Get Freelance Clients For Your Design Business - Create a System

hi creatives one of the most common questions when you run your own design business is how to actually find clients I've been running my branding Studio since 2015 and I've learned a lot about what works for me but also speaking to other creatives to see what works for them every design business is a little bit different so rather than just telling you the steps that I've done I'm going to take you through the steps to create your own sales strategy so that you can start with something that will truly work for your business the tips I'm going to share today are relevant for any creative business who wants more clients not just someone who's starting from scratch let's dive in the way we're going to approach this is through a sales funnel and you probably heard about this for your clients but for some reason as creative businesses we never tend to actually create them for ourselves a sales funnel is just another way of saying the different steps that someone is going to go through from knowing that they want a designer to finding you hiring you and then working with you repeatedly the sales funnels for a creative business typically looks something like this first the client realizes that maybe their brand or their website design is just not working and maybe they even feel bad about sharing it online then they ask their connections for referrals to a designer and they look online to find portfolio sites and social media accounts of designers they then find you and read more about you on social media and on your website they like your work your process and your values and they reach out next up you have a consultation call and decide to move forward with a proposal you sent over a proposal and the client says yes they pay a deposits on your contract and you take them through your creative process to design their brand they approve the brand pay the final invoice and decide to hire you to create another design project with them they like to work and refer a friend to your business so now that we know what the different steps of the sales funnel is we want to think of each of these steps and think of different objections that your client might have to hiring you specifically your sales funnel might look a little bit different depending on what you offer so make sure that you tweak it and make the steps that work for your business so to make this more concrete for example step two here is where they ask their Network and referrals for someone who is a really good designer that they can recommend and so how can we work here to be that one designer who gets referred one way that we can problem solve here is to build a really good network of other creative businesses where you can refer to each other and collaborate on projects and this is a great way to get clients that has worked for me and also for lots of other creatives in my network so now that we're going to think about problem solving for each of these sections I think we need to break it down into categories and so basically there are three stages the first one is going to be marketing this is when it's kind of a cold lead and they don't know that much about you yet then we have sales which is where they have decided to be interested in you maybe commit to you working with you specifically and then third we have relationship which is where you can build that ongoing relationship to get repeat work when it comes to marketing I feel like so much of the advice is all about your social media schedule and which platforms to choose and of course that's super helpful but I think we need to think about social media platforms from a different perspective something that has really helped me has been to think about platforms as either distribution channels or as relationship Builders and most of the time platforms cannot be both so what I mean about that is Pinterest for example is pretty obviously not really a relationship Builder because you don't really get to know the people's accounts that you pin but they're really really good distribution Channel however YouTube for example is really really tricky to get discovered you have to put out a lot of videos and a lot of content before you start getting followers but once you start having those followers we have so much more of a actual relationship because you can have people on video you have conversations you can have Community tabs and so YouTube is more of a relationship building account I think when we plan our marketing strategy it's really important that we have channels that complement each other rather than trying to be on all of the different channels so that way we can create custom content that specifically has that one purpose so maybe for you it's different maybe for you for example Twitter is your distribution Channel and Linkedin is your relationship Builder because maybe that's where your clients are so have a think about this for your own business and how you could approach that with your own strategy for marketing we might also want to consider more traditional ways of networking and building relationships with people that are not just through social media this can be anything from cold emailing to having a business network from let's say the Chamber of Commerce in your city so let's get back to our sales funnel and go through step by step how we can work on our business to make sure that we're hitting those different objections and making sure we are the one who win the clients so Step One is the client realizes there's a need for your services and of course we could just wait for clients to realize but that's going to take time and it's not active so if we want to think about how clients might find out that they need our help we can consider either doing cold emailing which basically means that you're contacting people that you think might be a really good client and you're making a suggestion for how you can help them this has kind of a bad reputation because a lot of people approach this with a kind of volume approach where you're just emailing hundreds of accounts with a very random message and of course you're just hoping that if you're emailing a hundred one will say yes but typically that's not my experience instead what you want to do is you want to find a couple different clients that are really your ideal audience and you want to make sure that you're doing some research on them make sure that you're understanding how you can help them and make suggestions specifically for them and pitch a project rather than pitch yourself so there's a really really great resource which is called the ethical cold pitch it's a resource by someone called Bree Weber who's a copywriter and I'll make sure to link it down in the description and this is basically a course around how to create really really quality pitches where you don't have to send that many because the closing rate is much higher and you're trying to really understand this client's business and make a pitch that they