If not, we have an excellent hands-on article you can visit here.

Funnels and customers

Before we jump into the different channels and how you can use them, it is important to create structure for your marketing.

Here there is one thing in particular that is important to spend a little extra energy on:

Your funnel

Boiled down, your funnel (or customer funnel as the correct Danish translation is) is how you move your potential customer from never having heard of you to becoming a screaming fan-girl (m/f).

Your funnel can generally be seen in three levels. It is important that you are aware of how they play together and what they each contribute.

1. The first level is the activities that move your name from unaware to aware, and helps position you as the expert.
2. The second level is how you collect and qualify your leads, as well as the smooth movement to a paying customer.
3. The third level consists of big smiles on customers who keep coming back and even tell others about you.

Each part of your funnel has some overlap, and of course can also be broken down even more granularly, but that's for a future article.

You've come to get meat on your leg, so let's quickly move on to your game plan.

Start in the middle of your funnel

It may seem a little contradictory, but to create an effective funnel, you don't just start by throwing out great content on LinkedIn and then wait for the offers to roll in.

👋 You start with your conversion point. In other words, where you pick up a lead and convert that person into a customer.

Your typical conversion point is your website (including your portfolio), blog, your packages and prices, as well as your pitch.

We don't spend too much money on this part of your funnel here, but you can, among other things, visit this article about how to get a handle on the most important part of your website, these two articles around pricing 101 and 102, and this around that create a solid pitch.

The reason you need to use a little extra energy here at the start is that traffic is very expensive and attention is a commodity in short supply. When you finally get people to stop and listen, you must have done your homework so well that they can't help but dream into a world with your solution in hand.

And this is basically what your website and portfolio should be able to do: help make dreams come true.

Collect your leads

When potential customers land on your website, it is because they are interested in whether you can help solve their problems. Most of the time, it's just to sniff around, to see what size you are.

Here you must ensure that you have a so-called lead magnet in place where you collect information on your leads.

It can be gated content where you have to give your email in return for cheat sheets, e-books, how-to guides or anything else that gives value and a taste of what you can do.

It is also material you can push on social media.

Top funnel work

Then we come to the part where a large part of your energy will lie when it comes to marketing yourself. 

You can of course go out and pay for campaigns across platforms, but we keep a narrow focus on everything you can do without breaking the bank.

Be visible where your audience is

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Quora, Twitter etc.

If you have an ambition to be everywhere at once, you're going to be well and truly exhausted in no time.

And guess what, your customers also have limited time and only use relatively few platforms.

✅ It is your job to find out where your customers hang out and be visible here.

You don't always have to pitch, but you always have to be visible.

This means that you must share your work and your unique industry insights. Even what seems mundane to you is gold for your target audience.

Social Media

We probably don't need to spend too much column space talking about why social media is a golden opportunity to put your name on the map.

Whichever channel is right for you, the approach is the same:

95% give – 5% take.

Value must therefore first and foremost be delivered with the goal of positioning yourself as the expert in your field. This is both through own content and by commenting on others'.

When you find the platforms where your customers hang out, it's a pure gold mine.

Only by being social on social media will you push your career forward. Connect with relevant leads and fellow freelancers, and focus on making an authentic connection before you start looking for ways to help.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn right now offers quite unique opportunities to build your personal brand, and organic reach can be huge once you've found the formula for the right content. (However, never get obsessed with just looking at how far your content reaches. It's more important to get the right people to see it, rather than uninterested masses!)

On LinkedIn, you are rewarded for a high frequency, and fresh, quality content 3-5 times a week can move you significantly forward on the bus.

LinkedIn is also a channel where you can easily connect with relevant leads. From our corner of the ring, however, we see the strongest leads being warmed up by engaging with that person's content BEFORE an invite is sent out.

Facebook

As an organic channel, there is not much life in Facebook anymore. A completely ordinary post rarely makes it far into the airwaves without money being put behind it, but there is another somewhat bigger opportunity on Zuckerberg's home turf: Facebook Groups.

FB groups are ideal for sharing your content and helping other freelancers. Skills and help with tasks are often requested in various groups, so your time is well spent getting under the skin of the right groups that are relevant to your niche.

In Facebook groups, it is often easier to create a network and collaborate on projects. Many freelancers also find that their referral rate increases after they are more active in FB groups.

Instagram

The days when you could grow organically (and not least quickly) on Instagram are behind us, but that does not mean that there are no opportunities here.

If you are a photographer, graphic designer or something completely different from the creative branch, then a solid IG account can often be a strong companion for your portfolio. 

Instagram is a crowded platform, and content is consumed at high speed. It may therefore be slightly more difficult to create personal relationships and build a network. This does not mean that it is impossible.

Bottom layer of your funnel

The bottom part of your funnel is where some work must actually be delivered and the money must be taken home.

You are probably better at your job than we are, so we save that advice. On the other hand, you have to tackle two important elements here: retention and referral.

It costs a lot more to land a new customer than it does to keep an existing one. Your resources are therefore well spent on focusing on how you can keep existing customers - this is also marketing.

We have written an independent guide on how you can actively work with customer retention here.

Customers give customers, and testimonials are one of the most important things you can use to show how you have created results for others.

We have written about three hands-on tactics you can use to get testimonials in house.

Good testimonials rise directly to the top of your funnel again, and can be actively used to share your work and position you as the expert within your niche.

Your marketing symphony

When you put it all together, it should result in a sumptuous symphony:

• You share quality content on relevant channels (and yes, it can be reused across platforms): tear-downs, industry insights, insight into your work, results, things that inspire you.
• You comment on other people's content
• You share content from your newsletter, and encourage people to sign up if they would like more of the same drawer
• You connect with relevant leads
• Leads stop by your website and see what fabulous work you have previously delivered
• You have customer meetings in house and pitch your service
• They say "Yes, thank you" to a collaboration
• You work on retention of your customer from the first whistle
• You deliver a fabulous piece of work and get a testimonial out of your customer
• Your testimonial smokes on your website and you use it further at the top of your funnel

And then it can all start over. But every time you get a customer to complete this entire journey, things get a whole lot easier: you get better and your pool of happy customers gets wider. And especially the last one is what (most often) causes the scales to tip against you when you have to be weighed against a future competitor.