The increasing hyperconnectivity of the digital world has broken down both physical and geographical barriers in many industries, meaning that people can produce work and remain productive wherever they are in the world, at any time. And digital marketing is no exception.
The freelance economy is booming, with millions of Indians doing freelance work today. The fastest-growing segment of freelancers is those making lakhs and up, with over a third in that category.
With so many roads and angles to explore, a constant rate of evolution, and a growing number of touchpoints to exploit, more and more businesses are looking to freelance digital marketing specialists to help them deliver essential campaigns and projects.
Becoming a digital marketing freelancer is a potentially lucrative, rewarding, and entirely flexible situation. If you feel it’s the venture for you, here are some tips on making it happen.
Tips To Get Started
To ensure success in the industry and a steady flow of income, you need to have good skills and expertise and constantly update yourself in the various modules of digital marketing. You need to manage and promote your brand well to get clients continuously. With these things, here are the ways you can start, manage and grow your freelance digital marketing business. Here are some top tips for you to become a successful Digital Marketing freelancer:
1. Stay Up To Date On Recent Trends
Gaining bandwidth on social media, especially on viral platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, will require awareness of recent and popular trending topics. It may not be intuitive why commenting on trending topics on Twitter may help your business; however, doing so with the proper strategy can expose you to a larger audience and build social media by responding to trends.
If there is a light topic trending going on, tweet something out using the hashtag. If your Twitter profile is optimized with your website information (more on that later), what you do for work, and business email (also more on this in a bit), this will likely bring you several business inquiries in the short or long term.
Freelance digital artists will thrive by applying this strategy, mainly if their work is featured heavily on their accounts. Building social media in this fashion will bring more followers to your profile, resulting in work or referrals to receive further work. Younger millennials have used Instagram to build their businesses altogether. While some may detest the idea of being active on social media, multiple platforms are a powerful tool for freelancers to maximize their earning potential.
2. Identify Your Target/Potential Clients
You need to identify who will be your ideal clients, especially at the beginning of your freelance career. Based on your specialization and skill-set, you need to determine what kind of businesses/companies you can serve well or what kind of business needs of a client you can fulfill better. Choose your target clients and projects based on your interests and skill-set. With experience and expertise, you can work with a wide variety of businesses and clients.
3. Reaching And Getting Clients Through Content Marketing
More important is to create and publish helpful and engaging content relevant to your target clients on your blog and social media networking channels. Write about Digital Marketing, how it helps businesses reach goals and grow, various types of Digital Marketing, industry trends, and practices. Take advantage of guest blogging to increase your reach.
These are the various ways to reach potential clients and for your potential clients to discover you. Remember that your brand is a promise that you should strive to keep up. Your work delivery, integrity, and expertise should reflect your personal (brand) values.
4. Manage Time and Tasks With The Right Tools
You need to manage your work delivery and deliver the required work or results by the deadlines agreed upon with your clients. There may be times when you get 3-4 projects at a time, and you need to assign a particular time slot for each project based on the amount of work and the deadlines, set reminders, and check and report the progress. There are some excellent tools to help you with that with nice and varying features at varying prices. Explore them and see what works best for you.
5. Expand Your Skills And Improve Your Craft
Expanding your skills and improving your craft is a primary step towards growing your freelance Digital Marketing business. What else can sound more sensible? Learn and acquire more skills, expand your specialization and expertise by taking online or offline courses that you find helpful in the process, and constantly update yourself with the latest trends and practices in the Digital Marketing industry. Freelancing is all about being competitive and providing exceptional services that your clients feel worthwhile. So be it.
6. Collaborate With Other Freelancers
Collaborating with other freelancers with complementary skills and expertise is an effective and efficient way to grow your freelance business. For, e.g., if you have good content creation skills, SEO, advertising, social media, you can collaborate with other freelancers who are good at website design and development, visual design, UI/UX, email marketing, landing page development, and optimization, etc.
This way, you can work with clients and businesses on more comprehensive projects, offer more added and advanced services, charge more, and thus, grow your freelance business.
Find clients on freelance websites.
Freelance websites are platforms that connect people looking for work and employers. Here is a list of freelance websites where you can find social media management jobs:
- Fiverr – the world’s largest freelance services marketplace.
- PeoplePerHour – a website where freelancers can bid on jobs.
- Upwork – a platform that connects top companies to talented freelance workers.
- Flexjobs – for about $15 a month, you get access to a list of remote jobs.
- TopTal – through a rigorous screening process, TopTal identifies the best freelancers and connects them to potential employers.
The basic skills you need to master
At first glance, social media management may seem like an easy job.
That’s not true. There are some skills that all social media managers need to master:
- Communication is essential for social media managers.
- Data analysis is a skill that you will develop over time. For example, most social media managers use A/B testing to optimize their posts. And it’s only the beginning; marketing is becoming more and more data-driven.
- Being creative will make you stand out from the pack. There is a ton of room for experimentation in social media. The key to being successful is to try different types of posts and understand what sticks.
- Graphic design is also helpful if you want to publish engaging posts. Making beautiful images with Photoshop and Canva will give you a competitive edge.
- Customer service is crucial; bringing customers back is the number one reason businesses have accounts on social media.
- Now that you know which skills you need to improve, it’s time to learn them.
These are the instructions that can help you start, manage and grow your own freelance digital marketing business. Also, one can create your freelancing career while working as a full-time employee and then gradually shift towards freelancing with one’s growing experience and expertise.
We hope the tips provided here have shown you the importance of social media for freelancers, especially those who avoid it like the plague. While far from perfect, multiple platforms can help freelancers build social media in a fashion which is helpful to their business and goals.
We’ll be happy to know your tips for becoming a successful digital marketing freelance or share your favorite one from this blog. Also, don’t forget to share your views on this article in the comment section. Check out our other blogs and social media accounts too!
