Balance Client Work and Marketing Without Burning Out

It’s hard to balance client work and marketing. Yet, if you don’t make time for marketing, you’ll also struggle to get the clients you deserve. Here are some simple ways for you to make time for marketing without burning out.

Without consistent marketing, even the most talented freelancers struggle to attract clients. Marketing lets you highlight your skills, build your network and reputation, and show potential clients how you can help them meet their needs.

Why It’s Hard to Find Balance

We all like to do things that we’re already good at, because this makes us feel good. And trying to do things we don’t know much about is frustrating and stressful.

Most freelancers never have a chance to learn about marketing. Not knowing what to do makes learning how to balance client work and marketing even harder.

Desperation Shows

So many of us focus on client work—and do little or no marketing—until we become desperate. But marketing only when you need work doesn’t work.

If you’re already doing well, that’s great. Unfortunately, this can change at any time. Even successful freelancers lose or fire clients and need to replace them. But if you’re not consistently marketing your freelance business when this happens, it will be much harder to find new clients.

And if you’re a new freelancer, then it will be very hard to build a stable, successful freelance business without good marketing.

If you’re desperate for freelance work, clients and colleagues will sense this. Clients won’t want to work with you and colleagues won’t want to refer work to you

How Marketing Helps Freelancers Succeed

Sometimes freelancers think that clients will fall into our laps. That doesn’t happen.

You need to do consistent marketing to attract steady, high-paying clients. Even if you get referrals, clients will check out your LinkedIn profile and maybe your website before deciding whether to contact you.

Freelancers who do good marketing rarely if ever face famine. Instead, we have a steady stream of clients and work—a perpetual feast. And when we need more work, we know what to do to get it.

The most important reason to market your freelance business is so you can choose the steady, high-paying clients you want to work with, instead of taking whatever work comes along because you don’t know how to find the right clients.

balance marketing and client work

Balance Your Priorities

Avoid burnout and ensure that you have time for your client work and your marketing by managing your time and building the marketing habit. Here are some ways to do both of these things.

Manage Your Time

Better time management will help you balance client work and marketing, giving you more time for both. It will increase your efficiency and decrease your stress.

There are many ways to manage your time, like the Eisenhower Matrix, the Pomodoro Method, and timeboxing.

The Eisenhower matrix

The Eisenhower matrix has four parts:

Important and urgent:

These tasks are both important and urgent. Do them first.

Important and urgent tasks, like marketing your freelance business, help you achieve your goals. But they may not have immediate results.

Important but not urgent:

Spend most of your time doing important but not urgent tasks. You don’t need to work on these tasks now, but you do need to work on them soon if you want to achieve your goals.

Urgent but not important:

Minimize urgent but not important tasks. They won’t help you build a stable, successful freelance business. Urgent but not important tasks usually come from other people.

Not urgent and not important:

Tasks that are not urgent and not important are your lowest priority. Do these later or eliminate them from your To Do list.

25 Minutes of Work, 5 Minutes Off

The Pomodoro technique helps you focus on one task. It helps you:

Manage distractions
Control your time
Maintain your motivation.

For every 25 minutes of intense concentration, take 5 minutes off to do nothing.

Timeboxing

Timeboxing is similar to the Pompodoro technique but it’s more flexible because you set the amount of time for a task. You choose a fixed (but realistic) timeline for the task. Depending on the amount of work involved, the time may be minutes, hours, days, or even weeks.

The timeline includes a deadline for completing the task. Having deadlines motivates us to get things done.

Learn more about ways to manage your time
Unlock Freelance Success Now by Making Time for Marketing

Streamline Your Processes

Achieve more balance by streamlininge your client work processes. Use project management and other tools, create standardized templates, use AI appropriately, and automate certain aspects of your workflow.

Freelance medical writer Monica Nicosa, PhD, Nicosa Medical Writer LLC, identified tools used by freelancers in her 2024 Freelance Medical Communicator Tools of the Trade Survey. While the survey focuses on freelance medical communicators, most of the information is also applicable to other types of freelancers.

The top two survey choices for software that can increase your efficiency include:

Time tracking software: Toggle or Harvest
Project management software: Asana and Trello
Citation/reference management software: EndNote or Zotero.

Monica s a freelance/consultant medical writer with 27+ years of professional experience in medical communications, continuing medical education, and health technology assessment (HTA). She delivers high quality manuscripts, slides, posters, meeting reports, and more.

Learn more about tools used by freelancers
2024 Freelance Medical Communicator Tools of the Trade Survey

Commit to Marketing

Commit to spending a specific amount of time on marketing each week. Treat marketing like your client work and assign yourself deadlines for getting it done.

balance marketing and client work

If you’re launching your business or have been freelancing less than first two years, you’ll need to spend a lot of time developing your marketing tools and building your network.

Any time you’re not busy with client work, you should be marketing your business.

If you’re expanding your business or changing direction, or you’re struggling to get enough clients and work, spend at least 5-10 hours a week on marketing.

