How Freelancers Find BIG Clients on LinkedIn

in this video I'm going to show you how you can find clients on LinkedIn using the front door the back door and the side door which requires a secret knock and a secret handshake now in this video I'm going to be showing you some really valuable things and it's going to be on the house it's going to be free and so I propose a trade how about I do that for you and in return all I ask is that you like this video and you subscribe to our Channel I promise you you will not regret

it and it's fair all right so three ways to use LinkedIn we're going to start with what I call the front door now whether you're looking for full-time work or you're a freelancer I find that most motion designers use LinkedIn in an inefficient way they're using it like any other social media platform where you post content and you hope that people engage with that content and maybe potential clients see it and then they think oh this artist is great I'm going to hire them for my next project I call that an inbound sales approach and

it's the same thing that a fisherman does putting a worm on a hook and casting it out into the sea and hoping to get a bite and while that can work it really works best if your work is already awesome right but if you're starting out if you're looking for that first full-time job that's not a very efficient strategy so I'm going to teach you the outbound strategy where you are actually going to go out and you are going to find clients to work for so we'll start with the first tactic which is going through

the front door and just using the job search functionality inside of LinkedIn so here's how this works you're going to go up to the LinkedIn search bar and you're going to type in a search term let's say motion designer Now by default LinkedIn is going to show you people who are motion designers this is not actually what you want at this point you're looking for jobs so we're going to come up and click on jobs now because I'm in the United States LinkedIn has automatically applied this geography filter to it but you can see that

there are 2471 results for jobs that contain the term motion designer or some combination of those words in the US now if you've ever looked for a job chances are you've already done this part before this is actually not that useful by default you need to narrow the results a little bit to get anything useful out of this tactic so now we can go to all filters we can narrow this down a little bit so right now it's showing me jobs that are posted basically at any time and the problem with this is that some

of these jobs may have been posted 6 months ago and no one bothered to take them down let's look for jobs posted in the past week and then show those results now we have 722 results in the United States for motion designer jobs now it's obvious why this is useful especially if you're looking for a full-time job but what if you're a freelancer well the way I like to look at it is if a company is looking for a full-time motion designer chances are they also need freelance help from time to time and so this

tells you that that is a company that is very likely going to hire Freelancers and so you should reach out to them if that's what you do what I always like to point out here is just the variety of companies that hire motion designers so there are things that are really obvious like ogl is a big Ad Agency it's very obvious why they would hire a motion designer the New Orleans Pelicans they are an NBA team and so it's also obvious why they would hire a motion designer but who the heck is aor and why

is akor hiring a motion designer I actually don't know and I'm kind of curious so let's find out this is aunor's website and I've looked through it and honestly I couldn't tell you what they do uh something to do with technology but hey that's the world we're living in every company now has to make content in some form and that's going to be video content it's going to be animated content it's going to be still design content and motion designers happen to be the Swiss army knife that can kind of move between all three of

those worlds relatively seamlessly and so even a company like ainor is hiring a full-time motion designer and because you now know that this company exists and that they hire motion designers if you're a freelancer that's also now a target for you to reach out to these are just the basic filters in a minute I'm going to show you how you can access some really Advanced filters in LinkedIn but even this level of filtering is really really useful let's say that you live in London you can filter for jobs that were posted in the past week

just in London and you can see there's 59 results here now currently we're using the search term motion designer but you can play around with other Search terms too and I find that using different Search terms is really helpful because most people are lazy and so if they are a motion designer looking for a motion design job they're going to go on LinkedIn and search for motion design but what if you search for After Effects what if you search for video What If you search for animation and you just do a little more digging you're

working harder than most people you'll have better results so if I change the keyword to After Effects but we're still looking in London at jobs that were posted in the last week now there's 349 results what about in Florida in my neck of the woods 550 results just in Florida and you see by changing that search term I get a lot of different types of jobs that pop up multimedia designer now I don't think most people come to school emotion saying I want to be a multimedia designer but you have to learn to accept the

language that your clients are using and just roll with it so Legacy companies HR departments they're not as hip to the motion design world as we are and so they may still use terms like multimedia designer when really what they mean is someone who can do a little bit of video editing and who can make animated content for social media and other channels what if we change the search term to Cinema 4D and just look everywhere in the United States there's 103 results and you see some really interesting opportunities like Target you know this huge

box store and they are hiring an associate producer for Motion Graphics depending on what stage of your career you're in that might be a really appealing role those big corporate jobs tend to be a little bit cushier in terms of work life balance they tend to have great benefits and good salaries and so if I was looking for a full-time job I'd probably apply to this now you may have noticed there's a bunch of other filters up here but generally I think it's fine to just stay with one level of filters when you're getting a

