Step 3.1: Identifying YOUR Target Clients
As a freelancer, you’re likely to provide services to clients. Clients are the people who will avail of your freelancing services. They can be individual entrepreneurs, local MSMEs or SMBs, small tech startups, corporations, unicorns, and among others.
Most newbie Freelancers or even experienced Freelancers FAIL because there’s no clarity of whom they’d like to serve.
With thousands to millions of potential clients out there in the market, it’s impossible to serve all of them. That’s why it’s important that even before you start pitching your Freelance services to a variety of prospects, you have to narrow down your target clients.
Pay close attention as this step is crucial to have a sustainable Freelancing business. And there are sub-steps to follow such as:
1. Identify a Niche Market
e.g. Real Estate
2. Explore the Sub-Niches of that same Market
e.g. Independent Agents, Brokers, Developers, etc.
3. Study or conduct research about this market, and explore opportunities where you can leverage your current skills or your “Focus” skills from Step 2.
e.g. Web Design for Independent Agents, Social Media Marketing for Brokers, Video Editing or Graphics Design for Developers, etc.
Understanding your target market and identifying your target clients involves the creation of what we call as “Client Avatar” or “Buyer Persona”.
The Buyer Persona or Client Avatar is basically a document, where you put a semi-fictional representation of the ideal client that you want to serve. Such document(s) must contain essential details that describe the profile of the client. The Buyer Persona or Client Avatar must serve as a guide as you craft your service offering, customize proposals, do marketing, pricing, and among other things.
Watch the video below where I did a demo in creating a Buyer Persona during one of the mastermind sessions with my previous trainees.
https://vimeo.com/391642423
If the above video isn’t enough, take this separate Buyer Persona Creation course to learn more about the topic, the concepts behind it, its applications, and other examples. That course is bundled FREE when you get the full version of my 7-Step Freelancing course.
Now that you already know how to identify your target clients, the next step is to know where or how to find them.