Now is the time to consider your goals for the coming year and make concrete plans to achieve them. There are many ways for independent or freelance designers to expand their business and accomplish their objectives.
1. Provide Add-On Services
Finding new clients is more difficult than increasing revenue from existing clients. Offering additional services is the most effective way to accomplish this. Expand your core offerings and look for additional, related services that will be useful to your customers
You can provide many additional services in addition to what you are already providing. Generally, graphic designers provide services for creating social media photos, websites, brochures, posters, business cards, product packaging, and more. Depending on your skill set and experience, you may want to include services such as video production, photography, social media marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), website maintenance, email marketing, and copywriting in your portfolio.
Some of these services may already be provided by you, but your clients may not be aware of what you can do for them. Make sure your website includes a comprehensive list of the different services you provide. Additionally, other marketing collateral such as brochures should be as thorough as possible.
To close a deal with a potential client, you can also be successful by recommending additional services or bundles of other services that you believe the client will find useful.
2. Upgrade Your Tools
Success as a freelancer or independent designer depends on efficiency. What you’re able to do with the time you have available might vary greatly depending on whether you have access to the correct tools.
Our goal at FreeProTemplate is to support designers and other creatives by offering them high-quality materials including stock images, movies, and vectors. You may get as many creative materials from FreeProTemplate Pro as you like to utilize in your client projects. Whether you want symbols, patterns, graphics, social media templates, images, or video footage (among many other things), you may create stunning designs for your customers while saving countless hours.
3. Emphasis on Continual Services
Offering additional continuous services may help you expand your clientele if you work as a freelance designer (or convert your existing services into ongoing packages). Offering services that customers routinely pay for has several advantages, including consistent revenue and less time spent on marketing your company.
Regularly producing new designs is one instance of continuous service. If your customer needs fresh social media graphics every week, you may create a plan that includes a set amount of photos or hours each week or month. Both you and the customer may benefit from this kind of service. You’ll gain from a more steady and predictable income, and the client will always need high-quality images.
For an ongoing plan or package, additional services like website upkeep, web hosting, and marketing material design may be a good fit.
If you have ongoing work, you won’t need to look for new clients all the time. You’ll be able to spend more time earning money-generating tasks and less time looking for employment as a result.
4. Expand Your Network
Your professional network is essential to your success since word-of-mouth referrals are the greatest method to acquire new clients. Allocate time for networking, both offline and online. Concentrate more on the caliber than the number of your connections.
Your network’s members are more inclined to engage you if they require design services. They’ll also recommend you to others more frequently. Joining forces with other designers that provide complementary services might be beneficial. According to your individual qualifications and areas of strength, you can recommend clients to one another.
Develop connections both inside and beyond the sector in which your firm operates. The importance of networking with other professionals and small company owners is equal to that of establishing contacts inside the design community.
You may join a neighborhood association like the Chamber of Commerce or go to neighborhood events to expand your network. While online networking is frequently preferred, face-to-face interactions and contacts are much more useful. Aside from your time, many local networking events are free and offer fantastic chances to expand your network.
5. Strengthen Your Portfolio
One of the most effective resources you have when seeking new clients and prospects is your portfolio. Ideally, you already have a website for your portfolio. However, the majority of designers hardly ever update their portfolios.
The most accurate portrayal of your work should be in your portfolio. You can be losing out on chances and losing potential clients if it is out of date. Update your portfolio with any work that you have finished in the past year and include anything that will stand out or demonstrate a talent you wish to emphasize.
Removing outdated work examples from your portfolio that no longer demonstrate your best efforts may be another way to improve it.
6. Include case studies on your website
Although prospective clients like viewing your work, they especially enjoy the outcomes you have achieved in the actual world. Use case studies and statistics where you can on your website to demonstrate the outcomes you’ve achieved.
Case studies make it simpler for prospective customers to understand how you can address their issues. In addition, they pay attention to the results of your labor rather than just the task itself.
Share the case studies on your social media platforms and in your network as they are published. This makes it simpler to locate new customers who could want design services in the future.
7. Be a Social Media Expert
While social media is great for exposure, you won’t have time to be active on all of them. Choose one platform, and focus all of your efforts and attention on learning it.
Your chosen platform should be the one where your target market is most engaged. For instance, LinkedIn can be a fantastic choice if you’re trying to reach small company owners or entrepreneurs.
After selecting your platform, be careful to post pertinent material every day. It isn’t required to solely provide links to your own work. It might be just as beneficial to provide advice and techniques gleaned from your professional expertise. By commenting on posts, sharing other people’s content, or posting your own updates with links to useful resources or blog posts you’ve written, look for opportunities to collaborate.
Certain social media sites, particularly Facebook and LinkedIn, provide significant opportunities through groups. Look for groups in your industry and participate in the discussion there.
Finally, Considerations for Expanding Your Design Business
There are several ways to start and develop your company, but not all of them will provide the same outcomes and some of them will take more of your time than others. This advice was written with pragmatism in mind. These can all be done quickly and easily, and they all have the potential to provide you with exceptional returns on your investment. Examine your existing circumstance to determine which advice will be most helpful. By the end of the year, with the proper strategy, your design firm will have expanded to new heights.