100 results or a few hundred results if you're finding that you're getting tens of thousand of results then play around with those filters okay so that was the front door that's the obvious way to use LinkedIn to find potential jobs or potential clients now let's talk about a sneak gear way what I call the back door so we are back on the homepage and now I'm going to type in freelance motion designer and for this search I actually am looking for people so there are 53,000 results on LinkedIn for people that have freelance motion designer

in their LinkedIn profile somewhere that's a and that doesn't even factor in that tons of Freelancers maybe most Freelancers don't actually call themselves freelance motion designer they may just say motion designer or animator or designer animator or something like that now why are we looking at people instead of jobs well let's try this let's go to locations and I'm going to once again put in Florida where I live and show the results for motion designers that live in Florida so here's a bunch of Floridian motion designers and I know cuz I've done this search before

that I'm very likely going to find a bunch of Ringling graduates which is pretty standard when you look for motion design in Florida so I'm looking for names that I don't recognize and here's an artist who's in Orlando emelo Lopez so let's check out Emilio's profile so Emilio's portfolio is right here made it very easy to find thank you Emilio very nice template I like this and I see a lot of work on here for companies I don't recognize like what is speechly what is Abaco systems I don't know but I do know that they

hire motion designers here is a video for Cisco Systems and Cisco is a mass massive company so it's not surprising that they would hire motion designers I'm seeing u.com I'm seeing wigwag I don't know what any of these companies are but I know that alilio has done work for them and if amilio has done work for them maybe I can do work for them here's another artist I'm unfamiliar with Kristen Molina in Miami so let's check out her profile and right here at the top I can see that she's a freelance animator for mdsx and

I don't know what that is so let's Google that mdsx creative ooh this looks cool this looks like some sort of agency that I didn't know existed that is in Florida and here we go mdsx is an experiential design agency based in Orlando Florida this is excellent I live an hour and a half from Orlando Florida it'd be very easy for me to like take a day trip and go visit them if I was thinking of trying to approach them for work and that's cool I love meeting artists in Florida so this is great I

didn't know they existed and the point I'm trying to make with this back door approach is I didn't find them by looking for motion design jobs I found them by looking for motion designers and seeing who they work with so it's kind of this roundabout way of finding companies that hire motion designers is to not look for companies but to look for motion designers and then do a little bit of Google stocking a little bit of LinkedIn stocking and you're going to build up a much bigger and broader lead list doing it this way all

right so we've looked at two ways of using LinkedIn to find potential clients now I'm going to show you the Third Way and this is a really powerful way to use LinkedIn unfortunately you do have to pay for something so if you use LinkedIn you may have noticed this little button up here sales naab this is referring to sales Navigator which is linkedin's paid product and this is what the interface looks like sales Navigator is a sales tool now you may not like the word sales but if you're a freelancer and you're looking for clients

I got some bad news for you you're doing sales and if you're looking for a full-time gig and so you're reaching out to companies to see if they're hiring guess what you're also doing sales and so sales Navigator is this pretty amazing platform that has all of these tools and really really advanced search features that make it much easier and faster to use than the vanilla LinkedIn search so let me show you what I mean here I'm going to search for motion designer now the first thing I want you to notice is that I'm getting

500,000 results significantly more than I was getting with the vanilla search in LinkedIn and that's because sales Navigator doesn't limit you to searching one geography at a time you can search the entire global population of people who use LinkedIn so this is a list of basically every motion designer on LinkedIn now what if I go to company head count okay so I'm looking for motion designers who work at companies with 11 to 50 employees now what's magical about 11 to 50 employees well you can play around with this but if a company is really small

like less than 10 people that's a really small startup and they are less likely in my experience anyway to be consistently hiring Freel Freelancers now if they have 50 to 100 or even more employees they probably are hiring Freelancers but those companies tend to be a little more difficult to get into initially they tend to have more bureaucracy they have HR departments and so it just takes a little bit longer to actually get your foot in the door but companies that are between 11 and 50 that's a sweet spot they generally have enough revenue and

they're also going to be busy enough and have some management where they can hire Freelancers and do so consistently and so now we've narrowed down the results to 9 9 1,000 results so now let's put on our Sherlock Holmes hat and I really wish I'd bought one for this video we now have a list of motion designers who are working at Studios or companies that are a good Target size for us but what are some other clues that we could think of that would help us know that those companies are likely to hire freelance motion

designers well if that company has only been around for say a year or two then you can assume that it's maybe a little bit less stable a little bit less mature of a company than one that's been around for longer so why don't we eliminate companies that haven't been around for at least 2 years come on get out of here and there's not a great way of doing that with sales Navigator search at the moment however there's kind of a proxy for that which is how long has the person that you're looking at actually been

at that company so why don't we narrow our search for motion designers who are at a company of this size and who have been there for at least 2 years the way you do that is to scroll down to see all filters and then in the roll section go to years and current company and say 3 to 5 years and we can also add 6 to 10 years and why not also add more than 10 years great we still have 30,000 results and at this point it probably makes sense to narrow down the geography so

