How Top Freelance Writers Make Their Clients Money (In 3 Steps)
You love writing, and you’ve figured out how to make a living doing it.
But as you raise your rates and secure higher paying clients, you increasingly wonder:
How can I ensure this piece of content generates a return on investment for my client?
Now, this isn’t technically your job. It’s the client’s job to take that blog post or white paper, plug it into a larger content strategy, and design the architecture that supports it. But as a professional writer and business owner, it’s best to underpromise and overdeliver.
One way you can overdeliver is by positioning each piece of content to push your client’s readers closer to making a purchase.
How can you do that?
By following these steps.
STEP 1: Create Mini-Buyer Personas For Clients Who Don’t Have Comprehensive Buyer Personas
Every good writer is familiar with the advice, “Know your audience”. But what happens when your client doesn’t know who their audience is? (In case you were wondering, “future customers” isn’t good enough.)
All marketers are familiar with buyer personas, but that doesn’t mean every marketing department has them on hand.
Are you going to turn a client away for this?
Absolutely not.
But it also doesn’t mean you’re going to create thoroughly researched buyer personas for them from scratch and for free.
Instead, you’re going to use your consultation call to develop mini buyer personas. You want to know the types of customers your client deals with on a daily basis. If they’ve been in business long enough, they have enough anecdotal information to create mini buyer personas.
The fastest way to generate these mini buyer personas is to ask the client to:
- Describe their highest paying client
- Describe a difficult but lucrative client
- Describe the most challenging type of client they have
- List the top questions, complaints, and compliments they hear from existing clients
- List the kinds of internal considerations (e.g. procurement policies, multiple levels of approval) that prevent their clients from moving forward on projects
If you know enough about a client’s industry, you can help them by whipping up mini buyer personas in advance and presenting them when you first speak. Consider the sample mini buyer persona below for a software development company focused on digital transformation.
- Middle Management Marcus: Digital marketing manager in a financial institution. He’s been tasked with boosting the company’s digital presence and he needs to start by bringing a digital project to fruition (e.g. a mobile app, a chatbot, an e-commerce platform, a website revamp). His knowledge of digital solutions is primarily in things like blogging, email marketing, and digital ads, so this project is overwhelming. He’s been tasked with coming up with a plan to present to his Director or VP. He needs to be prepared to answer questions they have about goals, objectives, project management, and pricing.
You don’t need market research to come up with this. You just need some smart questions, an open conversation, and educated guesses. This mini buyer persona also provides a foundation for companies to build on using customer interviews, client satisfaction surveys, market research, and more.
STEP 2: Identify Where This Content Piece Falls In The Buyer’s Journey
You’ve identified your content’s audience, but you’re nowhere near finished. Now you need to identify your content’s purpose.
The same type of audience member — in this case, Middle Management Marcus — can have different purposes. Middle Management Marcus at Company A may still be defining his problem while Middle Management Marcus at Company B knows he needs a solution and just wants to compare products and prices.
So, you need to ask your client whether this blog article, white paper, or e-book is meant for the:
- Awareness Stage: Customer senses they have a problem, but they need help naming and defining what it is.
- Consideration Stage: Customer has an understanding of their problem and an idea of their solution. Now they need to conduct research to shape their solution.
- Decision Stage: Customer knows what the solution to their problem is. Now they need to find a vendor.
Here’s how Middle Management Marcus would be faring at each stage:
- Awareness: Marcus’ VP/Director wants the marketing team to embrace digital transformation beyond traditional marketing tools like PPC ads/email marketing, but he doesn’t have a clear understanding of what “digital transformation” is and how it applies to his industry.
- Consideration: Marcus realizes that even though mobile devices account for half of internet traffic around the world, his company does not have a mobile app. He’s identified his problem. Now he needs to find a solution (someone to build the app) but he doesn’t know where to start or how digital firms project manage these projects or charge for them.
- Decision Stage: Marcus wants to hire an outside firm to build his digital app. His boss agrees that a mobile app sounds like a smart idea. Now, he needs to comparison shop and understand what different firms have to offer.
You may decide that Middle Management Marcus is in the Awareness Stage. Consequently, you and your client figure that writing a blog post called, “How Marketing Departments Are Emerging As Digital Transformation Leaders” is a good idea.
Or you may decide that Middle Management Marcus falls into the Consideration stage, so you move forward with a white paper called, “10 Features of a Successful Mobile Development Project”.
At the end of the day, your client can articulate what the purpose of this content piece is and use that understanding to further meet their content marketing objectives.
Step 3: Identify The Action You Want Your Reader To Take
Your client is paying you top dollar for one reason and one reason alone: They want content that converts. Writing style, humour, and expertise are important, but they are means to an extremely important end: Making money.
Never forget this. A writer who can write content that converts is a writer worth 100 times their rate.
Therefore, it’s important to know what you want your client’s reader to do as a result of this content.
How do you know what the reader should do?
Well, think back to their stage in the buyer’s journey.
If you’ve written a blog post for a reader in the Awareness stage, chances are they’re not super close to a purchase, especially if they’re in the B2B space. But you still want them to take action that pushes them closer to a purchase and keeps your client’s company in mind.
A good content marketer doesn’t leave this to chance. Instead, they encourage the reader to take action like following the company on LinkedIn and Twitter or subscribing to its weekly newsletter.
If you’ve written a whitepaper for a reader in the Consideration stage, they’re closer to making a purchase but there’s still some way to go. In this case, they may hand over their business phone number or business email in exchange for a piece of gated content. Boom. Now you’ve got a lead to pass to sales.
If you’ve written case studies for the Decision stage, you may want to encourage your reader to schedule a demo or book a call with someone from your sales team.
At the end of the day, your content should have a clear call to action that nudges the reader further through the buyer’s journey and one step closer to purchasing your clients’ product or service.
Follow these three steps, and you’ll deliver value to your clients every time.
