How to increase the visibility of your freelance business?

Standing out from the crowd is becoming more and more complex for profiles with highly competitive expertise or specialized in saturated business sectors. If you do not have specialized and niche expertise like Interim managers, Revenue Management Consultants, Developers or even Agile coaches, you will necessarily have to work on your visibility. Indeed, succeeding as a freelancer does not only depend on skills, but also on the ability to make yourself known to potential customers. What actions should be put in place to increase its visibility? In this article, discover several ways to explore in order to choose the one that best fits your goals.

Why work on your visibility will bring you more customers?

When you transition to freelancing, you will face various issues that are unfamiliar to employees. Probably the most obvious: the regular search for customers to maintain your source of income. In fact, financial regularity is not a given for the self-employed. So how are you going to create successful collaborations if your prospects haven't heard from you yet? You will have to show yourself more to promote your business and your offers.

The direct objective is, of course, to find missions. But the more you develop your reputation, the more you will get closer to your ideal customers or the professional opportunities you dream of. In a second step, you will then be able to refine your searches to choose your missions according to more precise criteria.

In summary, focusing on your visibility as a freelancer is fundamental to succeed in a competitive market. Being identified by your ideal client, strengthening your credibility as an expert and increasing your flow of missions are all benefits that visibility can bring.

What does that mean in practice? You will necessarily have to develop a strategy that promotes your visibility. You will need to clear up the following three steps:

• building a service offer, oriented towards your career goals;
• identify your targets, according to the type of customers with whom you want to collaborate;
• develop a unique personal branding, in order to promote your uniqueness with your targets.

In summary, focusing on your visibility as a freelancer is fundamental to stand out in a competitive market. Being identified by your ideal client, strengthening your credibility as an expert and increasing your flow of missions are all benefits that promoting your services can bring you.

5 actions to increase your freelance visibility

1. Focus on customer recommendations

Before you start promoting your business on new media, focus on the resources you already have. As reported by a Statista survey, your former customers are your second source of opportunities (friends and family come first.) This is due to three reasons:

• they are accessible contacts because they know you;
• they were able to understand your expertise thanks to a previous mission;
• they trust you and you have certainly already established a relationship during your collaboration.

In fact, when you have successfully completed a mission, your former customers know that you are capable of providing concrete results that are consistent with their problem.

Whether it's about LinkedIn recommendations (very effective in bringing out your profile during research on your expertise) or letters of recommendation in order to support your expertise during an interview phase, you will benefit from an initial social proof of your successes. Enough to strengthen your credibility as an expert.

Satisfied with the collaboration, your former customers could even become your ambassadors in their own network. Word of mouth is also so effective that many freelancers don't need to communicate a lot. To promote this promotion, you can simply ask at the end of the mission if they know anyone who could benefit from your services. Asking the question will cost you nothing, quite the contrary: satisfied customers will always be happy to serve you in turn.

2. Practice networking

A second action, in order to expand your professional circle, is of course to network. Networking is a practice that is sometimes feared by neo-freelancers, although it allows access to a greater number of opportunities. These are simply actions aimed at making yourself known and building relationships with people from your more or less close circles. Networking can take various forms: private conversations with professionals from your inner circle on LinkedIn; video chats to get to know a member of your network; reconnect with a manager from one of your former experiences, etc.

Generally, the first obstacle to networking is the fear of falling into aggressive bargaining. Indeed, it is never pleasant to find yourself in a position of demand. But this misconception reinforces isolation and limits the potential of your interactions. If you meet someone with the intention of getting to know each other and learning more about their issues, then you are already on the right track. After all, in order to meet your ideal customer, you must necessarily create contact with them. Initial exchanges can be authentic and sincere, while laying the foundations for future collaboration.

Unless you frequent spaces or events dedicated to this objective, professional networking is often very subtle. When you go to the hairdresser, to a party organized by friends or a conference on one of your passion topics, each exchange can lead to a potential collaboration. Again, it's just a matter of word of mouth. So talk about what you do, what drives you and why not your current problems.

