How To Help Your Clients (When They Aren’t Even Asking)

After nearly seven years of freelancing, I’ve come to one realization: most of my clients are clueless.

No, not clueless in that they don’t know what they’re doing, rather they’re clueless as to what is the best direction for them to take when it comes to their writing projects.

The Clients You Keep

Most freelancers I know deal with small businesses, those companies headed up by a sole proprietor who is swamped with many other tasks and simply cannot handle everything himself. There may be others who work for him (or her), but generally these businesses are thinly staffed, streamlined to the point where important communications work is outsourced. This is where you come in.

Small business people understand that they need to have a strong web presence in order to gain and retain customers, but some if not all of their communications work is handled by third parties. It has been my experience that I’ll usually deal with a publicist or advertising pro, but rarely do these organizations have an in-house specialist who creates or updates content for their website or handles press releases, articles, and other writing collateral.

The initial query I get from these people usually addresses a problem they have – such as, needing press releases on a regular basis, a mini-site created in advance of an important product launch, or articles developed including white papers to bolster their site. They know what they need, but they aren’t always sure how to get there. Or, they are holding onto misconceptions about what approach works best when it comes to their writing campaign.

And this is where you — as a white knight – come in to save their business!

Okay, maybe not to the point where you produce such dramatic results, but through your wisdom and experience you provide helpful tips which saves the company time and money as well as strengthens your position with them for the long haul. Personally, I would rather have several long term loyal clients than a lot of short term customers – I get tired of marketing myself over and over again!

Show Your Smarts

Let’s take a look at three sample projects that you can clue your customers in on:

Problem: Client wants to distribute press releases every week over the next three months to spotlight twelve products that they sell.

Solution: The newsworthy angle of the project is suspect, so you come up with a new approach: you uncover which products have been recently rolled out or updated, featuring those only in each press release. Instead of twelve releases you end up doing five or six, which is less money for you but more beneficial to the company who would simply be wasting their money.  Your grateful contact thanks you for your honesty and is receptive to your plans to build a mini-site for promotional purposes.

Problem: Article marketing is still the rage, which has given your client the idea that you should write 20-50 articles and submit these to an article directory while at the same time having the articles posted to the company’s website.

Solution: You understand that when it comes to duplicate content, search engines including Google will not count additional placements of the same article published elsewhere. So, you recommend that a certain amount of smartly linked articles be submitted to a top notch directory (such as EzineArticles.com) with the rest of the pages added to the company’s website. In addition, you advise your client to post company news via Twitter, securing the company’s brand name in the process while getting valuable traffic through it and Facebook.

Problem: Your client wants to launch an all new product via their website and wants you to work on related content.

Solution: You advise the client that mentioning the new product on the main website is appropriate, but since this will be a stand alone product that it should also have a website of its own. You add two new pages to the main website and then roll out a detailed eight to twelve page information microsite separately, with links between the two websites of course.

Anticipating Customer Needs

In each sample case, the client didn’t think that they had a problem or they didn’t fully understand what options were available to them. Because you took the time to uncover what your client really needed, you were able to provide a more suitable project for them each time.

And that is what freelancing is all about – not only meeting needs, but anticipating them too.