A huge part of any business’s success hinges on how well it can market itself. So it’s unsurprising to see marketing budgets consume a huge share of operating capital. In June of 2020 alone, global businesses spent a combined $1.8 billion on marketing campaigns.
For many of these businesses, however, the increased net spend on digital marketing will not translate to increased revenue or sales.
Part of that is down to how well they executed their digital marketing strategy. Which then brings us to the important question; how do you implement an effective digital marketing strategy to pull in sales and drive revenue.
For that, I like to use digital marketing freelancers.
Why digital marketing freelancers
Digital marketing is expansive! With so many moving parts, it’s hard, if not impossible, for a team staffed by a few people, let alone a single digital marketer, to singlehandedly effect a successful strategy. You need a big team, but big digital marketing teams are expensive to operate and coordinate.
I like to think of marketing freelancers as the foot soldiers of digital marketing. For anyone looking to implement a successful strategy, they are a time-tested way to execute the individual segments making up any digital marketing strategy.
Steps to hiring marketing freelancers
1. Identify your needs
Your needs determine what kind of digital marketing freelancer you’ll need to hire. If you don’t have a digital marketing strategy, for instance, it makes sense to hunt for a digital marketing consultant or specialist.
If you’re planning to shore up your content marketing game, then you can hire a freelance content marketing specialist to execute that part of your overall digital marketing strategy. Or you might just need some backlinks to build your site authority, in which case a freelance link building service works just fine.
How do you evaluate your needs?
Businesses differ considerably in what works as a successful digital marketing strategy. An eCommerce store trying to sell an already popular product might have more success with PPC advertising as opposed to full-on SEO.
What exactly will work for you comes down to a lot of factors. let’s talk about some:
Your budget
Digital marketing in its entirety costs serious money. However, some parts of the typical digital marketing strategy cost more than others.
Businesses with deep pockets can approach marketing more directly through oft expensive marketing strategies like PPC, influencer marketing and the likes.
If you’re on a budget, you can gain headwind by focusing on less capital intensive strategies like SEO and direct social media marketing.
Note that even budget-friendly strategies can be scaled up to become capital intensive, just as capital intensive digital marketing can be executed on a budget.
Your expected time to results
If you run an eCommerce store and stock inventory, you want to get those products in the hands of consumers and fast. Certain forms of digital marketing, case in point search engine optimization, take time to bear their first fruits. Others like PPC advertising can generate leads and revenue literally seconds after they’re deployed.
How long can you wait to make your first sale?
Project continuity
With what I just said, you might think, why bother with slow to start digital marketing strategies when you can start fast. Generally speaking, most fast to start strategies are also quick to end. So immediately you take your foot off the gas pedal, you stop reaping the rewards.
That’s compared to slow to start strategies which tend to go autopilot once you’ve implemented them successfully. I wrote this search engine optimized blog targeting a few keywords on SERP (search engines results pages) late last year, and till today I still make affiliate commissions for products sold through that page.
That said, you mustn’t always go with the slow to start method. Many people erroneously treat slow-to-start strategies or ‘organic strategies’ as better options in every case scenario, when in reality some fast-tracked methods provide more value for resources invested in certain situations.
Consider a small business trying to sell drones. To beat the top sites ranking organically for keywords associated with drone technology would require grueling and very expensive SEO efforts. When the goal is to sell drones, you can easily launch a Facebook ad campaign to put your products in consumers’ faces.
2. Define the marketing project deliverables
A mistake many people make when attempting to hire freelance marketing specialists is adopt a shotgun approach. That’s one of the fastest ways to burn through your marketing budget without any tangible results to show for it.
Explicitly define your expected results for every proposed digital marketing project. If you plan to hire a PPC ads expert for marketing drones on Facebook, how many drones do you expect to sell per net ad spend? How fast do you want to sell each drone? What’s your return on investment (ROI).
This helps keep everything objective. Even more importantly, it helps the freelance digital marketing expert plan, budget and strategize more effectively.
3. Pre optimize your site or business
Marketing a bad product or business requires more work and is more likely to yield poorer results. Before considering digital marketing, your business must be properly set up to integrate with and benefit from any digital marketing strategy.
Optimizing 101
Since most of digital marketing funnels through your site, that’ll be focus here:
💻 Upgrade your UX/UI
When I started this site, the entire look and feel was crappy since I built it myself in a rush. Expectedly, my bounce rates were through the roof. A total redesign was all it took to hold on to more new visitors. For you, it could be your site, a bare landing page or a social media page.
How does it look? Is it attractive, and does it inspire trust? Ensure to check this out before attempting to hire a freelance digital marketing expert.
💪 Double down on performance
53% of web visitors will bounce (close the page) if the site doesn’t load up in less than 3s. If your website is buggy or laggy, expect a significant number of users to bounce off from wherever they came from regardless of how superb your marketing campaign is.
There’s a lot that goes into optimizing the performance of a website as far as it concerns digital marketing. Check out this guide to optimizing a website for digital marketing to get started.
