Ali Ali
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Landing high-end clients seems like a mystery to most freelancers. Whether you’re a writer, designer, SEO professional, or any other type of freelancer, you can land high-end clients and do it repeatedly.
I first started freelancing 4 years ago, and I got paid pennies for writing thousands of words. Although I had the writing skills to do my job, I lacked an understanding of how to attract, land, and keep high-end clients.
In this article, we’ll explore some key strategies I’ve leveraged to land high-end clients that have taken my freelance business to the next level…
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What is a high-end client?
Before diving into the details of landing clients, it’s important to clearly identify what a high-end client is.
A high-end client is a company or person that is prepared to pay more for your services because they value your work. These clients may be large companies with significant budgets or smaller businesses that are looking for specialized expertise.
They might also desire a more individualized or tailored approach to their tasks and be prepared to pay extra for it.
Why are high-end clients better?
The reason why it’s better to work with high-end clients is because you can provide more value.
For example, if you’re doing email marketing for a small business, you can write great copy for them to land clients. This is useful, but you can make it even more useful by going after and working with bigger companies.
In this scenario, bigger companies would have larger email lists, more products to sell, and a better brand. For the same amount of email copywriting work, you can generate much more revenue for a business and ultimately get paid more for your work.
Identify and define your target market
Before you can start marketing yourself to high-end clients, it’s important to identify and define your target market.
As a result, you must decide which sectors or categories of companies are most likely to be interested in your services. Because it supports all of your other initiatives, this is essential. It will be challenging to market and sell your services if you can’t pinpoint your target market.
You are essentially seeking to aid your market. The more specific you can be with your marketing, the more effective it will be. You can change the focus of your market from the whole industry to a specific sub-niche you’re trying to serve. Here are some ways you can narrow your niche once you figure out your general industry:
- Size of business: What type of business are you trying to help (startup, large corporation, family-owned business, freelancers, etc.)
- Specific sub niche: Is there a specific sub-niche you’re looking to help (e.g. for healthcare: healthcare IT providers, health insurance companies, VA hospitals, etc.)
- Budget: What is the typical budget of your average client? Are they looking for a cheap product or are they looking to invest thousands of dollars each month into marketing.
- Main customer avatar: Who is the specific person you’ll be selling to and working with routinely. Are they the CMO, content manager, paid ads manager, etc.?
Tailoring your marketing
After you’ve figured out who your market is, you can start to tailor your marketing efforts and messages to appeal to those people. This will be key in order for your clients to resonate with your marketing.
If you can’t pinpoint your market’s pain points, it will be hard for you to sell them anything. To learn what makes you unique and how you might stand out in your market, you can also research your competitors.
All of these efforts ultimately help you get a more accurate picture of the problems your clients are facing and how you can best address them.
Build your online presence
The vast majority of marketing to your ideal clients will be done online, so it’s vital to build a great online presence. The point of this is to build social proof, which will help you stand out among other freelancers when pitching to high-end clients.
I did this by focusing on LinkedIn and I published content regularly for six months. This helped me generate many leads and get clients.
You can establish and improve your online presence by:
- Creating a professional website: Your website should display your services, experience and portfolio. You can also target SEO keywords by publishing blog posts on there.
- Strong LinkedIn profile: When you search for a person’s name, LinkedIn frequently appears among the top results. Make sure your LinkedIn profile is current and that it emphasises your experience and skill set.
- Other social media platforms: Social media presence on platforms like Twitter and Instagram can be great in establishing trust and building social proof. These platforms often work well, especially if you’re doing something related to selling to consumers.
To sum up, your online presence should be cohesive and professional, and it should clearly communicate the value you can offer potential clients. The easier clients can find and trust you, the more likely they are to engage with your services.
Networking and building relationships
Most of the time, working with high-end clients is a relationship-driven industry.
Even though the work you do and the results you get are important, you need to build a relationship with them to get in. You can accomplish this through deliberate networking. Your name being synonymous with the service you provide is the whole point of this. The more individuals who know you, the more probable it is that they will recommend you to high-end clientele.
