Look, we won’t lie: building a freelance marketing team can seem daunting. But listen up pals, because with the right tools, you can build a team of freelancers who understand your business, your needs, and your industry.
But why hire freelancers over full-time employees? Which marketing professionals should you be adding to your team? And what do you need to do to build a freelance marketing team?
We’re answering these questions and more as we break down everything you need to know about freelance marketing, how to hire freelancers, and how to build your dream team.
Table of contents
- What is a freelance marketing team?
- Who are the key players on a marketing team?
- 4 reasons to hire freelance marketing consultants (instead of full-time employees)
- How to build your freelance marketing dream team
- The Freelance Squad is your one-stop-shop for freelancer marketers
- Building a freelance marketing team FAQs
What is a freelance marketing team?
You’re probably familiar with the general functions of an in-house marketing team. Depending on the company, you can have everything from a marketing generalist, to a copywriter, to a designer, to ten of each. These employees work in-house to build and execute a complete marketing strategy for your business.
A freelance marketer is a self-employed individual who works remotely with one or more clients to fulfill their marketing needs. Most freelancers specialize in a specific aspect of marketing, so it’s rare to hire a single freelancer to execute an entire marketing strategy from top to bottom.
And that’s where a freelance marketing team comes in to save the day.
A freelance marketing team is a group of freelancers with different skill sets who work together to create and execute a marketing strategy.
Teams of freelancers are not full-time employees, but to meet the needs of their clients—aka you—, they collaborate with other freelance professionals to give you all the benefits of an in-house team, plus some very nice-to-have extras.
When you hire a freelance marketing team, you get to cherry-pick exactly which skills you need and which individuals are best suited for the job. And that means businesses of all sizes can run successful marketing campaigns using the right freelancer team without hiring five or more new employees.
Who are the key players on a marketing team?
Whether you’re looking to hire in-house or source a great group of freelancers, your goal should be to build a cohesive marketing team that can effectively market your products or services. But what marketing roles should you actually be looking to fill?
Let’s look at some key players that can help you successfully market your business.
Marketing strategist
A marketing strategist is an individual who researches, creates, and communicates strategic marketing plans to reach a business’s target audience and drive growth. These marketing professionals work closely with other marketers, clients, sales teams, and key stakeholders to ensure their strategies align with company goals.
Marketing strategists lead and optimize companies’ marketing efforts across various campaigns. Their goal is to build systemic strategies to achieve a business’s marketing objectives.
A marketing strategist can help you by:
- Analyzing market data to help find the most effective ways to market your products/services
- Working with your marketing team to brainstorm and plan marketing campaigns
- Performing a competitor analysis to find ways to stay ahead of the competition
- Tracking social media trends to ensure your brand makes the most of its marketing efforts
- Communicating and collaborating with sales, products, and customer service teams
- Monitoring and analyzing ongoing marketing campaigns
Copywriter
A copywriter creates clear copy to sell products and engage and educate audiences. Copywriters write persuasive copy for various channels, including websites, blog posts, landing pages, product descriptions, ads, scripts, white papers, and (way) more. Some copywriters also work on internal communications and can help businesses with their internal memos, policies, surveys, etc. Trust us when we say a job description that’s run through a copywriter receives more—and stronger—applications.
Copywriters are often required to transform complex, jargon-infused copy into something relatable and relevant to the target audience.
A copywriter can help you:
- Write original copy for various channels and formats, including:
- Blogs
- White papers
- Social media ads
- Search engine ads
- Product descriptions
- Websites
- Landing pages
- Newsletters
- Print marketing
- Scripts
- eBooks
- White papers
- Develop your brand voice and tone
- Adapt copy to match an existing brand voice and tone
- Write copy for digital and print ads
- Create captivating and SEO-friendly blog posts
- Edit and revise copy with input from key stakeholders
Designer
Graphic designers are the marketing professionals that will bring visual excitement to your brand. Graphic designers create visual concepts that align with online and offline marketing materials to educate, inspire, and delight audiences. They have a strong sense of aesthetics and combine that with brand standards, colour theory, typography, and graphic elements to create work that’s way more nuanced and effective than whatever your marketing manager can whip up in Canva.
