Freelancer Clients
Whenever we talk about freelancers working with clients we always describe an awkward dance in which the business owner (client) focuses on price rather than obtaining specific business goals (either because they are inexperienced with digital marketing or stuck in one of the stages of denial).
On the other side, freelancers just want to do work they love that’s creative and rewarding for both parties, but often lack crucial business and sales skills. This often leads to them not knowing how to schedule onboarding, how to vet potential clients for fit, how to explain budgets properly, or taking some kind of bizarre DIY project where they try to train a non-technical client in how to do bits and pieces of what needs to be a holistic approach if they’re going to make any headway in growth.
Screening Potential Clients for Fit
Freelancers new to the practice can reduce the drama and stress inherent in working with clients by first identifying what are commonly called “pain points” in the freelancer / client relationship.
Anyone who has freelanced before knows the most common issues of clients you just don’t want to and shouldn’t work with.
Eight Types of Digital Marketing Clients You Do Not Want to Be Like and Why
In order to find an appropriate fit for your fledgling freelancer career, it’s vital that the freelancer work with clients who can directly benefit from the value they can deliver.
Value in Digital Marketing
So many freelancers struggle with even articulating the value they could provide.
Rather than focus on explaining to potential new clients the value of ranking at the top of local Google search results (Search Engine Optimization or SEO), they instead focus on installing generic templates with no higher value SEO could deliver and no eCommerce or content marketing.
Once you know how to identify and clearly explain the value of being on the first page of Google search results to a potential client, know how to explain budgets and ranges, and how to work holistically to deliver outcomes most freelancers can’t even comprehend and most business owners lust after but can’t conceptualize, and can technically fulfill the five stages of what I call the “5D” project development stages, you can now begin screening potential clients for fit.
The First Stage of Client Screening
The first stage of client screening is to be aware that the most common question you will receive will be based on the view that the service of digital marketing is actually perceived as a single “one and done” physical item like buying a McDarnold’s cheeseburger or a can of tomatoes.
This is simply because the great irony of digital marketing is that those who could most often benefit from digital marketing (small business owners) are also the most likely to attempt to negotiate away any benefits, target prices rather than complex multiple-level goals they don’t know, or try to resolve themselves with DIY hobbyist approaches.
It is for this reason that a freelancer must know to expect this email or call. You’ll hear it thousands of times every week or month, depending on how often you interact with potential clients. “How much is a website?” “How much is SEO?” “How much is eCommerce?” These all proceed from the false assumption that these processes are items that can magically be purchased one time and then somehow assembled like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle into some generic free or super-cheap template somewhere. Again, any freelancer with any level of professional experience knows this approach results in chaos and deleted dreams of growth. Yet it is the “bright shiny object” most can’t help but be drawn to.
Before being lured into answering this question with a logical “well, it depends,” simply ask the potential client a few quick questions:
Do they have a business in existence now? Do they have any staff on hand who could help maintain the site, write content, act as a contact person, who could provide marketing collateral, provide hosting information, make approvals for some necessary functions, provide social media passwords for rebuilding those channels, and so on. Odds are strong if they answer not to these two initial questions, there’s not much to build upon.
Another important question is to ask how long their business has been in operation. Statistically most businesses flop before their fifth year in business so if a business is legal in structure (such as with an LLC or legal nonprofit) and are at that five year mark or older they are stable and will have staff. If they are less than five years of age, it’s likely they won’t know how to answer questions, may not have actual real tangible goals, and just be more difficult to work with due to lack of experience, lack of funding available, and then the requirement for low budgets and negotiations at every stage of development.
If a client can meet these initial criteria, then you can move on to scheduling another video conference call to review how budgeting works. It’s my recommendation to keep calls short. You should also record them if possible for future reference or keep a spreadsheet with their full name, contact information, their issues or concerns (budget will be at the top as we discussed), limitations, challenges (no staff, no goals, for example), what happened, and schedule a follow-up for a few days later to explain their primary concern in clear, simple direct language using my related blog post linked to above. Summarize how budgets can be estimated by using common industry standards such as newspaper advertising, radio, and TV advertising rates.
Nothing of any value for either party can be accomplished for less than several thousand dollars, so it’s important to address this point as quickly as possible. You can and should rehearse this explanation repeatedly with friends and others you trust to be supportive. You can also have rates from larger agencies at your disposal for comparison by simply contacting them as a “mock up” potential client giving a different name and burner email address. By having those rates at hand, you know where you stand in comparison and can show potential clients that a) you’re more reasonable as a individual freelancer and b) further detail how a single experienced trusted “hand” freelancer can be more nimble and give them a more personalized caring approach a larger agency could not and would not.
Onboarding
As you refine your screening process, you’ll need to build a onboarding process where you train clients in how you work, why you make certain decisions you do on design or approaches (and this can almost always be explained by simply looking at a client’s larger, more profitable industry competitors).
My advice here is to have a workbook you create using Canva or even a short course or video that explains concepts such as SEO, eCommerce, and branded content marketing and how these seemingly disconnected services actually should and can work together to place a client website at the top of search rankings and that this, in turn, results in more leads coming in.
This is a very high level concept and approach most freelancers will by habit and necessity ignore. Don’t be that freelancer.
Short of a workbook, you could have a bullet list of points you are rehearsed and well-versed in where you can answer each key objection in a series of brief interactions. Price will be at the top of any list, as we’ve said before. It is the hydra that never goes away until a business is experienced in Returns On Investment (ROI) and understands and values holisitic digital marketing. Usually this understanding only results in a business after it’s struggled, fought through the five stages of denial I’ve linked to previously, and grown beyond their five years of financial advancement and seen past.
Further Steps
To find these types of clients a freelancer must first recognize where these legitimate, established businesses go online and offline and know how to reach them. When I worked for marketing agencies, we’d call such systems “farms” where systems would be created to specifically recruit and nurture potential new clients.
One great way to “farm” for appropriate clients is through the use of workshops. We’ll dig into creating client “farms” in a separate blog post as well as another on each technique (such as teaching workshops).