why don't we just say United States if we're a freelancer we're probably looking for remote cool so now we have 7500 results hopefully now you're starting to see how powerful this is we have 7,500 motion designers working at companies with between 11 and 50 employees and they've been there for at least two years and so what if we decide that we would really like to get in with more Ad Agency work because ad agencies tend to book Freelancers for longer term projects they tend to give a little bit more creative control at least in my

experience to freelance motion designers and it's a little bit easier to get bigger budgets and do project rates with an ad agency versus a motion design studio so we can come down to personal and select industry and we could look for advertising so we've got advertising Services media production there's a lot of different types of industries that you could filter for I'm going to pick advertising Services include those so now we're down to about a thousand results so we're getting somewhere but let's say that you're just starting out and you know that ad agencies in

cities like San Francisco and New York and Chicago and Boston those are kind of the big dogs at least in the United States but that also Al means they're going to be a little bit trickier to get into right and so it might be easier initially to go after agencies in smaller markets so why don't we exclude some of the bigger markets so we can go to geography and we can exclude some of those bigger markets so I'm going to just say New York City exclude and then we'll do San Francisco yeah Bay Area exclude

we could also exclude Chicago and Boston and down here I see a motion designer who lives in Los Angeles and so I'm going to exclude that too because that's another Major Market all right so we've been pretty surgical with this search let's take a look and see what the results are so the first result is for admed Incorporated an integrated agency that designs and delivers modern training tools for pharmaceutical biotech blah blah blah okay so this is an agency that specializes in sort of the medical world biotech biotech has big budgets they have lots of

money and so if you can get in with one of these agencies this is a great bread and butter type of client I've never heard of this company but but now I would definitely reach out to them what about cool fire media in Denver so let's hover over this a Content creation Studio producing for Brands as well as broadcast and digital channels that sounds right up the alley of any sort of generalist motion designer you've got Digital Imaging group in Houston Texas you've got obrien advertising in Virginia Beach so now you have a list of

potential clients that is way more specific than what most motion designers are actually going to be able to generate and let me show you one more thing you can do let's say we're interested in this ad Med Incorporated company so I'm going to go ahead and click on that now this is why it's important that I filter by the number of employees if this was a massive Ad Agency that had 2,000 employees it would be pretty difficult for me to know exactly which person to reach out to to let them know that I'm a freelancer

it's not impossible and as you get more experience you'll learn how to do that we talk about it in the client code the class at school motion that dives really deep into all these techniques but it's much easier to start with smaller companies because it's a lot easier to tell who the decision makers are and what's great about sales Navigator is you can see all of the employees with one click but it also attempts to tell you who the decision makers are so let's click that so here is the CEO of admed Joan and I

could do my homework and go to her profile and try to decide if I think she's the right person to reach out to in this case I would assume not because if this is a medically oriented company I wouldn't assume that their CEO actually comes from the advertising World maybe she does but she more likely is going to have some background in the biotech world and so I think it's actually going to be better to look for someone with a marketing title or or just a producer sort of video title so let's go back and

look at all employees and now we can just kind of go down and read through these job titles and see if we find anyone that feels like the right person to reach out to so here's Wilson who's the motion designer on staff here is a talent acquisition specialist which that might be the title they use for you know the person finding artist to work with here's a senior project manager and a project manager and in a lot of companies project manager means a similar thing as producer so I'd probably do my research on these two

people and decide if maybe I should reach out to them ah here we go multimedia producer Bernardo you and I we're going to be buddies Bernardo is almost certainly the right person for me to reach out to and at the very least least I would reach out he would tell me who at the company I should actually be talking to but you saw how quickly I was able to hone in on a really specific type of company and not only find the company but find the key decision maker or decision makers there and so then

the next step would be do my homework on them get some contact info Reach Out start building that relationship and eventually getting booked and I teach that entire process in excruciating detail in the client code at school of motion this video is just scratching the surface in that class I teach you not only how to identify companies like this but how to identify the stakeholders at them how to do your homework find out how to build rapport really quickly with people how to get contact information how to verify that information how to write the perfect

cold email how to follow up how to use tools and automation to make your life easier and a lot more so if you're interested check that out the Link's in the description and either way I hope that this video gave you a lot to think about maybe some new tricks to try and Linkedin in and if you're on the fence about sales Navigator I would highly recommend paying for one month and just trying it even if you just used it every day for a month and built up a giant leads list it's so worth it

especially if you're a freelancer but maybe even more so if you're looking for full-time because most people looking for full-time jobs are not using this tool and you have a huge advantage in identifying companies that maybe aren't as good at getting their name out there in front of motion designers you could be one of the only motion designers reaching out directly to a stakehold saying hey I'm available for work so that's it for this video thank you so much please like the video please subscribe I explained the deal earlier and I trust that you'll honor

our agreement and that's it I'll see you in the next one d