Solopreneur Marketing: Smart Tips for Success

Importance of effective marketing for solopreneurs

What exactly is a solopreneur? A portmanteau of “solo entrepreneur,” a solopreneur is a one-person innovative business operation.

It overlaps with the term “freelancer,” but while the freelancer usually offers their services working as a temporary employee for a company, the solopreneur has a stronger business structure and is responsible for it’s every aspect, including pricing, invoices, accounting, and marketing. Their clients can be businesses of all sizes or consumers.

While most solopreneurs work alone, some hire helpers for some part of their job, like customer scheduling or paperwork. That’s the main difference between solopreneurs and entrepreneurs: the latter will hire people as soon as possible to scale the business, while the former will try to postpone hiring forever, if possible.

As with any business, the solopreneur needs clients to keep operating. With fewer resources, the solopreneur must be smart in its marketing tactics to find the right customers.

Solopreneurs are the most underserved — and the most powerful — segment of the modern economy. Solopreneurs and freelancers are building real value every day, but they’re forced to hack together tools built for either consumers or big companies.

A big company can have some slack in its marketing efforts. Strategies like “spray and pray” or “true multichannel” are great with a big budget, but aren’t possible for solopreneurs.

A small or one-person team must always aim for a high return on investment (ROI) with a small investment, so it’s best to know what business strategies to invest in from the beginning.

Challenges faced by solopreneurs

Every solopreneur is unique, but there are three challenges that we all (and most small business owners) face when dealing with marketing strategies:

Solopreneurs have limited resources

“If only I had the marketing budget of a big brand business!” Oh, the dream! Actually, a big marketing budget requires a large team to manage. Anyway, most solopreneurs don’t have the budget to invest big in advertising, or the capacity to create very complex campaigns. That means resources will always be limited. That’s a fact that will need to be accounted for when creating a solopreneur marketing strategy.

Solopreneurs have time constraints

The ultimate resource is time. A small business with a team of three or five can spare some downtime to keep up with social media, content creation, or ad optimization. But a solopreneur can’t help a client while updating the website! A good marketing strategy will consider batching most of the online work in high-focused time slots and prioritize essential communications.

Solopreneurs need many skills

A jack of all trades, the solopreneur usually wears many hats, from accounting to marketing to invoicing clients. To run a business solo requires divergent skills (and a good toolset to manage it all).

As solopreneurs need to tackle the marketing activities by themselves, they won’t be able to use certain strategies that need more niche expertise. For example, producing heavily edited videos or creating animation won’t appear on marketing for solopreneurs lists.

8 best marketing tips for solopreneurs

A perfect solopreneur marketing strategy doesn’t copy what big businesses are doing. Instead, it focuses on solopreneurs’ strong edges. Solopreneurs are:

• Agile: solopreneurs don’t need other people’s approval to create, invest, and respond. 
• Flexible: it’s easy to try many small experiments before committing. Also, changing course is quick.
• Personal: a charismatic solopreneur will captivate and engage the audience more authentically than a business ambassador, for example. 

Here are eight strategies that leverage these advantages to get your business on the right track.

Define your unique value proposition

To stand out as a small business, the most important thing is to define your unique value proposition. That is, to answer “why YOU?” What is the most unique value you can bring to your client? This will be the first thing people will read on your website and everywhere else, that’s what is at the core of your personal brand.

Be very specific. Find the ways you are uniquely positioned to offer the most benefit to your customers. This will be the core of your marketing strategy: your whole content will be created around this single concept.

Your focus can be a single type of customer you can help the most, a single problem you’re suited to tackle, or a combination of both. For example, “accounting consultant” is a broad subject, but “accounting consultant to BnB owners with revenue up to $700K” will find the right customers.

Know your audience and their media

This is derived from your unique value proposition. The better you know your ideal client, the better you will be positioned to create great content that adds value to your business and audience.

