When you’re actively looking for new clients, how much marketing is enough? I hear this question frequently, from beginning and experienced translators alike: beginners need more work, while experienced translators need better work. I’ll admit that I often give subjective answers, such as “Until you have as much work as you want,” or “Until you’re consistently meeting your target income every month.” Those answers aren’t wrong, but they dodge the issue: “enough” marketing is more, or way more, or waaaaaaaay more than most freelancers are doing.
Like many people who give business advice to freelancers, I frequently hear from people who are discouraged that their marketing efforts aren’t yielding better, or faster results. “I’ve contacted so many potential clients, and I still don’t have enough work.” One metric I often give: during my first year of freelancing, I applied to over 400 translation agencies, and it still took 18 months until I was replacing the income from my previous full-time job. Here’s a better answer; I found this in Jennifer Goforth Gregory’s book on business development for content marketing writers (not an affiliate link, I just liked the book!). If you’re having freelance marketer’s block, you should buy the book, and read Jennifer’s blog. Her posts on topics such as what to do when you lose an anchor client combine great advice about the freelance mindset with do-it-now advice on freelance marketing. I implemented a lot of the suggestions in that post when I simply wanted to make more money although I hadn’t lost any clients (it works!).
In her book, Jennifer puts some numbers on “enough” marketing, while commenting that many freelance writers think of 20-30 contacts as “enough,” when that’s actually very few. She recommends:
- When you are actively looking for new clients, contact at least two new potential clients every business day.
- After 50 contacts, you should have gotten at least one positive response (“We’ll keep your information on file.”)
- After 100 contacts, you should have landed a new client
- If you aren’t seeing results, adjust. Perhaps you’re contacting the wrong kinds of clients, or perhaps your chosen method isn’t working well, or something else. But if you are seeing those results, just keep swimming
- If you are in urgent need of work–let’s say you’re new to freelancing, got laid off from your in-house job, or lost a client that provided the majority of your income–you should immediately launch a massive-action marketing plan. Jennifer’s blog features a guest post from freelance writer Holly Bowne, who contacted 139 potential clients in five weeks (using individual letters of introduction, not “Dear Sir or Madam”). If you simply don’t have enough work, you should be marketing yourself in every second you’re not generating income.
I really like Jennifer’s advice, because many translators make the mistake of expecting too great a return on too little marketing effort–feeling that after 25 contacts, they’ll surely be overwhelmed with high-paying, interesting work. Compared to when I started freelancing 16 years ago, two things are certainly true:
- Translators at the low end of the market have a harder time making a living
- Translators at the high end of the market face more competition
Back in the day (“the day” being the early 2000s; I started freelancing in 2002), things like meeting direct clients on their own turf, writing informational content for direct clients, and joining direct clients’ professional associations were novel concepts. Now, I talk to translators who run into multiple other translators at client-side conferences. It definitely takes more effort to break through the noise in 2018. If you want a definition of “enough” marketing to help you break through, Jennifer’s is a good one!
Readers, over to you: any thoughts on “enough” marketing?
Amanda Xiaoqing Mao says
Hi Corinne, thanks for sharing. The dilemma I have is, if I do more marketing, I may have too much work that I can’t handle at the client’s deadline; if less marketing, I may have little to work on after a major project. Very hard to find a balance. Any thoughts?
Amanda
Corinne McKay says
Hi Amanda! Glad you enjoyed the post. A couple of thoughts here: as a freelancer, you are rarely going to have exactly the right amount of work. You’ll nearly always have a little too much or a little too little, and personally I’d rather have a little too much so that I’m not stressed out about money. Also, in my experience, the concern that you will be flooded from work with new clients is a little overblown. I guess it depends on your languages and specializations, but given the statistics in Jennifer Gregory’s book (my own results are maybe a little better than that, but not dramatically better), I think that it’s manageable. Meaning that if you send out two inquiries a day, I don’t think you’re going to get work from five new clients in a week.
Amanda Xiaoqing Mao says
Hi Corinne, thanks! Seems the comments are only available with a computer not a phone, so sorry for replying late!
Jennifer Goforth Gregory says
Hi Amanda, This is Jennifer (the author of the book quoted above). It’s a really challenging thing to manage your workload. Here is a post that I wrote answering this exact questions. I also think that the success rate of your marketing dramatically depends on where you are in your career. When I was first starting out, my statistics were close to what Corinne mentioned from my book. But now, it usually takes me about 10 emails and I can round up a few projects.
Oleg Gordeev says
Thank you for the interesting post, Corinne! Based on all tips that I have read, 1 hour of marketing a day (5 hours per week) is a must for a freelance translator. During downtime, marketing efforts should be definitely increased.
Corinne McKay says
Thanks, Oleg! Glad you enjoyed it!
Jennifer Goforth Gregory says
Thank you so much for reviewing my book and sharing my thoughts. I really appreciate it!! And I’m so glad to know that the advice is working for you. It’s very interesting to see how much of it applies to freelance translators as well as writers.
Corinne McKay says
Thanks, Jennifer! Your book is so wonderful because it combines very helpful mindset tips with things you can do *right this minute* to work on your marketing. And yes, maybe you have a niche working with translators, because a ton of your information applies to us too!
Madalena Zampaulo says
Excellent post, Corinne! I agree with this wholeheartedly. I’m actually in the middle of Jennifer’s book, so it’s nice to know you recommend it. I think that the “coasting” comfort zone you mentioned on Twitter recently is all too easy to do as a freelancer, or as a business owner of any kind. We can all make the excuses of being too busy or not having time, when really, we should be preparing ourselves well for when a big client’s budget gets cut or things slow down across the board in one of our language pairs (I hear this one a lot from people in certain language pairs). Nice to see that you and Jennifer have put numbers on this to give us an idea of what is “a lot” and what really isn’t.
Corinne McKay says
Thanks, Madalena! That’s awesome that you’re also reading Jennifer’s book!
palomnik says
Great post, Corinne, and kudos to Jennifer Goforth Gregory – I found her work on losing an anchor client very insightful. I’ve often wondered about this, especially since 90% of my work comes from one client – they just pay me better than anybody else, and they send me more work than I can handle. However, they recently were bought by another company, and I started having white knuckles. As it turned out it was a false alarm (so far) but…
I have several other clients, but 1) they pay me less and 2) I have such a good relationship with my major client I don’t know whether I want to jeopardize that relation by taking on more work from other clients – and hence less work from them. Is it worth the risk?
Corinne McKay says
Thanks for your comment, and I’m glad you enjoyed the post! My take on this: in an ideal world, you don’t want one client to represent more work than you can afford to lose overnight. Lots of us have been on the receiving end of that e-mail and it’s not fun; a few years back, one of my largest direct clients unexpectedly hired an in-house translator with zero notice. They were hiring for a half-time marketing position (in France) and ended up hiring a native English speaker with translation experience, so decided to up the position to full-time and include translation in it. There went about 20% of my income, literally overnight. Ideally, you don’t want an individual client to represent more than about a quarter of your income. However, many people find themselves in the situation you mention: great client sends tons of work. And, to be fair, people who have a salaried job have one “client” who is responsible for 100% of their income. And, at least in the US, an employer can lay you off with not much more notice than you’d get from a freelance client. What to do? Ideally, diversify with equally good clients. At the very least, envision how you’d handle it if you got the dreaded e-mail from your big client tomorrow. How long do you think it would take you to replace that work with other clients? Do you have savings to cover your living expenses during that time? Do you have a list of potential clients you’d start marketing to? Do you have a network of colleagues who might refer work to you? All of those things are important for all freelancers, but doubly/triply so if you are heavily dependent on one client.