Keeping Up Your Marketing Momentum

Most freelancers are so accustomed to scraping for work and have all the time in the world to network and market their businesses. So when you gain momentum and start to get swamped on a regular basis, how do you make time to continue promoting yourself? Just that—make time and be efficient about it.

The fact is that, no matter how busy you are, you always have to market your business. That doesn’t mean you can’t have some time off when you’re under a tight deadline. But many freelancers make the critical mistake of thinking that an upswing is permanent. They neglect to promote themselves and then wind up with nothing but free time once those winning projects are over.

Here are some tips to make sure you don’t lose your marketing momentum.

Gauge Your Time

Ideally, your business should be healthy enough to survive while you devote yourself to an initiative that takes up your entire day. Marketing yourself in between these big projects is key, even if your phone is ringing off the hook. Think about how much time you need to put towards your project to see if you can afford to “take off,” or go a tad more lax with your promotional efforts. Try not to take off more than two weeks from your self-promotion efforts. If the project will take up all of your time for more than two weeks, it’s time to think about what you can do to continue marketing and make sure the task gets done, too.

Do the Bare Minimum

If you’re overloaded and hardly have time to think about attending a networking event, there are other ways to keep your pipeline of projects flowing in. Think about which simple tactics work for you (and will give you the best chance of lining up future projects) and downsize these strategies. Is cold-calling your thing? Instead of blasting out 10 calls in an afternoon, shoot for three. Another great way to keep business flowing? Respond to inquiries. Say you have 10 inquiries piled up in your inbox. You know that you will need to respond in a timely fashion. Skip the hardcore marketing and simply reply to these messages–it still counts as lining up work for the future, which is a main goal of marketing.

Tend to Smaller Efforts

Sometimes switching gears makes your marketing efforts better and enables you to diversify your avenues. For example, many freelancers overlook simple job-hunting strategies and think resumes are for cubicle dwellers. Not so. Update your resume on job boards or blast out a few resumes for gig openings. You can also keep up with making connections on LinkedIn. These are simple things to do that keep you “out there.” They may not be as time consuming as your other strategies, but they can be just as effective. Obviously if you haven’t put forth a hardcore marketing push in weeks, stick to the things that you know work. But when you want to diversify, think of other options that can be just as successful–and will take a little less time while you’re in overload mode.

Leverage Your Existing Connections

If you want to focus your efforts on marketing, consider communicating with existing clients and not just acquiring new ones. Send out an email newsletter or touch base with a few clients who will likely use your help in the future. You may save time by skipping introductions and still walk away lining up work for the near future.

Take a Break

Be cautious about this, friends. It’s easy to focus on getting one project done, for most of us. And if you’re the freelancer that solely relies on projects, instead of using part-time/steady work, you should be careful about putting all your eggs in one basket. So focus on your project for a few days at a time if need be, but don’t neglect phone calls and emails that require a timely response or you can actually lose the opportunity to line up more projects.

If you’re really pressed for time and have a monster project ahead of you, you may need to put more time into marketing on the off-hours–this is a the reality of being a business owner. After you put your heart and soul into working all day, it’s not uncommon for dedicated freelancers to clock some extra time to focus on business itself. No one said a freelancer is limited to a 40-hour workweek a week, anyway.