Some thoughts on relational marketing

Lots o’classes coming up!

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! It’s high season for professional development, and we’ve got a variety of options on tap for you:

• Direct client research lab: Get personalized direct client marketing recommendations, tailored to the kinds of clients you want to work with. I know, I said I wasn’t going to offer another session until April, but with a pretty full waitlist, I decided to go for it in February. Registration is $190, currently 11 spots left, registration closes when those spots sell out or on February 10.
• Free webinar: What now??: Free! The live session is on February 12, and everyone who registers will receive the recording. Everyone is welcome in this one-hour session, but it’s particularly targeted at mid-career translators trying to regroup and move forward in the world beyond “three agencies and a Gmail address.”
• March Marketing Madness challenge group: Back for an eighth year, MMM serves up the motivation that you need to get that marketing done! Twenty daily challenges, 20 motivational videos, an optional but fun Slack group, and new for this year, three live sessions (recordings provided). Registration is $95 until February 15, $99 thereafter.

This week’s topic: Some thoughts on relational marketing

When it comes down to it, there are two basic types of marketing: pitching, and relational marketing. Note! My business coach Treasa Edmond uses the term “relational marketing;” I’m not sure if she coined it, or if it’s a common thing!

For most of us, pitching means sending “warm” e-mails to people we don’t know, pointing out an intersection between their needs and our skills. In my opinion, the resource for that is Ed Gandia’s e-book, Warm Email Prospecting: How to use short and simple emails to land better freelance writing clients. That’s not an affiliate deal but I’m definitely biased, because after I took Ed’s e-mail prospecting class, I tried it for myself and immediately landed two book contracts.

Pitching has a lot of advantages: it’s fast, it’s cost-free other than your time, it’s low commitment (a student recently said to me, “I remind myself that no one is going to come after me with a pitchfork for sending an e-mail”), and according to entities that study such things, it still works, even though it’s kind of a “dated” marketing method. Here’s an article from Hunter.io on how to write more targeted e-mails that people are more likely to respond to.

Then there are the icky parts of pitching: lots of people think it feels spammy (TBH I don’t have this issue, I honestly feel like lots of companies out there need my help, but they can’t get my help if they don’t know that they exist), it can be kind of soul-sucking to send out 100 e-mails that 95 people never respond to, and you have to find a steady stream of prospects to keep it going.

In our profession, you also have to consider the cultural factors: in many European countries, direct e-mail marketing to people you don’t know is a) frowned upon/seen as tacky and desperate, b) illegal or close to illegal because of e-mail privacy laws, or a combination of the two. So what’s an eager freelancer to do?

The other option: relational marketing

If you don’t want to pitch, your other option is relational marketing: building a connection and establishing a relationship of trust and authority with the potential client before you directly ask them if they want to work together.

Hands-down, the most effective form of relational marketing is in-person client-side events where you can rub shoulders with the people who need you. For example, the American Bar Association’s international law section recently held a three-day conference in Mexico, and it was open to non-members. Topics included mergers and acquisitions, international arbitration and litigation, international trade, and legal technology. Just as an example, translating and interpreting for international arbitration cases has been the subject of a couple of great presentations at recent American Translators Association conferences. At this type of event, you could a) learn a lot about the sector and its needs, and b) connect with people at the top of the pyramid.

Whenever I meet a freelancer who says, “I went all in on direct client marketing and doubled my income in a year,” they’ve almost always focused on client-side events. And, you can probably envision some of the challenges:

• Client-side conferences can be costly and time-consuming to attend. The non-member rate for the ABA conference was $1,200+ (but let’s also say that even a medium-sized translation job would have paid for this).
• You may need to be comfortable speaking your source language(s), which a lot of translators aren’t.
• You need to be comfortable interacting with high-level people in person, which a lot of human beings (not just translators) are not.

I often suggest: if you’d like to dip your toe in the client-side event waters but you’re intimidated, start with something online. Go to a one-hour webinar or an online conference. Tons of specialized professional associations offer this type of thing. Again, random example, the Museums Association is having a one-day online conference in May, Championing accessible museums, it’s 69 UK pounds (around $94) and is on a hot topic in the museums sector, an area that a lot of translators and interpreters are interested in.

How about LinkedIn?

For many of us, LinkedIn is going to be our most basic form of relational marketing, especially for clients that we can’t meet in person. We can do things like:

• Comment on our target clients’ posts and tag them in conversations that they might be interested in
• Post things that speak to our clients’ pain points, and post things that are helpful, regardless of whether a client ends up working with us
• Find natural reasons to reach out to potential clients: “Congratulations on the new office in Munich!”
• Collaborate: Co-write posts or articles on LinkedIn; feature other people in our posts

The goal here is to create a human connection without the hard sell, and to “organically” grow our reputation among potential clients, who will (hopefully) then think of us when they need a translator or interpreter.

My take

I think that relational marketing can work well for specific types of freelancers:

• People with the time, money, and social skills to attend client-side conferences
• People with the patience and persistence to create relationships with potential clients online (on LinkedIn and similar platforms), without an intense focus on “the payoff” of getting work from them

The positive side of relational marketing? To a lot of freelancers, relational marketing is more palatable than pitching, because it feels less salesy. The negative side? It’s generally a longer-term, slower-burning strategy than pitching, and a lot of people don’t stick with it for long enough to see results.

The point of this comparison is mostly to show you various options and help you find a marketing method that you can at least tolerate (you don’t have to love it!). Remember our guiding principle for this year: Marketing: Do Something. Relational marketing is another “something” to have in your marketing arsenal!

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