When you’re marketing you need to know who you’re marketing to.

In a perfect world it would be to a group composed of your ideal clients only.

In reality, you’ll be marketing to groups with varying amounts of your ideal clients. Some will have a lot, some will have only little, and some will have none of your ideal clients.

One tactic I see freelancers do is to market to the existing groups they belong in. So if you’re a developer you broadcast your marketing messages to other developers. You tweet to your followers who are developers. You write blog posts on development topics.

This approach has problems though, which you can probably spot by now.

In that group of developers, how many are your ideal clients? 5%? 1%? 0%?

Unless you’re looking to pick up subcontractor work or overflow work, those developers are not going to really respond to your marketing messages. Sure you might get retweets or comments, but look at your bottom line. How many new clients and sales did you make?

It would be much better if you broadcast your message to groups your ideal clients are already in.

If you work with startups, then find where groups of startups collect. If you work with local businesses only, find where they hang out.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming the communities you belong to are also where your clients are. There might be some crossover, but it’s a long shot.

Eric Davis

P.S. You can use your communities to bootstrap your marketing. They can give you a bit of a push to get your messages to your ideal clients. But always remember to create your marketing so it’s valuable for your ideal clients.