Employing a marketing freelancer or copywriter is a necessity for many small to medium businesses and entrepreneurs. It’s the perfect route to help your business scale and grow while keeping employee costs at a minimum.
However, employing a marketing freelancer doesn’t come without risk and it can become an expensive business if you find yourself hiring two or three freelancers to do the same job.
I have heard many horror stories and indeed experienced a few myself, but there’s such a fantastic opportunity for your business to grow when you do find the right freelancer, that I decided to pen a list of the key mistakes to avoid when you need to hire a marketing freelancer.
1) Not doing your research
Websites like Fiverr and Peopleperhour are fantastic resources to find marketing freelancers. But you need to remember you are scrolling through profiles of marketers – the very people who know how to sell a service with words and images.
So what’s the best approach? Firstly, it pays to read their profile. You’ll get a sense of their personality, their values and experience. The old adage “if it sounds too good to be true” equally applies here.
The best advocate is the reviews left by other buyers. That’ll be the best indication of the quality and reliability of a service, so I’ll counter that slightly with that everyone started off somewhere, without any feedback or history.
2) Is there a connection?
You’re well within your rights to send a message to the freelancer to introduce yourself and discuss the project. In fact, many marketing freelancers prefer this approach.
Not only can we manage your expectations, but it’s an opportunity to flush out what you need and how we can best assist. Good freelancers will turn down work (however difficult that sounds) because they recognise one bad review can negatively affect their future work pipeline.
It’s in both of your interests to have an initial conversation, discuss the project and weigh up the options.
3) Don’t negotiate on price – unless otherwise stated
Freelancers typically have a set rate which will be calculated by a number of factors, but certainly includes the length of time it’ll take to complete a project, their experience and the revenue they need to accumulate to sustain their standard of living.
If you try to lowball a freelancer on price, you’ll immediately annoy them. They may need to take the job, but they’ll be pissed off that they are making less on the job than the market rate.
You may not care about that. But tell me, would you rather have a marketing freelancer fully committed to your project with the hope that more work follows, or a freelancer who just wants to get the job finished?
4) Provide a detailed brief
There is nothing worse than a business hiring a freelancer and providing little or no direction on what they actually need.
It’s not enough to say you want a blog written on the top 5 reasons to be a Vegan. You need to invest the time to specify what you’re looking for, what you want to achieve, how you want the piece to be positioned and so on.
If you have a tone and style guide, or brand guidelines, send them over. If you need to keep information sensitive, perhaps ahead of a new launch, ask the freelancer to sign an NDA.
If you fail to brief your freelancer properly, you’re not only setting them up for failure, but you’ll be costing your business more time and money than necessary.
5) Be kind, courteous and respectful
This goes without saying of course. Everyone who is reading this is a nice human being right?
Well, you can be a nice human being and still a pain in the arse to work for. Freelancers understand the pressure your under in trying to run and grow a business. But when you need to deliver feedback, even when the marketing is absolutely atrocious, aim to deliver it in a way which helps them learn and improve. It maybe they simply misunderstood.
Once you’ve agreed the fee and delivery details give them the time and space to complete the job. I’ve heard of buyers sending messages at all hours of the night expecting an immediate reply. That’s simply not feasible.
Finally, never call into question their professionalism. It’s the ultimate insult, one which will be given short shrift, and not help you in the slightest in getting what you need. Whenever I deal with someone who is rude, crap, an idiot, whatever, I aim to always be the better person. It also helps reduce your stress levels too.
6) Restrict access to data and operating systems
Sometimes you may need a marketing freelancer to get involved in your daily operations, such as access to Mailchimp or your social media accounts.
If that’s the case, you need to be on the ball and manage their involvement closely. The future of your business will depend on it.
For example, if you grant access to Mailchimp, you need to be aware your freelancer may have access to your data. Now, for most sensible people, they’ll treat it with courtesy and respect. But, if an email gets sent to the wrong data, that’s a problem. If you ask them to manage the unsubscribes and data, well maybe I’ll ask you to reconsider. Are you comfortable an external freelancer storing your data on their desktop? Hmmm…not sure I would be!
That’s probably an extreme example, but it pays to be careful. The biggest threat to you is if their laptop is stolen or their emails are hacked, which contain passwords to these operating systems. Or, you end their contracted and don’t revoke access.
It’s a worst case scenario but I would always urge on the side of caution.
These are 6 of the most common mistakes businesses make when hiring a marketing freelancer, which often lead to spending more time and money fixing problems than the original project cost.
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