DPaaS Issue #4: Top 10 Reasons to Incorporate Marketing Freelancers into your Team
Exploring the Future of Work
One of the widest skills gaps in professional talent at tech companies today is on marketing teams. As a result, marketers are switching jobs for higher salaries or models that better suit their needs and lifestyles. In this week’s issue, we look at the top ten reasons to incorporate marketing freelancers into your team to fill gaps created by open positions and get work done. In other news, the disconnect between professionals and employers grows, professionals are rebelling against returning to the office, you have to be incredibly lousy to get fired, and Apple shifts its return to office policy again.
Leading Off: Top 10 Reasons to Incorporate Marketing Freelancers into your Team
Freelancers may be the most misunderstood concept in business today. The headlines surrounding the “Gig Economy” probably don’t help.
Historically, outside of a select number of industries like journalism or photography, freelancers are considered by some to be part-timers looking for a side hustle or an aging professionals looking to limit workweeks.
If this is your perception of freelancers in marketing, you’ll want to read on. The use of marketing freelancers may be the hottest business trend for the coming year. But, don’t think of them as freelancers. Since the average company uses more than 90 on-demand marketing services, the new way to think of these professionals is on-demand marketing resources you can tap as needed. Marketing as a Service.
Here are the top 10 things you probably don’t know about on-demand marketing professionals.
They have the experience you need. The most significant value an on-demand marketing professional brings is experience. Not just with one or a handful of companies, but potentially with dozens or even hundreds. With each engagement, their knowledge and skills substantially improve compared to marketers repeating the same tasks year after year at the same company.
You only pay for results. With traditional employees, you pay a salary regardless of output. You also pay for vacation time and benefits. On-demand marketing professionals get paid to deliver results.
They deliver consistent results. When you get paid to deliver results, you only focus on results. If an on-demand marketing professional has been providing services for more than two years, you know they are results-oriented. Otherwise, they wouldn’t survive. This timeline also indicates that on-demand marketing is a chosen career path and not just something to do in between traditional jobs.
You only pay when you need them. Dial-up. Dial down. On your terms. The most successful on-demand marketing engagements are project-based. Unlike a full-time employee, you can hire an on-demand marketing professional to help scale teams as needed for large projects and scale back down with the project is over.
They enjoy getting up and going to work, every day. On-demand marketing professionals gravitate to projects they enjoy and in which they will excel. Traditional marketing employees don’t always have this luxury, and that’s one of the main reasons great on-demand marketing professionals don’t have traditional jobs. They want to carve their own path of enjoyable projects.
No, on-demand marketing professionals don’t always get to work when they want. This is perhaps the biggest knock on freelancers. They work when they want. On-demand marketing professionals work when you need them. A clearly defined scope of work and timeline is critical to a project’s success with on-demand marketing professionals.
Those 90+ apps. On-demand marketing professionals know how to use them. Because on-demand marketing professionals work with many different clients, the odds are in your favor that you’ll find one intimately familiar with the tools you already use. Odds are even greater they can help you optimize them. Most on-demand marketing professionals obtain certifications in the most commonly used marketing SaaS offerings and tools.
They seamlessly integrate with your existing team. Very rarely do on-demand marketing professionals work in a vacuum. In the most successful engagements, they seamlessly integrate into existing teams and provide a shot in the arm in helping that team meet its goal.
They provide a bridge for new staff. Many companies hire on-demand marketing professionals to meet a specific need while finding a full-time person to fill a permanent position. Great on-demand marketing professionals take it a step further by training the new employee once she is hired.
It’s never goodbye. It’s see you later! At the conclusion of a successful project, while the on-demand marketing professional may temporarily go away for a bit, they are never gone forever. The project may have lasted weeks or months, but relationships with on-demand marketers can last years. When you have a need, they will be there to fill it!
The use of on-demand marketing professionals is growing exponentially. New platforms make it easier for you to find the right one and establish the right relationship. There’s little risk to trying to use an on-demand marketing professional to see if it’s right for your organization.
In Other News
Forbes - The Great Disconnect Between Bosses and Workers - The return to the office movement has highlighted the disconnect between executives, managers and their employees. Generally, the supervisors want everyone to come back to their offices. Meanwhile, employees are perfectly happy working remotely. Most executives (66%) report they are designing post-pandemic workforce policies with little to no direct input from employees. About two-thirds of executives (66%) believe they’re being “very transparent” regarding their “post-pandemic” policies, but less than half of workers (42%) agree.
Wall Street Journal - In This Economy, Getting Fired Takes Hard Work - To hold down a job these days, a worker seemingly needs one essential trait: a pulse. Some jobs have always required little more than the ability to stay awake. In the tightest labor market in a half-century, people in higher functions may get by just going through the motions, too. “You’d have to be incredibly lousy” to get fired as a software engineer at the moment, says David Cancel, who employs roughly 700 people as chief executive of Drift, a Boston-based marketing firm that uses artificial intelligence. “Most companies—and us, in some cases—are keeping people who wouldn’t be on the team in a looser market. The standards would be higher.”
New York Times - Apple Delays and Modifies Its Return to Office Plan - Apple, in a blow to its efforts to restore normalcy to its operations, has suspended its requirement that employees return to the office this month for at least three days a week because of a resurgence of Covid-19 cases. The reversal was welcome news for thousands of employees who pushed back against the company’s demand that they begin coming to the office three days a week in late May. Early this month, the group, which calls itself “Apple Together,” published a letter calling on the executive team to allow for a hybrid and flexible work schedule, saying they could collaborate remotely using online tools such as Slack and spare themselves hours of commuting.
Wall Street Journal - At Tech Companies, the Rebellion Against the Return to the Office Is Getting Serious - Some of the economy’s most in-demand employees are about to find out how much power they have over where and how they work. After months of return-to-work starts and stops, many tech companies, including Google, Apple Inc., and Microsoft Corp., are telling remote workers it’s finally time to come back for good, or at least show up part of the week. Employees who fled the Bay Area and other high-cost tech hubs earlier in the Covid-19 pandemic—or who just prefer to work from home—now face hard choices: move back, try the super commute, or hold out for a concession or new job elsewhere….Two-thirds of the workforce said they would find a new job if required to return to the office full-time, according to a survey of more than 32,000 workers by ADP Research Institute. Of those who quit their jobs in 2021, 35% cited wanting to move to a different area, according to the Pew Research Center.