by
Yasi ZhangFind out how freelance marketers can help your business grow. This guide will teach you how to find freelancers online, hire the best ones for your needs, and pay them fairly without breaking the bank.
The internet has made it possible for both individuals and businesses to work remotely. As a result, freelancers have become more popular than ever before. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that by 2020 there will be 75 million freelance workers in America alone!
Freelancers are a great way to manage your marketing needs without spending too much upfront cash on an employee. But what should you keep in mind when bringing on a freelancer? How do you make sure they deliver quality work? And how exactly do you pay them once their job is done?
Keep reading this post to find out everything you need about finding, working with, and paying freelance marketers (and other types of freelancers).
1. Understand the difference between solo freelancers and agencies
There are two types of service providers: solo freelancers and agencies. The difference is that solo freelancers usually provide a specific kind of work experience in a particular domain. For example, if you need videos to be edited, you can hire a freelance video editor. If you need to create blog articles, you can hire a content creator, and so forth. Agencies, on the other hand, usually have a team of specialists from various domains. As a startup founder, you will have a project manager or an account serving person from the agency side. This person will make sure all the work is done on time according to your criteria. He or she usually is your single point of contact. So you can leave everything to the agency and focus on what matters to your business.
2. Who should work with freelancers
If you have an in-house marketing manager or CMO or yourself is a marketing professional. I believe you should have a marketing strategy and marketing plan well crafted. You have your brand guideline, buyer persona, brand voice, etc. You know what should be done, how it should be done. The following question is who should do it. With limited resources, often that is the case in startups, you will need external help. And you have a small in-house marketing team to manage all the marketing activities. In this case, your team can find freelancers who have the exact skill set and industry experience you require.
I always talk about building brands is like building a house. You need the architect; you need the electrician; you need the builders and other people who have a particular skill. If you have the architect in-house (your marketing manager or your CMO), you can find freelancers to help you build the house. But you need to design, instruct, and oversees the project.
We often see that a tech startup founder wants to promote and do marketing without a holistic plan. So they don’t know how to select and work with freelancers. The results are usually not what they expected. The briefing is not clear; there is not project management, the result the freelancer delivered does not fit into other marketing activities, etc.
If you want to hire freelancers, you need to have a strategy and have a team with experience with a marketing manager who knows how to choose a suitable freelancer and guide them. Then you will have the result as you expected.
3. Who should work with marketing agencies
The biggest struggle of startups is that they do not have the resources to hire a team of marketing professionals, nor do they have the budget to employ first-tier marketers. That’s why when we see the websites, branding, social media, and other marketing activities they do, they are often less impactful or coherent than the big international brands.
Startups can consider working with marketing agencies that are for startups. It is more efficient, more professional, better results, and more cost-effective than hiring someone full-time in-house. Maybe when your startup has grown to a particular scale, you can have a CMO or a small team to make the strategy, set the plans. Then marketing agency can help you execute plans.
Traditional marketing agencies or creative agencies are focusing on doing campaigns, branding, and media buys. They charge based on an hourly rate. It is costly to work with them. But the results are not comparable if companies do it by themselves simply because marketing agencies have a team of specialists who have top-notch skills in social media, design, content creation, video editing, etc.
Agency for startups like us at Promote and Scale, we have a team of specialists and senior marketing professionals who can serve you as you’re an acting CMO. Even if you decide to hire a full-time CMO, we can get onboard your CMO and focus on execution. So you can save time and focus on growing your startup.
4. How to find freelancers who specialize in your industry or niche
If you are a startup having an in-house marketing team and looking for support in a particular domain, you can easily find freelancers worldwide. Thanks to the internet, now companies can work with freelancers from Africa to Europe to Asia. There are few platforms you can use:
Fiverr: a platform for creative designers, content creators, and video editors.
Upwork: a platform for skilled professionals from all domains. You can find consultants, SEO specialists, translators, etc.
99designs: logo, website, and graphic design.
