When you have a freelance business or your own company, you have more time doing your own things, pursuing your own projects, making the best out of your own skills and determining your own work hours. Having your venture also gives you control over the direction you want your business to go. However, you may be finding it difficult attracting clients to your business. If you are, we would be considering top reasons why you’re having trouble attracting clients.
As a freelancer, the task is up to you to discover opportunities and sell your skills or services to a wide range of audience within your reach. If this is seeming difficult for you to do, then, there are a few critical reasons why that is.
1. Your Customer Service Is Poor
Your customers are your best bet when it comes to marketing your business. If you offer great services and your customers are satisfied by what they received, then they would easily refer other people they know to your business. On the other hand, when they have poor experiences with your company, be sure that they will also tell other people about their disappointments in the service you provide, and will make their friends not to trust in you. This kind of information is dangerous to your business and your reputation, reducing your chances of attracting new opportunities in future.
While it is great to improve on SEO and social media presence, it is also very crucial to build a very trusted service for your audience. It would mean offering live chats, providing prompt answers to their questions, and being timely with delivering on your promises.
If you improve on your customer service, you will have more chances discovering new customers, less trouble attracting clients, and more confidence in your existing customers in referring you to new customers.
2. You Lack A Credible Online Presence
It has become almost impossible to launch into freelancing without having a credible online presence. And as recent study revealed that there are about 5.6 billion Google searches everyday, it is more than enough reason to have your business visible and credible to online visitors.
You shouldn’t also forgo making use of leading social media platforms in promoting your businesses online. Your customers and prospective customers need to be sure you are authentic, legitimate, respectable, and professional with your business. And if your online information isn’t accurate or well detailed to convince your prospective customers, you’ll sure be losing out on opportunities.
3. You Have No Specific Audience
Every business must have a target audience it is proffering services to. As a self-employed worker, you must be able to define your audience to be able to make a living from what you offer. While it would be tempting to think that everyone could benefit from the services you offer or products you sell, there are people who are less likely to need your products services and some others who have a high tendency of patronizing you.
For instance, as a person dealing in the bakery business, you are likely to focus more on busy moms looking out to make a purchase for their families, or if you have the low-calorie product, you’d consider people who want to lose weight. Also, as a consultant in digital marketing, people you’d want to focus on are people engaging in other businesses and are considering ways to grow their online presence.
If you do not figure out who your specific audiences are, you’ll continue to have trouble attracting clients to your business. You should identify your focus audience right from the first day of launching your business, and create a buyer persona – your ideal audience profile – which can serve as a compass during the creation of your marketing campaigns. Your buyer person should include information such as gender, location, age, likes and dislikes, demographics, budget, and more.
4. You Are Difficult To Find
This is one of the top reasons you are likely having troubles attracting clients to your business. Even as a freelancer, you need to be visible and easy to find. And it is beyond just having a one-page platform displaying your contact information. Your business must display in depth information of everything it represents across all considered online platforms, and should also appear at the right time before your audience.
Since your prospective customers are very likely to surf the internet for solutions to their problems, you should consider writing articles on the problems your business addresses and the solutions that your clients would enjoy from patronizing your business.
When you optimize your posts to meet the search queries of your prospective clients, your prospective clients would very likely land on your page when they come online. And if your contents are very helpful to them, they may decide to work with you.
Applying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) skills to your contents increases the likelihood that your contents would come top on search engine result pages. So, when customers are in need of products or services related to yours, they are very likely to find yours. And you must continue to create contents on your services that are channelled to your customers’ needs and their search intents to have your web pages rank in search results and appear in the face of your prospective customers.
Being skilled in SEO means that you are able to use keywords, headlines, interlinks, meta tags, and backlinks among others within your web page contents to increase traffic and visibility. With the wide range of daily searches on the internet, you will be able to pull an increasingly high number of customers to your website if you are able to make the best of SEO.
5. You Do Not Seem Trustworthy
You must have had encounters with scammers online, most of your potential customers have too. So, they are suspicious of who they relate with online. And if your company is a new one, you will definitely need to do a lot of work in gaining your customers’ trust. But the good thing is that you can improve your credibility online to attract more customers to your business.
Be transparent about everything you do and represent. Do not make promises you can not fulfil. Make logical expectations about what you offer and can deliver. And when your customer starts coming, get them to make testimonials and reviews which can stand as social proofs for more visitors and customers.
You may also work with influencers to build your trust level for increased customers. Influencers can give your business a shout-out, encourage their followers to consider your products or services, and increase its appeal during the early days.
In conclusion, it has never really been easy attracting clients to any business. And whether as a small business owner or a freelancer, you should work steadily to avoid our top reasons why you’re having trouble attracting clients. Gain the trust of your target audience, ensure that your clients can easily find you, and deliver whatever service they want.
Do not over-promise. Ensure that you are well familiar with your audience, and they are also provided with everything they should know about you and your business with a compelling website. In no time, you’ll be raking in the desired cash figures.