5 Reasons Why LinkedIn is The Best Platform to Get Better Freelance Fashion Design Clients
2023 was the year Instagram lost its sparkle. TikTok, X and stupid videos helped many designers get very frustrated, very fast. Here’s why using LinkedIn is the best place to market yourself as a freelance fashion designer.
Here’s my 5 reasons LinkedIn is great for attracting better clients - without any sleazy salesy feelings and saving you bucket loads of creative energy to focus on doing what you love. Starting to post regular content on LinkedIn will grow your confidence, save time, attract better clients and stop you feeling so lonely as a freelance fashion designer. Here’s why…
LinkedIn is a trade fair - every day…
Regardless of anything else, if you are a freelance designer that makes a living by providing a service, it’s critical to continually create opportunities for conversations. Whilst it’s great to get out to trade fairs it can take days out of your week when you consider the impact of travel, midlife exhaustion, (hello hot flushes) and juggling client work.
LinkedIn is the largest professional online network in the world and it’s in the palm of your hand, every day. Cultivating a short, daily method of building relationships online can free up more time to spend with those you love. This does not mean cold calling but simply connecting with your ideal client. When they see your request and read your profile they can then read your content showing how you can help them.
LinkedIn curates your audience accurately.
LinkedIn used to be a platform for hosting your resume, but this has evolved dramatically over the years. It’s now also a content platform for business to business relationship building with 1 billion users. Yet because of this, and your vast experience over the years, you now have a feed full of old colleagues, fellow freelancers and all sorts of random factories.
By editing out peers and connecting with your ideal client in your chosen niche, the LinkedIn algorithm will suggest to you more of the people you want to work with. This is impossible on IG since beyond reading the bio who knows who is behind those squares? IG may have more than twice the users of LinkedIn yet how many of those are real?
Verified information helps provide authenticity signals to others that you are who you say you are, so use this feature to build trust as a freelance fashion designer. Keeping LinkedIn for creating better clients and leaving other platforms for keeping in touch with old work mates and freelance friends is a wise move.
LinkedIn doesn't rely on a pretty feed.
Whilst creating a pretty IG feed can be nice, it takes up precious time that could be put to way more use. “She had the best IG feed” is not an obituary to be trying to covet, and I know from personal experience how much creative energy those little grids can drain.
If you want to add exactly the same content from LinkedIn on your IG as a sort of portfolio piece that’s fine, but copy and paste, don’t create special content for IG - it’s a waste. I have spoken to many freelance fashion designers with a huge following on Instagram, and honestly none of them generate business in the way they thought it would.
You might have posted on Instagram and LinkedIn…but were so busy trying to do both that you gave up, because you don’t really know what to say, it attracts all sorts of time wasters and it takes forever…which adds to the stress of not having the creatively satisfying clients you want to work with.
Stick to one platform (LinkedIn) and do it well; that means posting a consistent marketing message for at least 90 days whilst curating your feed and connecting with your ideal clients - consistently. Until then, you really don’t know if your marketing message is working.
LinkedIn is built to show your expertise.
Humans are fickle and grabbing their attention is hard. Believe me when I tell you, your dream client is looking for you, and if you are a freelance fashion designer offering professional services, a high end client will be looking on LinkedIn.
Your headline is the first thing that a potential client will see, so it needs to be relevant to their needs i.e. how you help them and what problem you solve for them. If that does its job, the CEO, buyer (insert your dream client) will then go on to look at the rest of your page. Having your freelance history and specifically the results you have achieved over the years is what you need to turn viewers into booking a meeting or reaching out with a DM.
If you want to command higher rates and better clients, talk about the results you achieve for your clients. It’s not bragging - it’s fact. You are insanely talented with years of experience. Remember, marketing yourself as a freelance fashion designer is all about getting potential clients to agree to a phone call, meeting or Zoom, because better clients don’t happen without a conversation.
LinkedIn replaces the need for a website.
Hear me out on this. I know you have spent weeks, maybe months on Squarespace, you are on first name terms with the support ticket guy (well maybe not quite). You’ve got a beautiful website…but it’s really an online portfolio that doesn’t speak to your clients.
You think your website is showing off your niche, but really all you are doing is talking about yourself - and honestly, the CEO of that dream brand you want to work with doesn’t care. She wants to know how you can help her business grow, save her time or save her money.
LinkedIn can hold small PDF portfolios of work, and you want to be booking a meeting to have a conversation around how you can help, not allowing a potential buyer access to your life’s work without a consultation or discovery call.
LinkedIn will allow you to add a call to action button, and if you hook that up to Calendly you have a 24 hour website working for you - for free.
LinkedIn also helps your SEO which means that periodically Google reviews member directories for new and updated public profile information to show in their search results. This indexes your LinkedIn profile and makes you searchable as a freelance fashion designer on the web.