Moreover, a reassuring point is that you can definitely get help from your interlocutor, even though you may have just met him. It is very human to want to be useful, even for a vague acquaintance. During a professional appointment, whether with a prospect or even simply a professional contact, we often say that there is three possible endings :

• You leave empty-handed from your appointment because you did not dare to talk about yourself;
• You end the exchange with an opportunity in hand;
• Your interlocutor does not have an immediate need or is not concerned by your services but could know a contact who is.

The objective is therefore to aim for the second or third situation. While there are a lot of techniques for building a network, we encourage you above all to be yourself, open to meetings and to value yourself with your interlocutors.

3. Be part of a community

Freelance communities are particularly useful, and often numerous because of their commercial impact on the business of freelancers.

Among the most frequent, we must note the expert groups on LinkedIn or Facebook which, for some jobs, can be particularly active. They can be freelancers driven by the common desire to create a collective, opinion leaders who want to share their tips and disseminate the opportunities they have seen pass, or companies that are aware of the missions to be filled. We also find the Slack chat service, which brings together Numerous communities of professionals and entrepreneurs, whose access is often restricted to ensure the relevance of the members added.

As a result, these groups can be selective but once your integration is accepted, these communities allow you to cultivate a continuous presence in your professional sphere. These are often the entry points for interesting opportunities where each member shares their resources, questions, mission proposals that they are forced to delegate due to lack of availability, etc.

Collectives are real pools of professional opportunities and allow you to make a place for yourself with other experts. A good way to build constructive relationships by reducing the risks of competition.

4. Sharing your expertise

In parallel with these relational actions, you can definitely carry out actions where you can reap results more quickly. Building trusting relationships can take time, so what options do you have left? Speak up and communicate where your prospects are.

Many freelancers choose to value their expertise by adopting a mentoring position. In particular, this allows them to share their know-how with professionals at the beginning of their careers. Training activities, such as workshops or conferences, can be an interesting option for developing additional income.

If, on the other hand, you are not interested in this pedagogical posture, you can (and should) promote your work through media that promote public awareness. Knowledge in digital marketing is a plus, but an appetite for speaking out may suffice. In any case, you must understand that you have a commercial interest in promoting your services on the internet.

This practice has several advantages:

• instruct other professionals and position yourself as an expert;
• prove your expertise by sharing customer cases and success stories;
• build a community of professionals who appreciate your personality, your values and above all, your work;
• maintain a pool of prospects.

This approach can be energy-consuming but you do not need to multiply the communication channels. Choose the media whose expertise you know best. If you are comfortable speaking, bet on a YouTube channel, a Tiktok account or start your podcast. If you like to write, choose social networks, a blog or a newsletter.

Become an opinion leader in your expertise and/or sector of activity. You will strengthen your credibility and increase your reputation. Show that you have beliefs and that you know what you are talking about.

5. Getting closer to trusted partners

Have you ever considered working with trusted partners? Their role is to promote your expertise with the right people.

There are several types:

• business providers, who are in charge of finding missions for you. They seek information from their network in order to identify current needs and offer you the missions they have identified, in line with your expertise.
• matchmaking services, which identify the right missions according to your profile and put you in direct contact with customers. Unlike recruitment experts, these services value your expertise from identifying the opportunity to the start of the mission. Discover an example with the support of Beager.
• The platforms, for their part, make it possible to make your profile visible to companies likely to seek services like yours. However, it is necessary to have a complete profile and numerous recommendations to ensure your visibility in the tool, in the face of sometimes high competition.

Increasing your visibility is an essential strategy for obtaining missions and ensuring a regular income. There are various actions to achieve this: rely on customer recommendations, cultivate your network, create content on the Internet, integrate a community or even get closer to a third party to whom to delegate this visibility work. By investing time on these various actions, you will save a lot on your next prospecting phases. Your customers will naturally come to you.