10 steps for promoting your translation services in a skills portfolio

Our new guest post this week comes from France!  Wilfried is a French teacher for French natives and foreign students. He has dedicated his career to literature, semiotics, communication and serious game teaching in France and in China. Since 2008, as the Deputy Director and Communications Officer of ESTRI, School of Translation and International Relations, he has specialized in quality management and (viral) marketing, specifically by providing personal branding tips to help students define their place in the job market. In 2012, he also created www.paroledescoop.com, a consulting business for editing great Web content and finding solutions for optimizing organic results on search engines. When he is not trying to detox from his geek addictions, Wilfried is on the road, abroad, with the wind of cross-cultural differences whipping at his face.

Today he’s sharing 10 tips and steps on how to promote your translation services using a skills portfolio.

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Interested in developing your business and in promoting your expertise with personal branding tips? You are probably aware of Skills Portfolio: a communication tool allowing you to publish/share samples of your work and to provide your clients with evidence of your high-quality translations. If not, it might be time to reconsider your strategy with the 10 Ps of the marketing mix.

In order to create an efficient skills portfolio and to focus on the specifics of your business, here are 10 questions you must ask yourself before you continue. The answers to these questions will help you define the relevant message. You will then be able to choose the right tool and the proper media to communicate this message.

Priorities: Which translation texts do I want to select and promote? Which ones most efficiently represent my expertise? Which ones can I select while still respecting my client’s confidentiality? Which samples are catchier?

Product: Which specifics of my translation services do I need to sell? Which services should I focus on?

Place: What is my place in the translation industry market? What are my competitors focusing on? How do they communicate their expertise? How can I make the difference by selecting my background information and my own work? What will be the specific aspect of my service, my message? What do I want my clients to think, say and do?

Promotion: Which tool will be more appropriate for communicating my references and samples of work? Depending on my goals, should I promote my translation services online or offline, in an e-portfolio or in a brochure? If online, should I publish my skills publically on my website or privately on Google Drive for instance?

Price: Will my communication strategy add a lot of value to my work? What value does my portfolio add to my work: cheap, expensive or fairly priced?

Physical evidence: What proof can I provide my client with to allow him/her to make the right choice between several providers? Will I come across as providing proficient services? Which work will provide evidence of my proficiency? Can my former clients recommend my work? Should I provide information on the machine translation tools that I master? Which labels could enhance my business communication?

People: Does my portfolio content make mention of my team and group working skills? Does it say something about my collaboration history and success in achieving my client’s goals and requirements?

Partnership: Does my portfolio include my partners? Are my partners in contact with or indirectly related to my prospective partners?

Permission marketing: Will excerpts of my portfolio be published on social media such as my professional Facebook page, my Linkedin profile, my Twitter account? Will these excerpts prompt my clients to recommend my work? Will they encourage prospective clients to ‘like’ my page, to share my content, to follow my activity, or to contact me?

Purple Cow: Are my portfolio and personal branding strategy unique?

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