As creative freelancers and solopreneurs, you only have a limited amount of time available to focus on building and growing your business, while spending the rest of your time serving your clients.
In order to make the most out of your time and effort, you need to focuse your marketing.
One of the things that comes up again and again, in my mastermind group, private coaching, and training courses, is the confusion around where to actually focus to get the best results.
What happens is many people will come to me and say something like…”I want to sell 10 headshots. How do I get 10 more headshot clients? I just need to get 10 more headshot clients to meet my sales targets.”
And what they start with is something that might be far away from actually converting clients. They might think…”I need to do Facebook Ads. I need to start paying to get eyeballs or traffic on my site.” That might be so far away from the possibility of actually converting 10 people into paying clients that making this effort may give you a little to no return on your efforts.
That leads to disappointment. When that happens again and again, you start to doubt yourself. You start to believe that you suck at marketing. Don’t get discouraged – there are so many options about where to focus your time, energy, and money when it comes to marketing that most freelance creatives feel totally overwhelmed.
A lot of times when you look at your marketing, you may not even really know what stage of marketing you need to focus on or what your biggest challenge is. You may just have a general sense that… Hey, I should be doing more marketing. I should be doing more Instagram. I should be using hashtags. I should be doing email. I should. I should.
We should all over ourselves without actually identifying what problem you need to solve first.
What is the area you need to look at to start getting immediate results?
Where to start fixing your marketing
One of the things that I created for you freelance creatives is a quick marketing guide.
Within the guide, I invite you to organize your biggest challenge into six different categories. You’ll start to notice that these six categories relate to the buyer’s journey of getting awareness and generating traffic to get new people to your website, social media, or opt-in offers.
Maybe there are already a lot of people visiting your sales and landing pages, but you’re not getting those inquiries. Are you making them offers? Are they looking at your offers? If you’re not getting those bookings for discovery calls or creative briefs then there may be something you can do to increase those inquiries.
If people are aware of you and they like you, trust you, and reach out to you, but you’re just not closing the sales, then maybe the place to focus is on the sales conversions, proposals, and estimates.
Or maybe all of this is going well. People know you, like you, trust you AND you’re giving them great proposals. You’re even closing sales. But are you generating enough total revenue? Your marketing is working, but there may be an opportunity for you to improve sales or adjust your offers to increase revenue – all with the same amount of effort.
There are six different categories that you can use to start organizing your thinking and start identifying what you want to focus on first.
Focus your marketing first on conversions.
It’s really challenging to do all of these things all at once. To try growing awareness while nurturing people, getting really great conversions on your sales or your landing pages, and be closing every single inquiry that you get.
These are really individual skill sets. They are very distinct places where you can start to hone your own skills, your own confidence, your own excellence, and start to see better, more consistent results.
When we’re trying to do ALL of the things at once, we start to be LESS effective because we’re focusing on too many different things at one time.
Many of us are multi-passionate. Some of us have extra bonuses, in terms of being neurodivergent and having brilliant aspects of our capacities, like ADHD and being able to focus deeply and then switch focus super quickly. Still, that’s about dancing with your own energy and your own time, not about the effectiveness of trying to do all the marketing things all at once.
It’s more effective when we can focus our time, our energy, and our money on one area of marketing at a time, and get that working really well before we focus our time and energy on the next thing.
As a general recommendation, I suggest focusing first on converting your inquiries into actual clients. If you’re getting inquiries but you’re simply not converting them into sales or you’re not getting responses to your proposals or estimates, you are losing money.
That’s where I would focus first, because the hardest thing to do is to bring people all the way along this buyer journey, to the point at which they know you, they like you, and they trust you enough to ask for an opportunity to work together. At that point, you really do want to hone those sales skills and make sure you’re doing the best that you possibly can at closing those sales.
The number one place to focus, in terms of generating revenue, is as close as you can to where people are ready to buy.
Focus on that discovery call process, focus on turning your proposal into a powerful sales tool.
In my guide 6 Things To Fix In Your Marketing, the first page takes a look at what sucks and the second page helps you examine what you want more of in your life.
Marketing fix to help you avoid getting ghosted.
For example if you want get more gigs instead of getting more ghosted, here’s what you do:
- Focus on listening instead of talking during a sales call.
- Change your proposal style to the style that I recommend – the “insight, benefit, and reason to believe” proposal style.
- Use value-based selling techniques.
- Pre-book your follow-up/proposal presentation calls
These and other techniques are gone into in-depth in the Business Mastery Program and the Marketing & Sales Membership.
We all have only a finite amount of time and energy, and most of us, a finite amount of money to invest in marketing and promoting our businesses. I know that you want to be as effective as possible.
There are so many different options. The first place to start is to identify where you have the biggest problem, or the biggest potential and possibility. My marketing guide helps you identify that.
Once you know where to focus, the next step is to get clear on what actions you might want to take to reach your marketing goals. I can totally help you with the action steps. Book a free call with me today.
Focus first, then clarity, then actions.
