If you’re a freelancer providing a
professional translation
service and you don’t have a marketing plan, it’s time to write one. Now.
A marketing plan is an essential tool in
defining what you want to achieve and how you’re going to do it. It can help
you to think through how you approach getting clients, ways in which you could
be more effective and how to earn more money. Sounds good? Then let’s get
started!
Your marketing plan doesn’t have to take
hours to write. It doesn’t even have to look professionally produced. If a
series of post-it notes on your office wall works for you, then so be it. This
is your plan and it needs to be in the format that will work best for you. The
goal is to focus your thinking and create a plan that is genuinely useful to
your business, not to create a fancy document full of pie charts that you’ll
never look at again once it’s finished.
A SWOT analysis is a great way to
kick-start your marketing plan creation. Jot down your strengths, weaknesses,
opportunities and threats. Then think about your objectives – are you working
in professional
translation to earn vast amounts of money or for the flexible, freelance
lifestyle? Do you work to live or live to work? Questions like this will inform
your objectives and create the backbone of your marketing plan.
Next think through your marketing strategy.
Who should you be approaching and how often? And what kind of approach should
you take – email, phone, letter, targetted press release?
Finally, set action points with specific
dates, to make sure that you complete them. This plan should be a working
document that you update regularly, with actions ticked off frequently.
Achieving
your goals
Always ensure that every part of your
marketing plan leads back to the fulfilment of your objectives. This is the
whole point of the plan. Keep your objectives in mind when writing each of your
actions to be sure that nothing takes you off on a tangent and distracts your
focus from what you are actually working to achieve.
If you find it helpful, you can also include
financial details in your marketing plan. Consider what you earned during the
past year and include a forecast for the coming year’s earnings. See how much
you can increase your earnings by (if a higher income is one of your goals),
but be realistic at the same time. Attempting to treble your salary in a year
is a worthy ambition, but if it’s utterly unrealistic then falling further and
further behind your projected curve each month is likely to demotivate you
rapidly.
Tailoring
your marketing plan
Above all else, your marketing plan should
be tailored to suit you. Every freelance translator is unique in terms of their
skills, abilities, availability, interests and objectives. If you have a flair
for medical translation, then consider related translation sectors if you are
looking to expand your customer base – you are more likely to pick up
pharmaceutical translation work that literary translation work, so focus your
marketing activities around your interests in order to achieve your goals more
quickly.
Remember too to make note of what works and
what doesn’t as part of your planning. If you found that an email campaign
generated enquiries from five potential clients, while a telephone campaign yielded
no results, use that information to shape your future marketing activities.
Author bio:
Louise Taylor is a freelance writer who has had a passion for languages since an early age. She holds qualifications in Latin, French, German and Spanish, as well as her native English. She is also well on her way to speaking Portuguese fluently. As a long-term freelancer, she understands both the positive parts and the pressures of working in the freelance sector. She also writes for the Tomedes Blog.
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