Think about the most common challenges of your target audience, their schedule, and preferred channels. Sometimes the best strategy will be Instagram content, sometimes you can forgo social media altogether and focus on specific business trade forums, or invest in SEO for your website.

Every online channel will add some work: posting, replying, and keeping up. That’s why it’s better to start with fewer channels where you can engage (but there’s no problem in first trying many channels to find your best ROI).

Show your expertise

Bringing a lead to your website, newsletter or social media channel is only half of the work. To build trust and convert, the best strategy is to show your personal expertise.

Don’t be afraid to write a sales page that explains why you’re the best available option. A nice tip is to include testimonials from former clients and previous experiences. The expertise you show will bring the confidence your customer needs to click the “buy” button.

Create high-quality content

High-quality content is key. To show your experience, half-baked content will not cut through the noise.

Take your time to create high-quality content in any medium you prefer. It can be text, audio, or video. It can be distributed via newsletter, blog posts, podcasts, YouTube channels, or wherever your target audience hangs out.

Helpful content from an expert (you!) will be more valuable than a generic funny trend.

A great piece of content marketing is usually a generator: it can start as your preferred medium (some solopreneurs like to write, while others are better at speaking directly on video). Then it can be derived to other formats, like shorter posts for social media.

Good content is also evergreen: business concepts, tutorials, and explanations that will remain useful and relevant for years as posts on the website, not just hot takes about the latest trends. For solopreneurs, this is also key, since evergreen content can be updated and reused (linked again) many times.

Build an email list

It’s easier to get discovered on a social media channel. But all of the prominent social media websites restrict the reach of your posts using algorithms, so your content doesn’t get to your followers. You also may need to keep up with the best trends, keywords, and strategies that change every time!

That’s why you should start building your email list early. With an email list, you have more control of your offer to your audience, can send more high-value propositions, and, more importantly, keep their emails.

In short: you control your email marketing list. The audience in an external social media site is the audience you’re not guaranteed to reach or be able to engage. To start, Selzy has your back with the best tips on how to build an email list.

Batch and schedule content

Since time is a solopreneur’s most restricted asset, be smart with your content. Allocate time weekly or monthly to create all the content you need for your business: key texts, social media posts, everything. For email campaign ideas, it’s always good to check an email marketing calendar of important holidays and dates.

After you’re done, schedule every post for the website, social media, and newsletter for a week or month, and let the calendar work for you. Just remember to check comments and replies periodically to engage with your audience.

Automate processes

The number one tip for entrepreneurs will always be “delegate.” That won’t work for solopreneurs or small business owners, though. But what if I told you there’s a way to delegate many business functions by automating?

There are automatic tools to manage your invoices, remind your customers to pay, schedule social media or blog posts, and more. For example, the new trend is AI email assistants which can write, summarize, and reply to emails for you to streamline your process.

Seek help

Just because you are a solopreneur doesn’t mean you need to do everything by yourself. Sometimes you lack “marketing” on your expertise shelf.

Many times, it’s less time-consuming (and brings better ROI) to hire someone to do your marketing strategy, write your content, or handle your newsletter delivery. Many businesses work with others to cover areas outside of their expertise. It’s better for everyone!

Final thoughts: Streamline everything

It’s hard to handle solopreneur marketing between all the real work, so let’s recap the smartest strategies:

• Define your unique value proposition and create your content from this core idea. 
• Study your audience and focus your time on the channels they read. 
• Don’t be afraid to show your personal expertise with insider tips and tricks. 
• Create high-quality content, it will always rise to the top and be worth its salt in the long run. 
• Start building your email marketing list early to have the audience you can reach. 
• Schedule content to free your time to work. 
• Automate everything that isn’t your core proposition. 
• Seek help and work with other solopreneurs or small businesses in areas you don’t have expertise in. 

Being a solopreneur is a choice of freedom to work as you please. These tips intend to leash your marketing obligations, so they don’t cut too much of your time.