Some of the best ways to start networking include:
- Attending industry events and conferences to make connections and learn about new opportunities.
- Joining relevant online groups and forums to connect with potential clients and other professionals in your field. A great example of this is Twine’s freelance job board. You can upload your portfolio and resume and easily connect with hundreds of potential clients.
- Using LinkedIn to connect with potential clients and showcase your skills and experience.
- Reaching out to your existing network for referrals or introductions to potential clients.
The great thing about doing this is the long-term results of networking. People you meet today will be your clients in three, six, nine, or twelve months. Creating a rapport with as many clients as you can is the goal here. Future warm introductions are made possible by this, so you won’t have to approach prospects with a chilly pitch.
Create a compelling offer
Making a compelling offer to high-end clients is the best way to encourage them to engage with you. If you have never met a prospect, the main reason they will choose to do business with you is your offer. The specifics of what you can do for their company will be highlighted in your offer, along with any guarantees you might make. This is a fantastic technique to lower risk for your client because, if you can come up with a tempting offer, it will be simpler to convert them.
Your offer should include a clear explanation of your UVP (unique value proposition) and how you can solve the client’s specific needs and challenges. It should also include a proposed project timeline, deliverables, and your hourly rate/project fee. The more specific you can make your offer to your client, the more receptive they will be to it.
Free-sample offerings also work well. For example, if you offered to market a podcast by getting them their first 100 email subscribers for free, they would likely take you up on that offer, and you could upsell them later.
Do take caution with this method, however. Offering free services is incredibly alluring for clients – but ensure you aren’t taken advantage of. Start with a simple offer and keep tweaking it until you have one that is high-converting.
Be consistent
The single most important factor in getting high-end clients is consistency. Oftentimes, people are sold the idea of immediate success if they do a certain hack or trick. The truth is, you will have to do any activity consistently to start getting repeatable results, and getting high-end clients will typically not happen overnight.
Now that you know the importance of offers, building your online presence, and networking, it’s time to build a consistent and sustainable plan. With consistency, you can take the guesswork out of landing high-end clients and repeatedly land them. In general, the more you promote your services, the more you’ll be known in your niche and get referrals for high-end clients.
Here’s a sample plan you can follow to land high-end clients:
- Set aside 1 hour a day to market to high-end clients: Making an intentional time commitment is the first step to do this. As long as you show up each day, you’ll get closer and closer to landing
- Choose one marketing channel: Choose one marketing channel (e.g. LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc.) to market to your clients. Ideally this would be a channel where your target market is active.
- Set a measurable input for marketing: Choose one input to measure and do it daily. This can be a cold call, a LinkedIn post, a tweet, YouTube video, TikTok, etc. It’s important to keep it simple and just choose one and repeatedly publish.
- Iterate based on feedback: Now you are posting daily on one channel, see what posts are performing best and double down on them. The more you do this, the more engagement and leads you will generate.
Wrapping up
A plan like this can be followed for at least 6 months. It’s doable and easy to maintain, even with your workload. You don’t need to overwhelm yourself; just pick one marketing channel and do it consistently over a period of time, and you’ll land high-end clients.
I’ve done this personally with LinkedIn and referrals, and it’s worked great for my business. There are fluctuations between days or weeks, but month after month I get more leads and more clients.
These strategies above are some of the best actionable strategies I’ve used to scale my freelance business. It’s important to be intentional and consistent in your approach, so you make progress and don’t burn out.
The more you can market and sell yourself better, the easier it will be to attract and keep high-end clients. You’ll be turning your leads into clients in no time!
Want to be recognized as an expert in your field? At Twine, we have dozens of top-quality jobs being posted each and every day. There is a job waiting for your skills in everything from design to marketing, development, and copywriting. Join the marketplace of diverse creative talent here.
Michelle Payne
Stuart Logan
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