Do you love wasting marketing money?

I don’t. Let’s go straight to the point:

1. Graphic design for internal communications

Classic. HR needs to communicate stuff internally. Your marketing department has great designers, but they’re all focusing on the social media posts and email newsletters.

Options:

• An HR executive with no experience in design creates ugly material.
• You allocate one of your designers to work on this. Your social media strategy misses a deadline.
• You hire a seasoned freelance designer and get beautiful material.

2. Landing pages

We did this one. We had a team of three managing our advertising campaigns, a plethora of Google Search and Facebook Ads campaigns targeting 25 countries in three different languages. We needed to have someone focusing solely on our 70+ landing pages, making sure they all followed our brand standards, loaded quickly and constantly improving through split testing.

Options:

• Not do it and have our Quality Scores and conversion rates (so, ROI) suffer.
• Try to do it with the existing team, which meant neglecting other things:  ad iterations and CTR, target refining, budget optimisation.
• Hire a freelancer to work on our landing pages.

Guess which one we chose 🙂

3. Copywriting. All that copywriting.

What? You’re saying you do all of the copywriting for Instagram, Facebook, emails, landing pages and product descriptions inhouse? Week after week? Kudos.

The rest of us mortals out there, we’ll rely on a few freelancers for this. Efficient.

4. The remarketing stuff you didn’t even know you could do

Someone browses your website, then they see your banner when reading some blog . That one is easy.

What about “someone watches 1 min of your Facebook video and then gets a related video on their Instagram feed”?

Or “someone bought X product a week ago, so now they could be ready to buy Y product as well”?

Keep them engaged. There’s a million ways to do it.

5. Running against the clock

Back in 2008 I was working for a big corporation in Latin America (Telmex). Mother’s day was coming. We had a nice campaign involving a celebrity. The offline stuff was shaping up well: radio and TV ads, some brochures, direct mail campaign (don’t laugh, this was 2008). But the digital leg wasn’t looking too well.

We had a strategy, but no resources to work on the banners, copy and HTML coding for the emails. We were working with two agencies who were simply unable to help us, swamped as they were with the traditional marketing stuff.

Options:

• Miss the deadline with the digital leg of the campaign, missing a huge opportunity to efficiently reach a new audience.
• Look for another agency, who would’ve probably hired freelancers anyway due to the tight deadlines.
• Hire freelancers ourselves.

With Procurement on our side, we went the freelancers way.

Any of these resonate with you?

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You might also be interested in:

• Think video: everything you need to know about video marketing
• Psychology of colors: how to use them to double your sales
• UX Writing, the power of words in the User Experience
• Advantages of integrating freelancers into your content team
• Learn the metrics that a freelance social media expert should analyze about your business.
• What HR should take into account when bringing professional freelancers into the company.