You can ask around if someone has worked with a freelancer before and they would recommend. That way, your risks of hiring someone who cannot deliver are reduced. Trust me, and I have worked with tons of freelancers in the past; some people promise you a lot and cannot provide. It is a situation you want to avoid to be in.
If you find someone on the platforms, you can read the reviews, tell them about your tasks and ask for their opinions. I like to choose someone who can give me valid and insightful suggestions based on what needs to be done. That way, I can already gauge how experienced they are.
Many design works are subjective to personal preference; a programmer’s aesthetic view is not the same as a marketing professional’s. Assume a tech founder designs a logo with a freelancer; what is good for the tech founder might not be good enough for a CMO that he or she hires. Experienced marketing professionals always see the design from your target audience’s point of view, then combine it with your company brand proposition; they can better evaluate what design is the best to bring out your company’s positioning and uniqueness. Unfortunately, many startup founders are not aware of that. They hire website designers to design the website without having the marketing and brand strategy in mind. They hire logo designers without knowing the brand proposition. Overall, the designs are not consistent, and it damages the brand identity.
Working with a marketing agency that mainly serves tech startups is the best choice for tech startup founders. They bring the expertise to consult you, and they also provide the specialists to deliver the design, copy, content, etc. You might pay less for the service package than you would have paid for individual freelancers.
5. How to work with freelancers
From my own experience, the most important thing is the briefing. If you know what you want and provide all necessary information and guidance to the freelancer, a good freelancer will deliver what you want. If you don’t have a comprehensive briefing, no clear instructions of what should be done, how the result will be like, the freelancer will not be able to craft something in your mind. The outcome will not be what you expected. You might think it is the freelancer’s fault, but it could also be that you did not give him or her a good briefing. They do not work for your company full-time, and they do not know what you need; what they know is what you told them.
The most crucial document is the briefing. Tell them precisely what result you are expecting. You can give them some examples that you find online. Tell them the objective of the work, why you need it.
The second most important is to keep the communication going. Getting drafts from them, give them comments and feedback, so that they can revise and improve. You don’t want to hire someone who disappears for few weeks and comes back with an ‘end product,’ which is not what you wanted. Otherwise, you have to redo everything.
Lastly, give the creators, designers, and freelancers room to provide their ideas. If you hire a logo designer, especially an experienced and good logo designer, you need to leverage on this or her expertise. There is no need to pinpoint every single detail of how they SHOULD design your logo. Give them the freedom within the briefing guideline, you might be surprised at what you will get. You hire them because of their expertise, not because of their hands.
6. How to pay freelancers
If you use freelancer platforms, there is integrated contracts and payment system. You have to pay additional fees to the platform, but it saves you time drafting service agreements and arranging payments. If you hire freelancers off the platform, make sure that you have a service contract and payment schedule in place. This is to avoid future disputes when you are not happy with the work done or the person can not even deliver.
You can use Paypal or Stripe to make the payment and receive an invoice. Some freelancers use an invoicing system, and you will receive an official invoice and payment record. If someone is asking 100% payment upfront and you never worked with this person, be aware that it is not a common practice. Usually, the client pays a certain amount upfront to get the work started, then pay the rest when it is finished. It is up to you and your freelancer to agree on how the payment schedule is.
Recommendation
After working with tons of agencies and freelancers, I highly recommend startups to engage a marketing agency that can act as your CMO and execute all marketing activities. This way, you save resources and build your brand faster. Even when you have a small in-house team, you can outsource time-consuming activities and focus on growing your business. At Promote and Scale, we help tech startups and e-commerce businesses to promote and scale. Book a free 30 minutes consultation call with us to learn more.
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We are Promote and Scale, an agency specialized in digital marketing and lead generation for early-stage start-ups.
It is our mission to help you stop wasting your time and money on ineffective and inconsistent marketing activities. It is our vision to offer you comprehensive, high-quality, and efficient marketing services, so you can focus on what really matters — building your product, business development, and acquiring new customers.