When it comes to marketing for your brand, it is tempting to employ an entire full-time team to handle every aspect of your brand and how it is presented to the world. However, sometimes that isn’t really realistic and, more importantly, it may not be the best option for your company.
Recently, the term outsourcing has become somewhat of a dirty word, but truthfully it can help provide your brand with the best talent to manage certain parts of your marketing strategy. It can be tough to relinquish some control to staff that you don’t work with directly, but the right freelancer can be a huge asset and over time, you will begin to develop working relationships with these people just as you do with your own staff.
Deciding what to outsource and trust your freelancers with can be a difficult decision, but there are a number of areas you can open up to this type of work with minimal potential conflicts. These areas will also benefit from the work of a freelancer who may be more specialized than someone on your staff.
Content Production
In our experience here at Power Digital, we have found that there are a lot of great freelance copywriters available for hire. These individuals typically have a level of expertise across a variety of different topics and marketing areas, which make them a versatile resource for your brand.
While some may specialize in writing blog posts, others may thrive writing email content, and still others may be best at creating content for landing pages. In reality, it is rare to find a single person who is able to create great content across a variety of industries and finding that person could come with a steep price tag. For most brands, spending that money to find someone just is not in the budget.
Related: How to Integrate Your Content Team With Your Entire Marketing Team
You may also want to consider the number of hours you need someone to be working on creating this type of content. When you really think about it, you will likely come to realize that content production alone is not a full-time role at your company and that’s fine. If you were to hire a full-time writer, you would likely have to fill their time with other more menial tasks.
However, some writers aren’t interested in other types of work and forcing them to do those things may decrease their overall job satisfaction or productivity. With freelancers, you only pay them for completing the exact amount of work you need done, nothing more and nothing less. They get to focus solely on writing and you get amazing content for your brand. It’s a win-win situation.
Managing Paid Advertisements
Like content production, managing paid advertisements seems like it could be an easy thing to bring in-house. However, finding a single person who is extremely familiar with all the requirements and oddities of every network is rare, resulting in an expensive search process. Instead, you can use your budget to hire a team of freelancers who each specialize in a different network allowing you to have the best talent assigned to each project.
Facebook alone has a robust Ads Manager platform, which has many complexities that allow you to create campaigns while monitoring a number of metrics, including brand awareness, reach, engagement, traffic, and conversions. To see the full benefit and strength of this tool requires the user to have in depth knowledge on both the platform, Facebook, and the metrics themselves. Twitter, on the other hand, has a completely different ad management system that requires you to understand a separate platform and the metrics that matter there.
Hiring a freelancer to handle the various networks will save you time and energy in many ways. First, he or she will have a frame of reference to know when a metric looks good or when it doesn’t because he or she is used to working within that specific network. They will also have the experience to know what types of content will perform better to begin with, rather than guessing.
Technical & On-Page SEO
Outsourcing SEO activities is pretty common for many marketing teams. This is due to the fact that finding a person with the technical knowledge and skills required to significantly impact your brand’s performance is extremely difficult. It is also not a great fit to have SEO in-house because the hours required wouldn’t suffice a full-time position. However, you’ll need to be careful when hiring a freelancer to handle this aspect of your marketing. It is a technical position so you will want to conduct a thorough application and interview process as you would with any in-house position.
Related: The 4 People You Want On Your SEO Dream Team
This freelancer will be optimizing all of your on-site content and pages for search engine crawlers, which will directly impact your brand’s performance in search results. As a result, you must be sure that the person you hire to handle this is competent, trustworthy, and reliable as you will be giving him access to your site’s backend in order to audit your current SEO before developing your strategy further.
SEO Link Building
On the surface, link building for SEO seems like an easy-to-accomplish goal, but there is more to it than you may think. Once again, this aspect of marketing requires a very specific skill set in addition to having an extensive network of connections. Many brands excel when it comes to working with influencers and other public relations matters, but very few have the necessary skills and connections to execute a successful SEO link building campaign. This is where a freelancer can help.
An integral part of succeeding as a freelancer in general is networking and building connections so many individuals in that line of business will have a wide variety of contacts they can leverage to help your brand. By syndicating your content and building links, your site will climb in search rankings and your reach will increase significantly.
Working With Freelancers
Understanding where you can outsource and hire freelancers is only half the battle though. You’ll need to dig deep and consider what skills you are looking for when making hiring decisions. It’s important to treat freelancers like any other full-time candidate during the interview process. You want to have just as deep of an understanding of that person, their background, and how they can help your company.
Once you hire a freelancer, treat them as an extension of your company. Foster the relationship and ensure you’re keeping them happy, especially if you are pleased with the work they are completing. Like any other employee, keeping a freelancer engaged will increase their productivity for you and encourage them to stick around. If, however, the project they were hired to work on is not continuous, be sure to stay in touch with them after they are finished. Building a network of reliable freelancers can be enormously beneficial to your team as it will ensure that you have backup in unexpected situations like an employee quitting, an increase in workload for your team, or a shift in goals.
Related: 4 Tips for Getting the Most Out of Your Freelance Writers
And lastly, one of the best ways to keep your freelancers happy is to pay them in a timely manner. Make sure they understand what you need from them in order to process payment for a project and any other guidelines specific to your company that they need to know. The fastest way to ruin a relationship with your freelancer is to make them chase you for payment. Plus, late or delayed payment is not a reputation you want your brand to have in the freelancing community (remember when I said they have an extensive network).
It can be difficult to relinquish control of your brand to someone that is not directly under your supervision, but the benefits to your brand and your team can be incredible. Allowing a team of outsourced freelancers to use their expertise and talent to work for your brand will definitely yield results and in turn may take some of the pressure of your in-house team. And if you recognize these freelancers as an extension of your team, you will have an easier time making the transition.