Hiring a Marketing Freelancer
Today, anyone hiring marketers needs to think seriously about the trade-offs between freelancers, full-time hires and agencies.
Below, we rounded up some insights on why hiring a freelance marketer is usually the best route for hiring the best marketing talent ASAP.
The pros of freelancers
Freelancers are having a moment right now. Here are some of the key benefits that set them apart from other types of talent.
They can start promptly.
A freelance marketer is great for an urgent project. They don’t have to give notice with their current employer; they’re available promptly. At MarketerHire, once a client requests a marketer, it can take as little as three days for a freelancer to start work.
In MarketerHire’s recent report, 94% of respondents agreed that freelancers shorten the time it takes to hire.
They can hit the ground running.
Many freelance marketers — especially the vetted ones in the MarketerHire community — know their preferred channels inside and out, from multiple clients’ perspectives.
They can be treated more as expert collaborators than green employees, and they rarely need extensive onboarding.
In fact, they may have more recent, relevant experience with certain marketing initiatives than their clients do. A first for a client isn’t necessarily a first for a freelance marketer — freelancers thrive on jobs repeated across organizations but not necessarily within them.
For instance: When Whole30 launched its DTC salad dressings in January 2021, the company had never launched an e-commerce shop before — but they worked with a freelancer who had.
“We definitely blew our forecast sales away,” Whole30 co-founder and CEO Melissa Urban told MarketerHire.
They’ve seen your tech stack before — especially if you’re a DTC brand.
At least on a macro level, direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands are “all doing the same thing,” Toy noted.
Many rely on the same marketing channels and software. “If you took 10 DTC companies, I can tell you within 90% accuracy what technology they use,” Toy said. “Most of them use Klaviyo, for example.”
“If you took 10 DTC companies, I can tell you within 90% accuracy what technology they use.”
Freelance marketers with DTC backgrounds have the right skillset for your tech stack — and frankly, they might know it better than you.
They’re agile hires.
You can work with freelancers for as long (or short) as you need them. "It could be six months or six weeks," Toy said.
No one knows what their business will need in the future — and working with freelancers, you don’t need to. Employers don’t have to state an endpoint, or make a long-term commitment, to start a contract.
“Freelancers have given me a tremendous amount of flexibility to move things quickly in the event something is not working,” Forbes’ VP of Corporate Development Taha Ahmed told MarketerHire.
And ending a freelance engagement isn’t emotionally fraught the way letting a full-time employee go is; it’s expected.
They have stellar resumes.
Companies can often afford top talent on a freelance basis. Think marketers who have made major, measurable impact with recent, high-caliber clients — and can use the latest martech to boot.
“A much better marketer will freelance for you than will work for you at 99% of companies,” Toy said.
What does “better” mean, exactly? Toy usually assesses marketers based on…
Things change fast in digital marketing, so it doesn’t always make sense to focus on years of experience as a quality indicator.
They’re a flexible expense.
Speaking of affording things — freelancers are often the most affordable of the three types of marketing talent, even if their hourly rate sounds high.
They can work full-time, part-time, or hourly — and when you don’t have essential work for them, you can cut their hours (or let them go entirely).
In other words, you only pay for the freelance work you need.
The cons of freelancers
In MarketerHire’s recent report, 83% of respondents who had hired freelancers were initially hesitant to do it (though 97% of them said it paid off). Why? Here are some potential drawbacks to freelance hires.
They can be tough to integrate into existing systems.
In “Building the On-Demand Workforce,” researchers noted that C-suite executives saw major potential in hiring contractors through digital freelancing platforms — but middle managers saw “the looming challenges of implementation.”
Especially in large, complex bureaucracies that haven’t historically worked with freelancers, unlocking the power of freelancers can take some work up front. It might mean retooling existing workflows, or breaking down amorphous business objectives into clearly-defined projects.
Check out MarketerHire’s freelancer onboarding workflow here.
Freelance engagements can also require an HR reboot; typically, human resources designs onboarding and training protocols with full-time hires in mind, the Harvard and BCG researchers noted.
They can quit suddenly.
You’re not the only one who can end your collaboration with a freelance marketer. They can leave, too, for higher-paying work, personal reasons, or for no reason at all.
This can be inconvenient — though it’s worth noting that full-time employees, too, can depart at inconvenient times.
At MarketerHire, “we don’t hide from the fact that things change,” Toy said. “We embrace resourcing being something that is agile and lean… That’s why we’ll match [clients] so fast.”
“We embrace resourcing being something that is agile and lean… That’s why we’ll match [clients] so fast.”
If you’re in the middle of a recruiting push and you...
…then hiring expert freelancers might be a fit for you.
MarketerHire can help, whether you need a content marketing specialist, a social media marketer, an Amazon marketer — or another role entirely.
NB: This article was originally published on MarketerHire.
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