Graphic design is a diverse field of creative professionals using visuals to communicate ideas. Because it’s so diverse, graphic design can be broken out into eight often-overlapping fields:
- Web design
- UX/UI design
- Advertising and marketing design
- Motion graphics, video, and animation
- Packaging design
- Game design
- Illustration
- Publication and typographic design
A graphic designer may specialize in one field or have experience in more than one field.
A designer can help you:
- Create your brand identity—colour palettes, typography, logos, etc.
- Design your website and ensure it’s visually pleasing, user-friendly, and meets accessibility standards
- Create killer product packaging
- Design visuals for social media, advertisements, print ads, and more
SEO specialist
A search engine optimization (SEO) specialist optimizes websites for search engines by analyzing, reviewing, and implementing needed changes. They use keyword research, link building, technical audits, content creation, competitor research, and more to improve a company’s position in organic search results. There’s a lot of secret sauce happening, and it’s all 100% worth it.
Part of their job is to focus on search-related strategies to generate more qualified organic traffic, which converts to more leads and, ideally, more revenue. Profit, baby!
An SEO specialist can help you:
- Audit your website to analyze your site architecture and structure
- Determine the keywords that will help your business rank on Google
- Create a link-building strategy for your business
- Build an SEO blog strategy to help your business rank for relevant keywords (this is where those copywriters come into play)
- Craft captivating title tags and meta descriptions to improve your search results
- Build reports to help you track the progress of key metrics
Paid ad specialist
A paid ad specialist is an individual who has the skills and expertise to create, run, and monitor paid advertising campaigns across various channels. They execute various tasks with the end goal of creating powerful ad campaigns. Ad specialists research and analyze market trends to better understand what resonates with their target audience.
Paid ads specialists work with copywriters and designers to develop advertising materials for print ads, commercials, and digital ads for social media, search engine marketing (SEM), banner ads, and more.
A paid ads specialist can help you:
- Develop and execute paid media campaigns across platforms like Google Ads and Meta
- Conduct A/B testing to optimize your ad campaigns
- Monitor campaign performance, analyze performance data, and provide recommendations for improvement
- Use bid strategies to ensure your budget is being used effectively
Email marketing strategist
An email marketing specialist builds email lists and creates email campaigns and newsletters to increase brand awareness, and ultimately generate revenue. These marketing professionals understand email automation software and can help you build an email marketing strategy that informs and nurtures leads.
When done right, email marketing can and should boost your ROI, making it extra important to have also invested in a top-notch designer and copywriter for those emails. An email marketing specialist is going to help drive these results effectively in the short and long term, because what’s the point of sending emails if no one is actually reading them?
An email marketing specialist can help you:
- Create and monitor your email marketing campaigns, which include newsletters, drip campaigns, welcome sequences, abandoned cart sequences, and more
- Strategize ways to use email marketing to boost brand awareness and sales effectively
- Ensure the design of your emails is user and mobile-friendly
- Monitor email segmentation and audience lists and clean/purge them when needed
- Track and report on email campaigns
Project manager
Ah, project managers. The unsung heroes and oft-neglected marketers—and, the ones that really earn their keep.
A project manager leads projects by planning and executing them from start to finish while working within the bounds of timelines and budgets. They’re professionals who use innovation, creativity, and organizational skills to ensure a successful project.
Project managers lead marketing teams,—either freelance or internal—define project goals, communicate with key stakeholders, and follow a project through all stages. They’re the organizational linchpins that keep projects running smoothly.
A project manager can help you:
- Plan projects from start to finish and ensure the correct team members and resources are available
- Schedule meetings and follow-up tasks
- Monitor the project/team to ensure everyone is meeting deadlines
- Facilitate communication between team members
- Eliminate any blockers as they present themselves
- Stay on budget (we promise)
4 reasons to hire freelance marketing consultants (instead of full-time employees)
Using freelancers to fill the gaps in your business is becoming increasingly common—and for good reason.
Instead of the considerable overhead and long onboarding process that comes with full-time employees, freelancers give you the same—or higher!—level of expertise, and a flexible, here-when-you-need-me attitude that can make marketing magic for your business.
Let’s explore why it’s beneficial for your business to hire freelance marketing consultants.
1. Save money by hiring freelancers
You might be initially shocked when you see what a team of freelancer marketing consultants could cost to run a project. But when you crunch the numbers, working with a team of freelancers to execute a single project is much more cost-effective than hiring on the same team as full-time employees.