4. Consider your overall budget
I already talked about budgeting and how it influences the kind of digital marketing specialist you should hire. Remember that I also did say the entire concept of how budgeting dictates strategy implementation is not set in stone.
There are a lot of variables to consider, so let’s quickly outline the typical cost of hiring freelance digital marketers.
The cost of hiring freelance digital marketers
Search engine marketers
This category of freelance marketing experts includes marketers who handle PPC marketing and traditional SEO work.
For both groups, the cost is mostly tied to the extent and complexity of your specific project. Estimating what it’ll cost you to hire a PPC expert without having a look at your project would be more miss than hit. But just to give you a rough idea:
📌 PPC charges for setting up and tracking round trip ads on mainstream channels – $400 per month
📌 SEO charges for the typical eCommerce store – $5000 per month
Again these quotes vary considerably on a per-project basis; so it’s not unusual to see an SEO specialist charging north of $200,000 for SEO involving some highly competitive keywords.
Social media marketing
Marketing on social media is more indirect in that you can’t just slap product ads on social media pages and expect to drive organic sales. You need to drive engagement first, and part of driving engagement is churning out engageable content.
This is the job of marketing freelancers specializing in social media marketing. Again charges vary by project but expect to pay north of
📌 $5000 for a short spa high yield social media campaign
📌 $500,000 for longer duration social media campaigns
📌 $50,0000 for short duration social media campaign with content generation included
📌 $50,0000 for longer duration social media campaign with content generation included
Content marketing
Like social media marketing, content marketing is a more diffuse form of digital marketing. Content marketers, from the name, supervise the creation and deployment of engaging content across all digital media channels (not just social media).
📌 The best ones can charge up to $10,000 for their services
Affiliate marketers/influencers
With influencer and affiliate marketing, your product or service reaches a likely to convert audience. There’s a lot that goes into determining the charge for any influencer marketing campaign, including the influencer reputation, their follower count and the specific market.
The actual cost is such a varied number that you could hire an influencer for $200 in one scenario, and then go on to hire another for no less than $2 million in another case scenario. So again, actual costs depend on your product and market.
Sourcing for marketing freelancers
When hiring to fill any of the marketing freelancer roles I’ve just described, you have two main options: freelance sites like Fiverr and Upwork or Agency sites that staff freelancers like Toptal.
Each is unique in the advantages it offers over the other, but both also have their disadvantages. The decision to use one over the other for hiring a freelance marketer is purely based on preference as used correctly, both will produce the same results.
Freelance sites like Fiverr and Upwork
Both the Fiverr and Upwork marketplaces house some talented digital marketing freelancers. What’s really nice about these sites is the number of options at your disposal. For any one particular digital marketing task, you have marketing freelancers in the hundreds available on demand.
When you need to scale your digital marketing efforts, an excess of freelancers ranked based on performance and reviews is a nice perk to have.
It’s also, on average, cheaper to hire a marketing freelancer on these sites, although I strongly advice against opting for the cheapest option. Overly cheap digital marketing freelancers, from my experience, rarely deliver good results. And on Fiverr and Upwork you will come across many supposed digital marketers promising heaven and back on a $5 budget.
I wrote a guide on hiring digital marketers on Fiverr, so take a look for more info on how to hire great marketing freelancers if you do decide to hire on Fiverr.
Agency sites
Some agencies staff freelance digital marketers who you can outsource digital marketing tasks to with the agency serving as an intervener. It contrasts to the freelance sites method where you interact directly with the digital marketing expert.
Agencies are usually better options for digital marketing newbies. If this is your first exposure to digital marketing, agencies will be better because the best ones provide all the hand-holding to get you up to speed.
Effecting a digital marketing strategy with an agency is also easier, all things considered. Usually, they, not you, create the marketing roadmap based on your needs. Remember that freelance sites are more a la carte, so you hire per task. Agencies offer a managed service that usually hires the freelancers you need to effect a project deliverable while covering freelancer management and supervision.
The notable downside with agency sites for marketing freelancers is that they can pan out to be expensive above what you’d normally spend on traditional freelance sites for the same results. The extra cost comes from the managed service they provide. But all that said, if all of this sounds too alien to you, then you’re probably better off talking to an agency site for freelance marketers.
How you should approach digital marketing if you’re a newbie
Digital marketing is not as complex as many people make it seem. Provided you’ve got the hands to hire the right digital marketing freelancers, getting on with your digital marketing strategy is relatively straightforward.
Here’s how to do it:
Step 1: Check-in with a marketing consultant
A digital marketing consultant will help to perform all the background research and analysis required to plan an effective digital marketing strategy. This research/analysis is very important as without it, you’re basically shooting blanks in the dark.
All too commonly, I’ve seen people startup digital marketing projects based on word of mouth without any underlying analysis. SEO is awesome for business – so an antique Chinese restaurant owner setups a website targeting keywords no one ever searches for.
Hiring a marketing consultant prior to dabbling in digital marketing helps you set all the facts straight so you don’t sink money into doomed to fail digital marketing projects.