Once your freelance business is stable and successful, you only need to do maintenance marketing. Most of this will be things like:

Networking
LinkedIn activity
Responding to inquiries from clients
Updates to your marketing tools.

Build the Marketing Habit

Habits make it easier for us to do the things we need to do—like marketing your freelance business. If you build the marketing habit, then marketing can become as easy as tying your shoes.

With simple habit-building strategies like implementation intentions and using the science of your day, you can build a marketing habit that sticks.

Implementation intentions

Implementation intentions will help you build the marketing habit. Hundreds of studies have shown that implementation intentions help people stick to their goals. Here’s the formula:

I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME].

Habit stacking is another type of implementation intention. After you do something that you already do regularly (a current habit), you practice the new habit. Here’s the formula:

After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]

The science of your day

Daniel Pink, author of When the Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, says that when you practice a new habit makes a big difference. He divided the day into three parts, which he calls the science of the day: Peak, trough, and rebound. For most people, they occur in this order. Night owls tend to rebound, trough, and peak.

Our focus is best during the peak, which is the morning, especially late morning. This is a great time to work on strategic tasks like developing your marketing strategy or plan.

The afternoon is the trough, when we have less energy and alertness. Do easier tasks like searching for relevant contacts to invite to be part of your network on LinkedIn or developing your prospect list.

In late afternoon and early evening, we rebound, and are at our most creative. This is the best time for more creative marketing tasks like writing your website content or LinkedIn profile.

Learn more about building the marketing habit
The Habit that Will Make You a Freelance Success

Focus on What Works Best

Marketing can be a waste time—if you do the wrong things or do the right things in the wrong way. If you focus on what works best, then the time you spend on marketing will get results.

balance marketing and client work

What works best for most freelancers, especially freelance medical writers and editors, is based on my experience in my own freelance business, from coaching hundreds of other freelancers, and from my survey on How Freelancers Market their Services.

Focusing your marketing on what your clients need and how you can help them meet their needs works much better than focusing on yourself. And it’s more comfortable because you won’t feel like you’re bragging about yourself.

The Mighty Marketer’s free how-to guides and blog posts will give you everything you need to learn what to do to get the clients you deserve and how to do it.

Start here
10 Steps to Your Freelance Success: The Ultimate Guide

Networking

Getting clients, especially through referrals, is the top reason to network. Referrals are the easiest way to build your freelance business because clients want to work with freelancers they can trust. So when they need a freelancer, they usually ask colleagues for recommendations.

When you get a referral, the client is ready to hire a freelancer and predisposed to like you and to hire you. You can also meet clients through networking.

Having a strategic network of freelance friends helps you get more referrals. Many of us hear about opportunities that aren’t right for us that we can share with other freelancers. And some of our clients work with multiple freelancers.

There’s plenty of freelance work for all of us, and collaborating with other freelancers always beats competing with them.

Your freelance friends can also:

Support you in dealing with difficult clients and other challenges
Help you better manage your freelance businesses
Relieve the isolation of freelancing.

Learn more about networking
Networking for Freelancers: The Ultimate Guide

More clients are using LinkedIn to search for freelancers and to check us out when they hear about or meet us. You need three things to get more clients on LinkedIn:

A complete, client-focused profile
A big, relevant network
To be somewhat active.

Profile completeness and relevant keywords in the headline matter most when clients are searching for freelancers on LinkedIn.

Learn more about LinkedIn
3 Steps to Getting More Clients on LinkedIn: Your Ultimate Guide

Direct Email

When done right, direct email is an awesome way to find and get steady, high-paying clients. It lets you choose the clients you want to work with and attract them by showing you understand and can meet their needs.

Direct email is a three-step process:

Develop your prospect list
Send the direct emails
Follow up.

Learn more about direct email
The Secret Weapon that Helps 4 Freelancers Get their Ideal Clients
Direct email swipe file, with templates, examples, and tips

Maintain Balance and Avoid Burnout

Set Realistic Goals

Managing your time, building the marketing habit, and focusing on what works best in marketing a freelance business will help you avoid burnout.

Set realistic goals. And be kind to yourself if you don’t always meet your goals. If you’re incredibly busy with client work or personal stuff, it’s okay to skip marketing for a week or two.

But never give up. Adjust your goals and keep making progress. Every marketing action you take will help you build a stable, successful freelance business.

Learn to Say “No”

While it’s tempting to take every project that comes your way, to maintain balance and avoid burnout, you need to say “no” sometimes. Turn down projects that don’t align with your goals or capacity. If you want to take on the project but are very busy, try negotiating the deadline.

You Can Balance Client Work and Marketing

Balancing client work and marketing doesn’t have to be a struggle. Use the tips in this post to better manage your time, build the marketing habit, and do what works best in marketing your freelance business.

You’ll be able to deliver exceptional work to your current clients, get new clients, and build a stable, successful freelance business. And you’ll be able to do all of this while avoiding burnout.