When you hire a full-time employee, they’re full-time (duh)—you’re committing to paying them their salary for the foreseeable future. And the cost is even higher than just their base salary. When you factor in other associated costs, you’re looking at approximately 1.2 to 1.4 times their base salary.
With a freelancer, you pay them the agreed-upon rate for the project, and that’s it. You can hire them again when needed, but you don’t have to pay them when you don’t have work for them (unless you really want to. I mean, we won’t say no). It may be a higher initial investment, but it quickly becomes more cost-effective in the long term.
2. Scale your freelance marketing team based on your needs
Depending on your business’s needs and the marketing campaigns you run, you might not always need to have an SEO specialist or a designer on staff. When you rely on freelancers, you can scale your marketing team up and down based on your immediate needs.
If you have a project requiring a paid ads specialist and a project manager, you can hire freelancers instead of hiring employees who may not have a whole lot to do once you wrap that project.
3. Freelance marketing professionals bring specialized skills to the table
When you hire an in-house marketing generalist for your business, you often have a jack-of-all-trades-expert-of-none situation. They may be able to execute different marketing strategies competently, but they don’t have the deep knowledge that comes from focusing solely on one subject.
With freelance marketing professionals, you can hire someone that’s an expert in what you need—you can hire a paid ads specialist to run your ads and a copywriter to write instead of relying on one person to do both. You get access to top talent with specialized skills when you use freelance marketing professionals.
4. Access to experts from around the world
Even with remote work, people are getting called into the office more and more these days—and we can’t say we love it. Freelancers are truly remote-first though, meaning you can hire the person best suited to the role no matter where they’re geographically located. This means you have access to a more extensive network of professionals and have a better chance of finding the perfect person to fill the role.
How to build your freelance marketing dream team
We see you—you’ve done the research and know a freelance marketing team is the right fit for your business. But you’ve got no idea where to start. We’ve covered five steps to help you build a marketing team full of fantastic freelancers doing amazing things.
1. Determine what jobs you need to be done
First, determine what marketing tasks or campaigns you want your freelance team to accomplish. Defining tasks, deliverables, and jobs will help you decide which types of freelancers you need. There’s no point in hiring an email specialist when you hope to build a robust marketing strategy for your business (hint: you need a marketing strategist!).
2. Track down the perfect freelancer for each job
Once you’ve determined your needs, it’s time to start looking for freelancers to fill the role. When searching for the right person, keep in mind the tasks you’re expecting them to do as well as your industry—this can help you narrow down your search.
While sites like Fiverr or Upwork do offer help here, we want to stress that typically it’s a fight to the bottom in terms of the lowest dollar-per-hour rate, and you could see results to match. Especially if you’re looking for multiple experts, it’s a smart idea to find a team of freelancers that has experience working together where you won’t have to spend extra time syncing everyone up.
Trust us when we say that the kind of teams that all bill you under one invoice vs. five are your AP team’s best friend (and the person who brought them that team is next in line).
3. Bring freelancers and employees together (virtually or in-person)
Now that you’ve hired your freelancers, it’s time to get the whole team together for a kick-off. This can be in-person or virtually and should be seen as a way for your freelancers to meet each other and your in-house team.
4. Establish how you’ll communicate with each other
Communication is key in any team. When working with a group of freelancers, it’s essential to be very clear on how you’ll communicate with each other. Whether it’s through Slack, email, a project management system, or something else, it’s essential to outline how communication will work for the duration of the project.
5. Build the processes you need to execute your projects successfully
Regardless of if you’re working with freelancers or an in-house team, a successful project depends on effective processes that keep things running smoothly.
Even if you’re not working with a project manager, make sure you put processes in place to help your team members collaborate, share deliverables, and communicate effectively.
The Freelance Squad is your one-stop-shop for freelance marketers
If you’re dreaming up your next marketing campaign but aren’t sure how your in-house team will manage the workload, The Freelance Squad is here to help. Your one-stop shop to find top-notch freelancers and build your marketing dream team, the Freelance Squad is a collective of talented freelance professionals.
Think of us as the alternative to LinkedIn, Fiverr, and UpWork you’ve been searching for, whether you need short-term, long-term, or right-this-minute freelance support.
When you work with the Freelance Squad, we take care of steps 2-5 to help you find the right freelancers—heck, we’ll even help you with #1!
