Are you considering hiring a digital marketing professional to assist you with your marketing initiatives and win over more prospective clients without overextending your budget? You’ll need someone who possesses the right combination of skills, creativity, and strong marketing expertise while also being cost effective.
If your marketing budget is limited and you need a flexible professional who offers affordable rates without compromising on quality, hiring a freelance marketer is likely the most suitable option.
Read on to find out where to hire freelance marketers and how they can help you in your marketing efforts.
What Is a Freelance Marketer?
A freelance marketer is a self-employed individual who provides marketing services on a project or contract basis. They can be a generalist (someone with a broad range of skills in several areas of marketing) or a specialist in a particular niche—for example, a digital marketer who develops social media marketing strategies for dental clinics.
Typically, freelance digital marketers have experience in areas such as graphic and web design, content creation, social media and email marketing strategies, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertising, affiliate marketing, and link building.
Why Hire Freelance Marketers?
There are several advantages to recruiting a freelancer instead of internal marketing staff. Here are some of the benefits of hiring a freelance marketer:
1. Ease your marketing workload
Outsourcing work to a freelance marketer on an hourly or per-project basis is a great option if you don’t have a digital marketing team or to support your in-house marketing team by assigning the freelancer certain tasks.
Marketing workloads are often unstable; you will need different levels of effort at different points of the company life cycle. By hiring a freelancer for your digital marketing jobs, you’ll have additional support depending on your needs or current campaigns, whether you need help with product launches, link building, or a new content marketing or social media strategy.
This allows you to focus on other critical aspects of your business while ensuring that your marketing efforts are still effective.
2. Gain access to specialized talent from around the world
With the rise of remote work and the ability to work from anywhere, you now have access to a much wider pool of talent than those based in your local area.
According to recent statistics, approximately 1.57 billion people out of a total global workforce of 3.38 billion are freelancers. This greatly increases your chances of finding and hiring a candidate with the specialized skills needed for your digital marketing role.
You can find freelancers who specialize in growth, paid ads, SEO analysis, content writing, email marketing, lead generation, link building, and social media management. Additionally, professionals often have experience in specific industries (such as finance, technology, and e-commerce) and company types (like startups or SMBs).
Hiring a freelancer can be a game-changer, especially if you’re looking for a marketer with experience in particular technologies or emerging areas such as AI or machine learning.
3. Manage varying project sizes with minimal commitment
Since you’re able to work with freelance digital marketers on a project basis, you can scale your marketing efforts up or down as needed without making a long-term commitment.
This flexibility can be especially useful if you experience fluctuations in demand for your products or services or have specific campaigns that require niche expertise.
4. Hit the ground running with well-prepared experts
Freelance marketers have prior experience working with a broad range of clients, meaning they are often ready to start working on projects immediately.
Moreover, you likely won’t need to set them up with or train them to use software. Many already have access to the latest marketing tools, such as social media listening tools, SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, and email template builders. They are likely also proficient at using Google Analytics and various social media management platforms that can help streamline marketing processes.
Compared with full-time employees, who may require more training and supervision, freelance marketers are usually more independent. They are self-starters, naturally enabling them to be more productive when completing projects. Usually, you will only need to pay them after they deliver work to your satisfaction.
5. Fill a role for an urgent project
One of the key advantages of hiring freelancers is the ability to conduct shorter hiring processes. When hiring remotely, you can conduct interviews over the phone or video in a matter of minutes.
Remote hiring platforms like Near can make this even simpler by cutting 50–70% of your sourcing and screening time.
Furthermore, you don’t need to invest in the same level of infrastructure and resources as you would for an on-site hire. Since you don’t need to take the time to set up office space and equipment, you can get started on projects faster and with less overhead.
6. Pay less for top talent
Hiring a freelance marketer is an effective way to save on marketing costs. You won’t incur the same overhead costs associated with in-house staff, such as health insurance and other benefits. Instead, you’ll only pay for the marketing and creative work your freelancers deliver.
Freelance marketers in many regions outside the US also charge significantly lower rates than domestic talent. For example, you can save 30–70% on salary expenses by hiring LatAm-based professionals. As a result, you can drastically reduce expenses and redirect these funds to other critical business areas.