Step 2. Create a digital marketing roadmap
This roadmap should outline everything you plan to do and how you plan on doing it. If you’re working with a marketing consultant, then usually, you’ll get a roadmap as part of their consulting package.
Every project, however small, should be captured on your digital marketing roadmap for objectivity and performance monitoring much later when there’s a need to assess the project.
Step 3: Avalanche or sequential strategy
Choose how you’d rather effect each segment of your digital marketing strategy. The avalanche technique involves launching all parts of your digital marketing campaign at once.
So if you’re an eCommerce brand, for instance, you’d from the get-go kickstart your PPC, SEO, social media marketing and everything else all at once. Obviously, this means more upfront costs, but what it does is guarantee maximum traction and revenue growth from the get-go.
On the downside, going avalanche makes performance tracking a tad bit more complex. With so many moving parts all in motion at once, getting clarity over what’s working and what’s not requires professional insight.
With a sequential strategy implementation, you effect specific parts or group of segments of your digital marketing strategy sequentially – not necessarily one after the other, but with one starting first before the other gets bundled in as well.
The sequential method is cheaper but also rounds up to cost the same if you let your digital marketing strategy run the full course. It’s a nice strategy because it allows you to bootstrap your business with the success of one strategy serving as a financial segue to usher in the next.
It’s also easier to track digital marketing projects when they’re executed sequential. But note, however, that results take a bit longer to hit critical mass with sequential strategies.
Hire your freelancers
With a roadmap of what you need to do in place, the next step is to bring in the professionals. Some marketing consulting services offer to execute your strategy, and that means hiring freelancers on your behalf.
They’ll charge for this service, and if you’re a newbie who prefers not to get your hand dirty, then I’d say go ahead and pay the charge.
You can, however, effect the digital marketing strategy by hiring and supervising marketing freelancers yourself. Here’s how to spot great marketing freelancers from the bunch.
What makes a great marketing freelancer?
✔ Past results presented as case studies
Experience is one of the most important assets a digital marketing freelancer can have, and perhaps the best way to assess experience is to check out case studies.
Details in a case study is what differentiates actual strategy implementation from fluff. You want case studies where the freelancer actually states what they did, how they did it, and the results it brought, rather than those with vague claims and results sheets. Better if the case study was for an identifiable brand.
✔ Client reviews and testimonials
Reviews tell the story of what working with the freelance marketing professional feels like. On freelance sites like Fiverr and Upwork, it’s easy to check reviews from verifiable past clients. I talk about gauging reviews in my guide to hiring a freelancer on Fiverr and Upwork.
Assessing reviews on agency sites is a little bit trickier since they’re easier to fake. What you want to do is check out the brand names said agency has worked for and maybe reach out to them in person for direct testimonials if you’re signing off on a significant marketing gig.
✔ Client interaction
How a digital marketing freelancer responds to your questions and queries tells a lot about their professionalism and work ethic.
If you’re getting brushed off at every inquiry, that’s a red flag to say you won’t get explanations when it matters, and probably worse, your strategy might be implemented at surface level.
✔ Solid industry connections
This is usually not an absolute requirement, and not all skilled digital marketing professionals will meet it, but when it’s there in addition to the others, you’re most likely dealing with a true professional. Industry connections are links and connections one freelancer has with other freelancers and key players in their specified niche.
So, for instance, a social media marketer who’s well known and followed in the social media marketing micro niche on Twitter or a PPC expert whose LinkedIn page shows connection with and recommendations from other notable industry players.
The red flags that point to a not so great digital marketing freelancer:
⛔ No verifiable experience
Lots of talk and no show for it is a telltale sign you’re dealing with an inexperienced digital marketer. They should have verifiable pointers to back up every claim they make.
⛔ Extremely cheap
It might sound counterintuitive, but the simple fact is digital marketing done right costs money. Marketers who have the skill and experience to execute flawless strategies know their worth and will l almost certainly never price their services cheap.
⛔ No questions asked
A lack of transparency from a digital marketing freelancer, more than anything, shows a lack of transparency about their methods which is not a good sign. Great digital marketing freelancers might not divulge all their tips and tricks, but they’ll do enough explanation to make sure you’re in the loop.
⛔ Overpromising
This one seems pretty obvious, but for emphasis, you should reconsider your options when a digital marketing freelancer makes guarantees for laudable, exciting or exponential results.
Great digital marketers know to tour the way of caution with promises since there are just so many factors, many beyond the freelancer’s control affecting the success of a marketing campaign.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get any declaration of projected results; it just means those results shouldn’t be outrageous.
Ready to hire your next digital marketing freelancer?
Everything I’ve said should’ve prepped you better to hire a qualified digital marketing expert. There are lots of them hanging out online. You now know where to look for them and what to look for in them.
What’s left is making the final decision to hire.
Remember, understand why you need a digital marketing freelancer first, before attempting to hire one.
Understand your business and where it’ll need a buff so you don’t go shooting blanks.
A digital marketing freelance consultant can help with all of that if you’re confused. Here’s one you can hire to get you started.
