I am blown away by the successes that writers participating in the marketing challenge saw in just the first week. One member landed her very first content marketing gig. Another got four assignments from one past client and even heard from a client who has ongoing work for her for the entire first quarter. The other successes ranged from interviews with potential clients to sending out more than 50 LOIs to landing a white paper project.

And most of the early successes revolved around reaching out to past and current clients to ask for work. This is always my go-to move when I hit a slow spot, and it almost always yields quick results. So if you are struggling to get work moving in 2020, I highly suggest reaching out to past clients, and then following up on your LOIs from 2019.

As part of the kickoff activities, I asked writers to share their goals for the marketing challenge. Some people were focused on landing a set number of new clients during the challenge, while others set their goals on specific marketing activities, such as sending 25 LOIs each week or completing five marketing tasks every week. 

While goals are personal, I have found setting goals that I can completely control to be more effective and more motivating than saying, “I’m going to land three new clients this year.” Yes, the ultimate goal of marketing is to land clients, but I feel that setting this as your primary goal actually makes it harder to land the new clients, for the following reasons:

1. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and not know where to start. You have 45 minutes between interviews that you’ve scheduled for marketing. So you sit down and start to find new clients. But you quickly get distracted, and the time is gone without a single marketing task being completed. But if your goal is to complete five marketing tasks a day, it’s easy – you simply pull out your marketing plan and cross off the tasks. And at the end of them, you’ve actually made tangible progress toward your goal instead of watching cat videos on YouTube or buying a pair of new shoes.
2. Landing new content marketing clients takes time, sometimes a long time. And when you think the only way to succeed is to land a client, you will feel like you are not being successful. And it’s easy to get discouraged and give up.    
3. You are in control of achieving your goal. You can’t control whether someone else hires you. The only thing you can control is your actions. And when your goal is for someone else to do something, then you are taking the power away from yourself, and it’s easy to feel helpless. But if your goal is to do five marketing activities every day, then you feel more empowered to keep going, because you are meeting your goal every day.
4. There are many successes involved in marketing that aren’t simply landing the client. Every time you get a response that says, “Looks great! We will let you know when we have a need for a freelancer,” that’s a success because you know you are targeting the right people and your LOI is solid. Check out this post if you think that is a kiss off. And having a phone conversation that doesn’t turn into work right away is still a success. But when your goal is getting a client, you overlook these small but important victories.
5. It’s easy to be less selective about which clients you work with. I strongly believe that one of the most important decisions you make as a freelancer is what client to turn down. It’s not just about finding clients that pay your rates. You want clients that are a match for your strengths, weaknesses, personality and goals. This means that you must turn down clients that you think aren’t going to be a long-term match for you so you can focus on finding clients that will make you their favorite freelancer for years to come. But if your goal this month is two new clients, then it is going to be a lot harder to turn down a client, because that might mean you won’t make your goal.

Yes, you want to land clients. But by making your goal something that you can control, you become more likely to stick with your marketing and ultimately land new clients. So reframe your goals into ones that depend only on you to meet, so you control whether you succeed. And use those goals to create your marketing plan to keep you on track.

Do you set goals by task or getting clients? What do you prefer?