Where To Find Great Freelance Marketers
Here, we’ll list several of the best platforms and websites where you can hire freelance marketers. They aren’t ranked in any particular order, as each allows you to connect with only top-tier freelancers and make an informed decision based on the marketers’ backgrounds, rates, skills, and past marketing experience.
We’ve categorized the top places to find freelance marketing talent into freelance marketplace sites, social media platforms, and nearshore outsourcing platforms.
Best freelance marketplace websites for finding digital marketers
1. Upwork
Upwork is an excellent platform for hiring freelance marketing experts who offer a huge range of digital marketing services, such as SEO, social media campaigns, PPC, marketing automation, and content marketing. It has a large pool of qualified freelancers with relevant experience.
On top of that, Upwork has a reputation system that allows you to see the freelancer’s previous work and feedback from other clients, which can help you make an informed decision when hiring. Although it has a great filtering system to ensure you find what you’re looking for, the number of applicants can sometimes be overwhelming.
2. WeWork
WeWork is a freelancer community that connects local freelancers and entrepreneurs through various networking events, community groups, and coworking spaces.
The platform has a vetted network of freelancers who are registered as self-employed and go through a vigorous application process to get accepted.
For example, if you’re looking for a digital marketing consultant, graphic designer, or marketing strategist, you can easily find a vetted freelancer with a strong portfolio and references. One downside of WeWork is that you have to become a member to hire freelancers through the platform.
3. Fiverr
Like the two platforms mentioned above, Fiverr allows you to connect with freelancers with a wide range of digital marketing skills, such as using content management tools and running social media advertising campaigns.
It offers a unique “gig” system, allowing you to browse and purchase pre-defined packages of services. This system can work well for small business owners with a specific budget in mind, as you can easily compare prices and see what is included in each package.
Best social media platforms
There are also several social media platforms you can leverage to find and connect with the right freelance candidates to help with your digital marketing strategies:
1. LinkedIn
LinkedIn connects millions of professionals worldwide. Unlike some other marketplaces and platforms for freelancers, it doesn’t facilitate the remote hiring process or payments.
Regardless, it offers one highly useful feature that others don’t: the ability to follow freelancers’ profiles and get to know them on a more personal level.
You can assess how they interact with their audience and the type of content they post while evaluating their abilities to attract an audience and market themselves. If you’re seeking freelancers for your projects, consider incorporating LinkedIn outreach strategies into your search.
Keep in mind that LinkedIn is not solely a hiring platform, so it may take a while to find a freelancer available to take on an additional project.
2. Facebook
Through Facebook, you are more likely to find social media specialists to help you with your content creation, social media strategy, and PPC. Besides having a vast user base, Facebook has various groups dedicated to specific niche freelance marketing areas where you can find and connect with potential freelancers.
3. Instagram
Instagram works best for recruiting marketing freelancers with a focus on visual-related marketing, such as graphic design, photography, video content creation, and video editing. You can search for freelancers using hashtags and location-based filters and review their portfolios and previous works.
Nearshore outsourcing platforms
Nearshore outsourcing is an outsourcing model in which a company hires an external organization or a freelancer from a nearby country to provide services or complete projects.
This allows you to maintain a closer relationship with the service provider, reduce time difference and cultural barriers, and make the coordination and communication process easier while keeping overhead costs low.
For US businesses, nearshoring usually refers to outsourcing to countries in Latin America (LatAm), such as Mexico or Colombia.
Although platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, Freelancer, and LinkedIn have talent pools from all over the world, none guarantees to accommodate your time zone.
However, there are also companies that connect you with top talent from LatAm.
If you’re interested in nearshoring digital marketing experts from Latin America, Near can help you hire the best pre-vetted professionals from LatAm in under 21 days.
We have a massive pool of over 35,000 candidates with skills for almost any role, including digital marketing specialists. This means we can quickly present you with qualified candidates working in US time zones who possess great English communication skills and offer competitive rates.
Final Thoughts
Whether your marketing goals are to increase your social media presence, run successful email campaigns, boost your website traffic, improve your on-page SEO, build a landing page, or create successful digital marketing strategies, freelance marketers can help you achieve them.
With the information we covered in this article, you’re now better prepared to decide on the most suitable place to find and hire the right freelance marketing specialist.
To start connecting with freelance marketing talent, simply fill out our form to get a list of pre-vetted candidates tailored to your organization.