In a recent survey by Money Supermarket, 37.6% of freelancers said the most annoying thing about working for yourself is being responsible for finding your own work. Having to be a salesperson and promote yourself on top of doing what you’re best at and what people hire you for can be daunting. However, this is a skill that can come with time, and your other strengths, such as organisation and planning skills, can help you to improve at selling yourself. That’s where your business plan comes in. Here’s how your business plan can help you to find work as a freelancer.
Define Yourself
A business plan is a valuable tool for any freelancer. It can help you to find your strengths, grasp opportunities, and scope out the competition. Above all, writing out exactly what you want to do and how you are going to do it gives you some clarity. By writing your business plan you can define yourself. What product or service are you going to provide, and how are you going to do it? What are other companies doing, and what will you offer to make you stand out from the competition? What will your niche be? The operations plan and competitor analysis sections of your business plan can help you to answer some of these questions.
Find Your Target Market
Your business plan can also help you to find your audience, and that’s the next step. In order to sell yourself, you need to be clear on who you are selling yourself to. Once you have found your niche, you need to know who is interested in it. Part of writing your business plan is analysing the current market and figuring out where you fit. Are you providing a budget or premium service? Is your target market a particular demographic?
Use Your Personal Connections
What are the behaviours of your target market, and how are you going to reach them? Your marketing plan will help you to figure out a strategy for this. Part of this may be reaching out to the people you already know. Now that you know who your target market is, who do you know who fits the description, and can you market yourself to them? Once you’ve exhausted your personal connections, you’ll need to find more potential customers. For example, do your contacts attend networking events where you could find other like-minded people?
Know How To Market To Your Customers
After a while you should have a clear picture of who your customers are, what their behaviours are, what they like, and what kind of marketing will help you to connect with them. Continue to develop your marketing plan by figuring out which marketing channels you will use to reach your customers – for example online or offline methods, paid online advertising, social media, flyers, newspaper adverts, and so on.
You can’t dig into the details of your marketing plan and begin finding customers until you know what you are offering and who you are offering it to, so start at the beginning and use your business plan to build a profile of your ideal customer.
If you would like any help with writing a business plan for your freelancing business, contact cbm online using the form on the right or call 01604 420 420.