Networking: Hang Out with Your Clients, Not Just with Your Peers

Credit: jremick/Flickr.

As freelancers, we have many ways to interact with our peers to help us keep abreast of new ideas and emerging trends. We network with others like ourselves for moral support, for answers to business questions, and to develop strategies and skills and resources that can make us more successful.

You may belong to online discussion groups, get electronic newsletters and paper journals and magazines, or tune into regular podcasts. Perhaps there is a local group of designers, or writers, or trainers, or whatever your particular line of business may be, and you get together from time to time to share ideas and experiences.

This is an excellent practice, especially as independent freelancers do not have the natural social settings that employees of corporations do. We have to build our own social and professional connections, to assemble sources of ideas that we can draw on to enhance our own businesses.

Just don’t stop there. If all of your networking is with people like you, and little of it is with people who look like your clients, you are probably missing some great opportunities to grow your business.

Note that the “networking” I’m talking about here extends to any method of gathering more information that can help your business. That includes reading newsletters and listening to podcasts, for instance. And it includes learning how to be a better writer or designer or whatever you are, and not just to direct connections to more projects and clients.

Where Do You Hang Out?

With that definition in mind, take out a piece of paper, or open up a blank document, title it “Professional Networking,” and write down all the ways you interact with peers, directly and indirectly, to support your freelance business. Again, this includes coffee with a freelancer friend, subscribing to an e-newsletter, and going to the local association meeting.

Now, start another blank document, put a description of your target market at the top – the kinds of businesses you work with — and list all the ways you interact with them outside of actual project work. Do you go to their trade association meetings? Are you part of a LinkedIn group that attracts participants from that market? Do you subscribe to an e-newsletter targeted at those kinds of businesses?

One of the best questions you can ask your ideal client, the kind of client you want to do more business with, is “What do you read?” Find out if they subscribe to an association trade journal, or to particular e-zines. Ask them if they follow any discussion groups. Find out their favorite resources, and the web sites they find most useful.

Out of Your Comfort Zone, Into Theirs

We are all more comfortable hanging around with people who are like us. It is a lot easier to pop into a discussion with other copywriters, or other web designers, or other management coaches, than it is to get engaged in discussions with a group focused on manufacturing, or financial services, or small business strategies.

But there are many, many benefits to making the effort to “move in” with your target market, to become at home in their world:

• Get advance intelligence. If there are changes coming to your clients’ industry, if there are going to be shifts in the way they do business, you’ll learn about it much more quickly from them than you will from either your peers or from the media.
• Learn the lingo. Every target market has its own language. The more you immerse yourself in their environment, the more you will be able to talk to them in terms they want to hear.
• Build trust. The traditional networkers who just pop into a business event or discussion to look for leads annoy everyone. If you are one of the ones who stays around and shows genuine interest in helping others, in answering questions or suggesting strategies to promote their businesses, not your own, you will become “one of the family.”

Make the investment of time and effort — if necessary, shifting some of the time you put into peer networking — to spend more time in your clients’ world. Just like you, your clients like to hang around people like themselves. As you immerse yourself in their peer group, if you will, you will be perceived as one of them.

And the next time they need someone to write marketing copy, overhaul their web site, or educate their employees, are they going to pick an outsider, or someone who understands their business and speaks their language?

Photo credit: by jremick on Flickr, via the Envato photo group.