Successful Marketing for Self-Employed Professionals

Self-employed professionals did not go into business so they could be marketers. They started their own companies so they could provide accounting, bookkeeping, legal, design, healthcare, and other services. However, without consistently implementing effective marketing, these business owners are likely to regularly experience fits and stops. While working with their current clients, they stop marketing, leading to their pipeline running dry.

Jumping off a bridge
I have seen too many self-employed professionals do little or no marketing, or worse yet, market wherever and however their competitors market. I say worse yet because they often do not know if their competitors' marketing is successful or profitable. When I ask why they do this, they usually reply, "Because my competitor does it that way, and he's successful."

If your competitors are as successful as you think they are, it could be due to other reasons, including those that have nothing to do with their marketing. What you are duplicating may actually be subtracting from their success and profitability. To simply duplicate someone else's marketing is unwise. Remember what your mother asked you when you were a kid and did something just because your friend did it, "Would you jump off a bridge just because he did?"

Consistency is the Key to Marketing Success
When coaching self-employed professionals, I am almost always told, "I just don't have time to do marketing." Bull cookies! You have the time to deposit checks. You the have time to pay the electric bill. You have the time to prepare quotes. But you have the time to market your services? I don't believe it for a second!

Please don't say that you have to make the time to do those other things because your business will come to a grinding halt if you don't. Well it can't be a surprise to you that your business is going to come to the same conclusion if you don't get more clients, get repeat business, and get referrals.

The key to your success is to create and implement those tactics that you can put into action on a consistent basis, even if they aren't quite as effective as other opportunities. Consistency, you see, produces greater results than occasional flashes of brilliance. Don't let anything get in the way of your marketing.