Always Exceed Your Clients’ Expectations
Be very clear with your clients, and promote yourself and your business by offering clear explanations of your charges, your services, and the extras you’re capable of providing. And most importantly, always try to exceed your client’s expectations. There are various ways of doing this, such as delivering ahead of a deadline, flagging issues in source documents, and even catching grammatical errors or typos. These may be small issues to you, but to your client it’s just another aspect of your excellent customer service: it will keep your client happy and will ensure they become a repeat client, thus making it even more difficult for your competition to steal your client.
Ask for Testimonials
If a client provides you with excellent feedback because they’re very happy with a translation project you’ve completed, ask if they would mind providing you with a testimonial. We know that client reviews are a very effective marketing tool, and more and more prospective clients are checking testimonials. A survey conducted in 2013 determined that 90% of participants surveyed stated that their buying decisions were influenced by online reviews.
A client testimonial can come in a variety of forms: they may be public reviews such as on Google+ or LinkedIn, or they might be written reviews that you can use in your marketing materials and/or on your website. Anything that drives traffic to your website is a great marketing tool for you.
Keep an Eye on What Your Competitors Are Doing
Try at all times to keep your finger on the pulse of the translation industry in order to find new and improved ways of marketing your services, and attracting more customers. One way of doing this is to look to your competitors for ideas on how you can further promote yourself and your services. Another rather unique approach is to reach out to your competitors with a view to joining forces and landing larger-scale projects. With your combined experience and specific talents, it’s highly likely that you’ll be able to attract new clients, larger and better-paying clients, and be able to market your business as a strong and reliable translation service.
We wish you every success with your freelance translation business. The one thing we do know for sure is that there’s a lot of translation work out there, so you just need to be smart and strategic in your approach to winning your share of this work. Translation is a wonderful career and it can also be an extremely well-paid career, whereby you have the freedom to choose the hours you work, the circumstances under which you work, and the clients you work for.
