Five marketing hacks to do today to improve your freelance career

When you work freelance, the advantages of company life are stripped away. You no longer have an IT department, finance staff or a marketing team to assist you. It’s just you. This can be at once liberating and slightly terrifying. You may have a talent for professional translation or be a skilled writer, but that doesn’t mean that you’re automatically brilliant at understanding technology, completing financial admin or marketing your services effectively. 

Thankfully, you don’t have to have a natural talent for all of these activities – they can be learnt! To assist with at least one of these tasks, Tomedes has provided the five marketing hacks below. These are all simple, cost-effective ideas that you can implement today in order to start reaping the benefits immediately. 

1. Prepare sample social shares

Word of mouth can be hugely important when you work freelance, so be sure to ask your clients for feedback on social media. Of course, your clients are no doubt all busy people (who isn’t, these days?) so it’s a great idea to help them out. Simply drop them an email asking them to share a recommendation for you on social media. 

The key is to provide a sample couple of sentences that link to your website, Twitter profile, LinkedIn account or Facebook page as part of the email. While a client may not have time to sit and write a recommendation, then find out how to link it to your preferred account, taking 30 seconds to copy and paste your pre-prepared statement might be manageable. Just be sure that you provide each client with a slightly different sample text for social sharing – otherwise you could end up with duplicate social shares of the same content! 

2. Produce premium content

You know how fantastic your skills are, but are your clients and potential clients fully aware? Write a blog post that shows off your knowledge and delivers valuable, insightful content then share it on your website and social media accounts. Drop your regular clients a line asking them to share it and offer a reward for the client who generates the most likes or comments. If the reward is a discount off their next translation booking with you, then so much the better, as it encourages them to book in that next job! 

3. Update your website

We’re not talking about a massive overhaul of your whole site, but rather a quick marketing hack that you can do now. As such, jump onto Google and find out what business translation clients want to know about using freelance translators. Add a quick Q&A to your website and, again, share the content on social media. If you can identify and use trending terms, so much the better. 

4. Build up your followers

Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn can be excellent sources of new clients and it’s easier and faster to build up your followers than you might think. Trial a service like Crowdfire to get you started and you’ll quickly see your connections build with relevant contacts. Crowdfire and similar apps are designed to provide marketing support to those who have very little time (or inclination) to spend on marketing activities. Most of these apps offer a free version, so it doesn’t even have to cost anything to give your marketing activity an instant boost. 

5. Professionalise your marketing

Programs like Canva are free to use and mean you can create professional-looking content in a matter of minutes, even with limited technical or design skills. Whether it’s an email offer or a swanky new flier, take advantage of such services to make your marketing materials look ultra-professional in no time at all. Don’t let the look and feel of your marketing documents let you down – you never know when a potential new client might come across you, so always ensure that you’re presenting a professional image. 

Final thoughts

Why not try out one of the above freelance marketing hacks each day this week and let us know how you get on? We’d love to hear about your successes in the comments section below.