Digital marketing, especially in the COVID-19 period, is one of the most important and efficient marketing strategies for every business. Using digital channels, you can reach an enormous number of audiences without borders.
There are various types of digital marketing such as social media marketing, email marketing, and display advertising. Some can be done by few people while some need a big team. For example, while email marketing only needs a few people to come up with good email content, website marketing needs several talents to create, design, manage, and measure it. It is however costly to hire a full-time employee for every digital marketing. Moreover, you need different digital specialists for different digital marketing campaigns. Therefore, in this article, we’d like to introduce the 3 most useful digital marketing freelancers that can help your marketing projects. Since every business is in different stages, we will use Buxton’s three stages of business growth to suggest useful digital marketing freelancers for each stage. By hiring the right freelancers, your company will be able to grow more efficiently.
#1: Emergence stage – Freelance Social Media Specialist
Emergence is the earliest stage of business. It is when almost no one knows about the company. In this stage, the most important task is to raise awareness of your company. By raising awareness, your company will be able to build a customer base to fund future growth. There are various ways to raise awareness but amongst them, we suggest hiring a freelance social media manager to conduct social media marketing.
There are many duties social media specialists can handle. As their main duty, they can develop and manage the social media campaign of your company. For example, when you give them a topic, they can transform it into a post that is suitable for the social media platform. They can also manage communication with potential customers on social media. Moreover, to ensure the effectiveness of your strategies, they can monitor data like user engagement rate to improve limitations.
Since social media managers handle a variety of tasks and generate the voice of a company, you should look into their copywriting skills, research skills, analytical skills, as well as communication skills before hiring. You should also make sure that they are familiar with the platform that your company plans to use.
Advantages
There are several advantages of hiring a social media marketing freelancer for your digital marketing, especially in this stage of business growth. First, you can save money. Unless the social media content you want needs high-quality filming and editing skills, social media specialisr can create a post within a few hours. Therefore, by hiring freelancers who can be paid by their number of projects or hours, you can get quality content more affordably than a full-time employee. This will be especially helpful in the early stage of business when you don’t have much marketing budget to spend.
Secondly, you can make sure your account is always on-trend and ready to react. Creating and posting content may not take too long. However, staying tuned with the latest trend and features requires frequent and consistent usage of social media. This is time-consuming especially in the early stage of a business. However, with freelance social media managers, your company will be able to use the latest feature and trends to efficiently raise awareness without spending so much time.
Lastly, you can assess and develop your campaign with a new point of view. Unlike a full-time employee who is already part of your company, digital marketing freelancers have more perspectives, objectivity, and ideas. Using their point of view and knowledge, they may suggest a new idea or assess the progress more objectively. These will be very valuable to improve your marketing campaigns.
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#2: Expansion stage – Freelance Data Specialist
Expansion is the stage when your company is rapidly growing. In this stage, you would look for opportunities to expand into a new market. Therefore, the most important task in this stage is to analyze the data of your company to make the best decision.
It is often difficult to handle a large amount of data unless you have expert knowledge of it. Thus, if you do not have a full-time data specialist, hire a data specialist to collect and interpret data to find a business opportunity. Using their analysis, you can uncover problems or opportunities that will lead to successful decision-making.
There are three main different types of data specialists – data analysts, business analysts, and data scientists.
First, a data analyst uses analysis tools to provide meaning from the data. They focus more on technical data than providing suggestions. Second, a business analyst focuses more on a strategic role to find problems and give solutions. They often provide a more marketing-focused analysis. Finally, a data scientist uses data to uncover weaknesses, trends, or opportunities for an organization. They have better insight into human behavior to make better predictions and business insight.
Every data specialist knows how to use data to identify trends and patterns. However, some specialize more in marketing while some specialize more in a technical area. Thus, depending on your need and purpose, choose the one that can deliver the best insight to your company. Consult with them to come up with the best solution or opportunity for your business. With the right freelance data specialist, you will be able to make a better and objective decision based on the actual data and trends.
#3: Maturity stage – Freelance UI Designer
A company enters the maturity stage when it is well-known and generates high levels of cash flow (Buxton, NA). Since your market and product are already solid, adding a new market is not very attractive to customers. Thus, instead of creating new products or services, you should focus more on maximizing the performance of existing products and growing brand loyalty.
In this stage, you would probably already have several effective marketing strategies that promote your product. You would also have a solid base of customers or people who are aware of your company. Thus, we recommend improving the website by hiring digital marketing freelancers who specialize in UI design. With a more user-friendly website, visitors will be more convinced to convert from potential customers to buyers.
The main job of UI designers is to provide an optimal experience for visitors using visual elements. They determine an appropriate position, size, color, and shape that is convenient for every visitor to navigate the website. They think in the eye of a visitor to come up with the most efficient structure of a website. At the same time, they embed the company’s brand image to ensure visitors remember the company. Therefore, UI designers not only require hard skills like Adobe XD or InVision but also communication skills to deliver the company’s message effectively to the audience. When you look for a UI designer, make sure they have sufficient soft skills to portray the brand image to the target audience. By optimizing into a more user-friendly and organized website, you will be able to maintain and grow customers to sustain your company.
References
https://www.buxtonco.com/blog/3-stages-of-business-growth-and-how-to-navigate-them