The *Simplified* Freelancer's Marketing Success Estimator

Behind The Curtain...

This calculator is obviously very simple, and marketing can be quite complex.

But it illustrates what I've experienced, which is that your offer is the foundation of effective marketing.

If you're not offering something differentiated and valuable, you're gonna have a bad time.

👆 This is where I see a lot of freelancers & agency owners struggle with their marketing.

The Math of the Calculator:

(Service Offering Strength * 0.5) + (Marketing Volume * 0.2) + (Marketing Skill * 0.3)

The Logic of the Math:

Even if you spend a million hours a week on marketing but your service offering sucks and your marketing skills suck, you're gonna have a bad time. (This is what most freelancers do when they need work.)

If you have a crappy service offering, you can be the best marketer in the world and still get mediocre results where you're lucky if you break even.

If you have a great service offering but don't market it, you'll get some business through word of mouth, but it's highly out of your control.

In order to get good results from your marketing, a strong & differentiated service offering is non-negotiable.

Here's the hack...

If you have an A+ service offering, you can get a D in your marketing skills and a D in your marketing volume and still get good results.

This is why we recommend all DYFers start with our Double Your Rates Toolkit or Double Your Freelancing Rate course (service offering, sales, and pricing) before moving on to The Blueprint (productizing and marketing).

P.S. In case you were wondering "Why is marketing skill weighted more heavily than volume?" here's why... "Marketing Skill" includes targeting quality.

As a rule, 100 emails to qualified leads is better than 1,000 emails to unqualified leads.

It's not enough to just "blast your marketing to anyone and everyone;" it needs to get to the right people AND it needs to be compelling when it gets to them.

Hence, skill > volume. While you can compensate for low skill with higher volume, it's not a full replacement. (At least not in my experience)

The Most Common Mistake I See:

Most freelancers have a service offering score of 20-50%, very low marketing skill (~10%), and when they need clients, they only pull the "marketing volume" lever. 

This caps their results.

The solution:

Hone your bloody service offering.

It's the easiest, fastest lever you can pull — all it takes is a little bit of thought, creativity, and occasionally, a bit of skill building. (Usually under 20 hrs)

Whereas growing your marketing skills and increasing your volume take comparatively more time for lower leverage per hour spent if your service offering score is low.

Recommended Steps:

Here's the path I think makes the most sense from an efficiency perspective, without knowing anything about your business...

Step 1 — Get Your Service Offering "80:20 Good"

Get your service offering score to about 70%.

(This is what the Double Your Rates Toolkit & Double Your Freelancing Rate help you with)

Maybe you're not uber close to the money / ROI yet, but you're differentiated, have high value, etc.

Remember the L.I.F.E. acronym when optimizing: "Likelier Impact, Faster, Easier."

Step 2 — Volume + Basic Marketing Skills

Learn the basics (~50% skill score) of one marketing channel (e.g. cold outreach), and get your volume score to 55ish percent while continuing to grow your skills and hone your service offering based on actual feedback.

(One of the cool things about cold outreach is that you can use metrics like cold email response rates to help you validate what people actually care about, and use that data to hone your service offering)

Step 3 — Track & Make Micro-Adjustments

Track your metrics while holding volume at that ~55% to find your baseline conversion rates and what's resonating with the leads you're talking to.

Step 4 — Optimize

Use sales & lead gen feedback to improve your service offering and marketing effectiveness. Keep iterating and honing your service offering to get that score to 90-100%.

Step 5 — Ride the Gravy Train

Within a few months of this, many freelancers can very realistically get their scores to 90%+ service offering and 80% marketing skill in their chosen channel, at which point you're riding the gravy train. 🚂 

Given that your 90% service offering score and 80% marketing skill score exist without maintenance required, it means that now, all you have to do is pull that marketing volume lever whenever you want clients, and you'll get good results.

(It also means that your marketing will be profitable enough that you can afford to pay someone else to pull that lever if you don't want to!)

With this strong offer & client acquisition foundation, you're primed to productize & scale safely, or stay solo and shoot your rates into the stratosphere.

But it all starts with that service offering! So get going improving that score. 🙂

(And take advantage of the Double Your Rates Toolkit or Double Your Freelancing Rate if you want the shortcut.)