Moving away from permanent roles into freelance digital marketing is an exciting time. You’ve spent years at agencies or in-house learning the ropes and understanding what goes into making an account successful. With those skills, you’re ready to branch out with your own business, taking on your own clients and working in the way that you want to.
Of course, it’s never as easy as it sounds. Shifting to a freelance working style brings up all sorts of new challenges to navigate and obstacles to overcome. One of these is defining your working style and whether you want to focus on taking long term clients where you’re responsible for ongoing optimisation and management, or if you’d prefer to base your business around short term projects where you audit, set up and troubleshoot existing accounts.
Below, we’ll take a look the pros and cons of each approach.
Short Term Projects
Project work is a great way to build up a reputation as a solid, dependable freelancer. Taking on projects exposes you to a variety of different industries & challenges while also introducing you to new contacts with every piece of work. Reputation is everything and building up a strong contact list will help to bring in future projects as the clients you’ve helped refer you to other business owners inside or outside their industry.
For many marketers, a new challenge is one of the most exciting parts of the industry. By its nature, project work will always present you with a new challenge and an opportunity to test new tactics or apply lessons from previous work. There’s nothing better than seeing your recommendations driving a huge performance uplift and each new project gives you the chance to do this.
Of course, it’s not all upsides with project work. The most obvious challenge freelancers face here is creating a pipeline of leads large enough to sustain their income. A lack of projects for even a month or two is enough to create cashflow issues so freelancers need to allocate time to marketing their own business & ensuring that leads continue to come in.
Another problem you can face with project work is pricing & the perception of value. As marketers, we understand that a few smart decisions can have an outsize impact on performance, but a business owner who’s not as familiar with digital marketing may struggle to see this potential from a proposal alone. With sites like Upwork & Fiverr allowing business owners to hire skilled marketers for low rates, it’s crucial to spend time working out how to define & communicate the value that only you can provide.
Long Term Management
On the other side of the coin, there’s the option to build your business around long term account management where you’ll be responsible for setting up, running and reporting on your client’s digital activity.
A key benefit to this style of work is the increased security it gives you. Long term account management means that you’ll be able to plan how much revenue you’ll have coming in each month and identify when it’s time to scale up. In the event a client gives notice, you’ll have at least a month to generate new leads or upsell existing clients to maintain revenue, compared to project work which is over very quickly.
Along with the increased security, long term management gives you the satisfaction of seeing your recommendations in action and the performance uplift they can achieve. Project work is often focused around auditing and troubleshooting, so it’s easy to miss the chance to see your hard work in action.
However, with the positives come the downsides of this style of work. While you have increased security in terms of monthly revenue, a client leaving at the wrong time can change the short term outlook of your business very quickly. Lead generation & conversion can be more difficult for long term projects so you’ll have to quickly find the time to move back into marketing mode for your own business in order to secure new work.
Long term management can also create challenges as your clients succeed and grow their activity. More activity requires more management time and with multiple long term clients, you’ll have to prioritise to fit everything into your day. As your business grows, your focus may shift to higher priority clients requiring you to restructure contracts with, or even let go of, smaller clients who aren’t generating enough revenue.
For most freelancers, you’ll start out with a mix of work types and naturally gravitate towards one. Whatever style you pick, the key is to identify your niche and your main selling points so you can effectively and efficiently win new business. With so many businesses out there looking for digital guidance, becoming an expert in your field is the best path to success.
For long term management or short term project assistance, get in touch.