will be super excited to accept because it's something that they haven't thought about or you're coming at it from an expertise angle another example is in-person networking where we don't want to start setting ourselves right away we want to start listening to what people are talking about in their business how are they describing the issues that they're having how are they describing their business model and then we can apply our understanding of marketing and branding and design and see how can we offer a bit of insight that builds trust and then we can have a coffee after that to make sure we can talk more about it and we can pitch our services a little bit better for step two we already mentioned that having a great network of other creative businesses and businesses in general is a great thing but we can also get more referrals just by asking so what I've noticed is a lot of creative businesses doing an amazing job and then at the end of the project it's kind of like okay great here you go thank you so much for the project and then we just assume that if clients are interested in another service that we offer they would go to our website and check out if that's a service that we offer that's how I used to think about it and what I noticed was clients they just thought well this is a person who does branding I assume they don't do website design for example and so what we started doing instead is when we do our project handoff we actually have a little section there that talks about what how we suggest we could work together again so this might be very specific sections for their business based on what we know about them or if we feel like we don't really have a gauge on how we could work exactly with them we just include a list of the services we offer and see if that's something they would be interested in so sometimes just asking really does help since they already enjoyed working with you they're also much more likely to say yes than a typical kind of cold lead so now we're at step three and a potential client is really interested in working with you specifically they maybe found your social media or your website and we want to make sure that here we are capturing them and showing them exactly what they need to close that sale this is kind of where our marketing and sales stages are starting to merge so when they start getting in contact with you that's when we start the sales process but to get there we first actually have to convince them through our website and our marketing and so here what I think is really important is most bigger companies they want to get in touch through email so the first thing you want to do which sounds really simple but a lot of people miss out on is make it super easy to get in touch with you through email make sure you have a contact button on your website make sure that if you're coming through social media people probably want to go to your website rather than DM you and so you want to make it really easy to get to your website and click that contact button having a website is also something I always recommend we can't just rely on social media because we don't control it what if one day you were locked out of your account if your whole business is dependent on those connections that you have there that can be really detrimental so having a website where you have you know SEO traffic coming in where you maybe have a newsletter with an actual list of people that you can contact if something happens that is super duper important so I really suggest having a website not just a social media presence the first thing we really need to make sure we have on our website and social media is clear messaging that's targeted specifically at solving the problems that your dream clients have so rather than talking about ourselves and who we are and what we offer we want to really get to the core of the problem that our clients are trying to solve then we of course need to also have really quality work that highlights the type of work that you want to get it's really easy to just focus on marketing because we feel like we want to get more clients rather than working on personal projects and things like can build up our portfolio and I used to feel a bit bad about putting personal projects on my website because I thought well people are going to notice this is not for a client and therefore it's not going to feel like a valid project but that was really wrong so I've never ever had a client point out that something was a personal project I think it just shows a lot of initiative and if it's work that they like that's just proof that you're able to do that work if you feel like your design portfolio is not where you'd like it to be then really put some time into let's say following design prompts there's lots of sites that give different problems for projects or maybe take a couple courses there are so many really great ways to find education around design both free and paid but it really doesn't have to be expensive YouTube has tons of amazing content creators who create expert advice on design but there's also places like domestica and skillshare that have courses that are really affordable as well I also really want to mention that don't feel like you have to have have the perfect most stunning portfolio in order to get hired when I started we had a couple projects that were all personal projects and to be honest looking back they were pretty rough but we still got hired for a couple projects and then we were able to put those on our website so really I I think maybe it would be fun even if I share my old portfolio if I'm able to find it so let me know down in the comments if you'd like to see my OG portfolio one thing that can really up the quality of your design portfolio is to really describe the challenges of the project the brief of the project and how you specifically tackle that to solve this brand problem for your clients and come up with a really good solution if you're a little bit Unsure how that can be formatted I really suggest taking some time to go and review some really quality design portfolios and see how did they describe it what kind of categories do they put how do they talk about the brief how do they talk about their solution and their approach because having this information Nation it will make it much easier for this potential client to put themselves in those shoes of that original client and see ah this is how you can solve that same problem that we have at our business when we just have images it seems like the work we're doing is all about making something beautiful and of course that's part of it but as we all know there is so much thinking and strategy behind the work that we create so we really want to make sure that we share that so that clients can understand that and see the value of what we offer in terms of what to post on social media how often the posts and which platforms to use it really depends on who your clients are and what your goals are but what I will say is it's always