How to Market Yourself
How to Market Yourself if You’re Newly Self-Employed
For the newly self-employed, you’ll spend the bulk of your time on two things: doing the work and drumming up more work. Doing the work is delivering the services you’re offering or creating, procuring, and bringing to market the products you’re selling.
Drumming up more work means:
1. Getting yourself, your message, your services, and your products in front of the consumers that could potentially become your clients or customers
2. Presenting your business in a way that compels them to hire you or purchase from you
3. And delivering the kind of referrable service, products, and customer experience that delights them and inspires them to become recurring customers and recommend you to their friends
It might feel a little overwhelming to promote yourself if you don’t have experience with marketing, but here are some tips to get you off to a great start.
Show up as a professional
When your business has been operational for a while, your reputation will help you retain current customers and attract new ones. But until you have firmly established yourself, your image needs to convey professionalism and expertise.
To ensure you’re projecting an accurate, appealing, and professional picture of you and your business, you’ll need to invest in a few basics like a well-designed website, and a professional logo and URL. You’ll never get another chance to make a first impression. In today’s digital age, you might have mere seconds to catch a consumer’s eye as they scroll through options.
Your logo represents you and should be visually appealing, distinctive, and straightforward. It must convey your message and be executed well to be effective. Unless you have graphic design experience or access to great design tools, you’ll want to hire a professional to create the perfect logo for you.
Your website should be fast-loading, friendly to navigate from all types of devices, and error-free. It should be aesthetically pleasing, have high-quality content, and be easy to find. Your site’s content plays a critical role in search engine optimization, which contributes to driving visitors to your site.
Your URL helps enhance your credibility and professional image to potential clients or customers, so it’s an investment that will yield a return. All other marketing efforts will be limited in their reach if you don’t show up as a trusted professional on your website, in your logo, and with your own URL.
Be visible and active
Once you’ve got your URL, logo, and website in place, it’s time to start showing off a little bit. Paid advertising is one way to get business, of course, but before spending a single dollar from your marketing budget, you can get a lot of leverage and visibility using these free social media and networking platforms.
LinkedIn: LinkedIn is a fabulous place to network with others in your field, promote your new business and your expertise, and generate new leads. Follow companies, both large and small, that offer the same products or services as you. Make sure your profile is complete and start connecting with people you know. Former co-workers, college friends working in your field, vendors, and others tied to the niche your business operates in.
Engage regularly by liking, commenting, and sharing content relevant to your business. Post original content under your name and on your business LinkedIn page. Be aware of how you position yourself. If you denote yourself as “Self-employed” or a “Freelancer”, LinkedIn members can click on a link of others in that same category, many of which will be your competitors.
Instead, consider setting up a free page for your business on LinkedIn and linking it to your profile page. This gives you one more place to promote your business and solves the conundrum of helping your competitors become more visible.
Social media is unprecedented in affordability and reach, making it an invaluable marketing tool for the self-employed. You can unintentionally get sucked into spending more time than is useful or necessary on social media, so look at the top platforms, consider your target audience and concentrate your efforts on the internet communities that will be most likely to keep you in front of the consumers you wish to attract.
According to a Statista study, Facebook had an impressive 1.69 billion users in 2020. Instagram ended 2020 with over 1 billion users, as reported in this Sprout Social report, and Twitter started 2021 with about 69.3 million users as per this Statista article.
All the platforms mentioned here are free to users but allow you to do paid advertising on their sites if you choose. With so many users and so many options for entrepreneurs to promote their businesses, you can’t afford to avoid or be silent on social media and LinkedIn.
If you don’t feel competent in setting up and posting to your accounts, there are affordable freelancers that specialize in social media management that can build your followers and keep your story out there for a nominal monthly fee.
Know your target audience
Before you start marketing, you need to have a firm grasp on your target audience. This isn’t so much who you hope you will attract, but who you are likely to attract with the services or products you are offering.
How do those consumers use search engines, where do they look for services and products like yours, which social media forums do they use most? What will you do to make yourself more appealing to them?
If they are already buying your competitor’s products or using your competitor’s services, what is different about you, your business, your services, or your products? What will compel them to give you a try? Seeking accurate answers to these questions will help you fine tune the audience you should market yourself to, so your efforts result in a great return on investment.
Referrals and reviews
Word of mouth remains a powerful marketing tool. When you offer a delightful customer experience, deliver services that exceed expectations, and sell products consumers feel are high-quality and worth the money they spent on them, you’re creating a referrable relationship that your clients or customers will talk positively about.
As a newly self-employed business owner, don’t be shy about asking for referrals. Ask your most satisfied customers to introduce you to others in person, via email, or by recommending you on social media. Having strong and supportive endorsements helps establish your credibility and expertise.
Consider setting up a formal way for customers to leave reviews on your website. Incentivize them to refer others to your business. The goal is to please your client and give them every reason to share how pleased they are with others. The kind of exposure that comes through referrals and strong reviews can significantly impact your new business.
While this just scratches the surface of ways to market yourself and your business, working your way through these suggestions can get you off to a great start as you begin to drum up more work for yourself.