United Kingdom
Gumtree is a great place to find clients because there are many businesses posting jobs every day looking for part time and full time support with their online marketing. You will come across some great social media jobs posted on this site, but that isn’t what we are going to be focusing on here.
The fact is that businesses who are posting any job online related to marketing their business are great prospects to market your social media services too, because they have already shown that they are actively looking to spend money to market their business online.
You can use the method outlined here to get in touch with potential clients, get them involved in a discussion with you about how you can help their business, and then you can send them your proposal document, which you can easily create from the template provided here in the advanced training section.
The first thing you need to do is head over to Gumtree and browse their “jobs” section.
Click on “Jobs” then head over to the “Marketing, Advertising & PR” section and then within this category there is a subsection called “Internet Marketing & SEO”. This is where you will find the businesses who are specifically looking to hire someone to help them with their online marketing and these are the businesses we want to target.
You will see that there are lots of business owners out there that are looking for “online marketing experts”.
Some of these companies are looking for people to work in their physical office, which is impossible for you if you prefer to work from home, whilst some of them are looking to hire people to complete the work online. It’s best to target the businesses who are looking to hire someone online and not necessarily near their physical location, as this will give you a much larger number of potential businesses to work with.
However it doesn’t really matter much either way for us, because whilst there may be some jobs that you find on here that you want to apply for directly, the main way that we are going to be finding clients on Gumtree is by reaching out and getting in touch with these businesses who are looking for assistance with their online marketing and sending them your proposal with your social media marketing services.
When it comes to contacting these businesses all you do is send them a short and simple email.
Hi there,
I have just been on your listing on Gumtree and see that you are looking for assistance with your online marketing. I specialize in social media marketing and have found several ways you can increase clients to your business easily. If you want to talk please give me a call on xxx-xxx-xxx or email me back.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards
Your Name
You can send this directly to their email address if they provide one in the listing, but if not you can simply use the message contact form that Gumtree provides.
It is a good idea to keep this opening email short and sweet because this way your email will be read quickly. Business owners are busy people and therefore, will not have time to read a long email from a stranger. You can then go into your services once they want to speak to you.
When you do get a response back from a business, rather than sending them your proposal document with the services you offer right away, try and start a dialogue with them about what challenges they are facing with their business and then introduce your services and tell them how you can help them overcome these problems.
Using this method of contacting businesses on Gumtree is a great way of finding businesses who could potentially become long term clients that you can move onto a monthly retainer fee for providing ongoing services. Also, because you are likely to be the only person reaching out to these businesses offering your exact service, you don’t have the disadvantage of getting stuck in a bidding war like you sometimes will on freelance job sites, so you can generally charge much more per job!
Social Media Proposal Document
You can use your social media proposal document to help you craft the message or proposal that you will use in your initial contact with businesses and you can also use it as a sales tool to help get repeat business from each client. After you complete the initial job for them, you can send them the proposal document to help convert them into monthly clients who send you regular payments to provide ongoing social media management services for them. For more information on how to make the best use of the social media proposal document go to the Advanced Training 12 – Social Media Proposal Document. To download the document itself, click the link below.
