The decision to venture forth into the freelance world is the first of many. One of the first few questions to ask yourself is “What area of the spending public do I want to utilize my business?”

Who has the need for your services? Who is willing to pay for those services?

Important research must be done in order to find the best answers to those questions. Assuming your product is something everyone will want and need is suicide for any marketing strategy.

A quality possessed by the most successful small business owners or freelancers is recognizing that only a limited percentage of the potential customer base has an actual need for the service or product and the means to pay for those services or products.

The goal from that realization point on is to target in on exactly who those people are and direct your marketing efforts towards them to funnel their business and their money in your direction.

There are three reasons people buy services or products:

• To solve problems
• To satisfy a basic need
• For personal enjoyment

Before digging too deeply into your research, you need to fine tune the USP (Unique Selling Point) of your product or service and break it down into one area of specialization. Don’t market a variety of skills or services. This will ‘thin’ out your product and prevent you from standing out in the crowd of your competition. By all means, you can offer a line of products or services, but focus your marketing efforts to a single component that you feel will be your primary business generator.

Decide which of the three categories listed above best describes the product you are offering. Many times, more than one category will apply.

Once you have your blueprint, so to speak, you can begin to zero in on the clientele you wish to attract.

The first step to this is breaking your target market down to two sections:

• Primary Market –Where you predict to gain the majority of your business
• Secondary Market-While not as productive as your primary market, this is another area to gain business.

If your Primary market will be from local clients, you need to do demographics research and study each section of the demographics results individually.

• Age: children, teens, young, middle, elderly
• Gender: male, female
• Education: high school, college, university
• Income: low, medium, high
• Marital status: single, married, divorced
• Ethnic and/or religious background
• Family life cycle: newly married, married for 10 – 20 years, with or without children.

The more details you can find for your area, the better. The best resources for this type of information are your local town hall, the library, public records departments and Chamber of Commerce.

The demographics of your area should then be broken down to include psychographics. This information tells you the attitudes, values, lifestyles, and opinions of your demographic results.

• Lifestyle: conservative, exciting, trendy, economical
• Social class: lower, middle, upper
• Opinion: easily led or opinionated
• Activities and interests: sports, physical fitness, shopping, books
• Attitudes and beliefs: environmentalist, security conscious.

Once you have gathered and studied all the information, you should be able to have a clear mental image of who your optimal clientele will be. Sometimes actually writing a description of what your research has found will help you with implementing your goal of reaching those potential clients.

Also be aware of ‘sister’ businesses or services that complement what you offer. Often times the targets best suited for your business can be found simply by identifying those services that go hand in hand with yours.

Reaching out to others to create awareness of what you offer is one of the biggest challenges you will face when starting out. Knowing exactly who to reach out to and why they are your target will make the task a whole lot easier and garner the most productive results.

Do your research, study the results and set your sights.

photo credit: M i x y