worth it to create a really solid social media strategy when you sit down to think about what does the platform favor the type of content is it short form video is it carousels if you're an Instagram is it you know articles have a look and think and research what the different platforms are looking for in terms of both the algorithm and what users are enjoying you also want to create a social media schedule for yourself let me know if that's something you'd be interested in me creating a video about how to plan out your content I'd love to do that and you really want to think about content pillars so maybe one pillar is your sharing portfolio work one might be testimonials and one content pillar might be to share behind the scenes and a last one might be purely design tips for someone who is in your target audience and so here you're when you're coming up with ideas you don't have to kind of grab them out of thin air you're actually able to be like okay well on Wednesdays I'm posting content pillow one and on Tuesdays I'm posting content better tube for example I also want to say that you know there's a lot of information out there for how often to post and how much to post and for example Instagram just came out saying that the ideal way of posting would be at least one post to your feed every day video or static and to post at least three times a day to your story and that sounds really intimidating to a lot of people including me so I think what we need to think about is how does it fit in with the rest of our lives we need to take mental health and and general sanity into consideration and we really wanted to be a long-term strategy if posting seven times a week and three times a day on stories is not feasible don't create a strategy that works for you and that you're going to be able to keep up because even on the distribution social media platforms it's all about that long-term frequency and the long-term relationship with the people that are following you it's much better to show up three times a week every week rather than seven times a week one week and then nothing and nothing and then seven times a week try to think about it from how your business works and what you're able to do and be nice to Yourself four stages four to six we really want to focus on our creative process and the experience that we're giving our clients as they work with us we want to make sure that they want to come back from our work and that they want to refer someone when the project is done I think we can do this in three ways first we need to have a clearly defined process with easy steps to follow next up we need to communicate the strategy and these different steps to our clients so that they feel at ease and they are always aware of what's happening and third we need to produce high quality work that they are excited to receive because it's 3 steps it sounds easy but we all know it's not this takes a lot of work and trial and error so when you have a project you start with a strategy that you think is going to be a really good one and then you understand and you learn what was really working what was not working so well and then you tweak it and you improve it for example to make sure that my clients feel really comfortable I always make sure that we have a client portal set up that has each of the creative stages set up and we have all of our Communications in terms of what different documents are there we upload you know comments and things like that in that same one platform the second thing I do is I always try to have a live conversation with my clients when we're looking at designs rather than emailing because you're able to catch a lot of questions and you just get to know each other better so that's really helpful for a long-term relationship as well if you feel a little bit uncertain about your process or you're maybe new and you don't really know where to start I suggest starting with these five steps first one is Discovery then you have research and mood board then you have the Design Concepts finally you have iterations and then hand off and so these different steps can happen in lots of different ways and actually have a couple videos I can link as well down in the description that you can start with if you want to check that out as well when it comes to improving the quality of your work I think here we really just need to make sure that we take time to set aside for learning new skills I recently learned so much more about InDesign and lots of different things that have saved me lots of time but also made me a better designer so even just taking like an afternoon once in a while to learn the different new updates that you have on Adobe product or watch YouTube videos on how other people are designing like this one can be super helpful to learn more and become the designer that you're really striving to be another way that is an option both for Creative skills but also for business skills is to get a mentor in my opinion getting a mentor is super valuable but it's something that you want to do when you've tried a couple different things in your business and you kind of understand and how your business functions so that a mentor is not there to help you run everything in your business and figure everything out but rather to help you fix different issues that you've come across so they can help you problem solve in very pinpointed areas for step seven we kind of already touched up on this but you need to ask in order to get more repeat work and you also need to ask to get referrals sometimes if you feel a little bit uncomfortable asking just person to person you can include it in your handoff package or just as an incentive some businesses offer a referral fee to actually refer someone so we used to have an arrangement with another creative business where we would do 10 so if we refer someone to them and it becomes a project that goes forward we get 10 of that project fee so that's basically a marketing investment that you're giving to the person who referred work to you and I think it can be a really really good way of building trust but also incentive for someone to remember oh yeah it was a good thing to refer someone because there's something in it for me as well so that was a lot of different tips but I think where you should start is to create your own sales funnel you can use the same steps that we had or you can create your own and just try to think about the psychology of someone thinking about need your services and then going through those different steps of discovering you and hiring you and working with you as a long-term relief I really hope this was helpful and I'd love to hear your comments about questions and things that you have about getting work and we can maybe do a part two on this video thank you so much for watching good luck with your projects and see you next time

Channel: Kayla

Views: 3,503

Keywords: branding, logo design, brief, freelance

Id: cgxMczFHm1s

Length: 18min 53sec (1133 seconds)

Published: Wed May 31 2023