Why Hiring Freelancers Without A Strategy Will Drive You CRAZY

Thinking about hiring freelancers yourself to do your marketing?

Before you do, know this.

Hiring is easy.

But managing them can easily make you crazy if you don't have a sound strategy.

Think we’re exaggerating?

Oh, boy. You’re in for quite some trouble.,

First things first, we need to make something clear:

WE LOVE FREELANCERS.

This is how we look like when we think about our amazing freelancers:

Totally head over hills.

Freelancers are the base of our whole business.

Without freelancers, there wouldn’t be:

1. groost
2. amazing content provided to you on-demand
3. fun, yet educational content to keep you amused and help you avoid the most common mistakes made by business owners adventuring through the scary, yet wonderful world of marketing.

But the thing about freelancers is that…

They’re people.

At least we haven’t heard about robot freelancers.

Yet.

Until then, we’ll stick to human freelancers.

With all their human dramas.

You see, the greatest challenge about working with freelancers is not hiring them. 

Hiring is easy.

, you find a freelancer, you check if you like their face, describe what you need, give them money, and they deliver what you asked for. 

Hopefully.

I said hopefully because it will depend on your capacity to describe what you need, find the proper freelancer to deliver that, but first and foremost, to deal with this awesome, yet wild workforce.

Don’t fool yourself. Freelancers aren’t cute puppies.

They’re wild. Awesome and wild.

Being a Freelancer Isn’t Easy

The first thing you need to understand is that being a freelancer is not easy.

They don’t have health insurance or other benefits. Most of them don’t have long-term contracts with their clients.

But they do have freedom. And that’s usually what motivates them to become a freelancer.

Freedom.

They’re not like employees, who are used to abiding by almost anything their employers say.

Of course, great freelancers are willing to learn and will hear you. 

But if they don’t like the direction the project is taking, or even if they don’t like a subtle thing like how you’re providing feedback or if you’re bossing them around too much, they’ll run.

Great freelancers are very busy and sought after because they deliver. 

This means they’re not in it only for the money, but specially for the quality of life and opportunities to hone their skills.

It also means that you must know how to deal with them, how to communicate, how to organize briefings, tasks, and deliveries, and especially how to keep them motivated to work with your brand.

Or else, they’ll work for someone who does.

Now, say that after looking around you’ve found a great freelancer. One that’s a right fit for your project and culture.

You still haven’t won.

One thing is hiring ONE freelancer to help you with ONE thing.

You can hire a copywriter to do amazing copy for you. 

You can hire a designer. They will deliver great visual creatives pretty fast.

And you can also hire a media buyer. They’ll create high-converting ads spending less than you would (with their rates included).

If you eventually find a copywriter/designer/media buyer who does all the work of a full team, they’ll also probably charge the fees of a full team because they are rare. Unicorn-like rare.

But if you need to hire three or four freelancers (which you'll probably end up doing), it's a whole different world. 

If you don’t have the time, AND the patience, AND the required managing skills, AND experience working with freelancers, it soon might become a tiresome routine.

Before hiring all those people, you need a strategy.

Why Do You Need a Sound Strategy Before Hiring a Freelancer

If you don’t have a strategy before hiring a freelancer, you’ll have an awesome copy, an awesome design, and/or an awesome PPC campaign… but the end result will probably look like a Frankenstein because each piece was created separately.

So now you need either to come up with a winning strategy, which will probably be very hard because you’re not a marketing strategist, or hire a strategist even before you hire any of those freelancers.

Last but not least, you need to manage them all so that their work is done according to that strategy.

See how that can easily go out of hand? 

You thought you would hire one freelancer, and now you basically hired a team you have to manage yourself. Or hire another freelancer to manage them for you.

Good luck doing that. Probably you won’t have much time left to work on your business, but hey, at least you’ve solved your problem by hiring all those nice freelancers! 

You’re set for some time, right?

Right?!

Bad news. When everything starts running smoothly, the copywriter gets sick and can’t work for a couple of weeks. 

Or something good happens - their first child is born! Yay for them. Boohoo for you.

So there you go finding another wild copywriter to fill in their shoes. And onboarding that copywriter to the team.

When you finally find a new copywriter, the designer decides to follow their passion and become a coffee roaster.

Goodbye designer, goodbye another week’s night’s sleep. Hello, another week of hiring and onboarding.

Long story short…

Although you can achieve great things with freelancers, you’ll also need to put a lot of time and effort to manage them.

This is our expertise here at groost - finding, managing, and motivating the best freelancers around the world, with the best rates, who are willing to deliver small businesses the content they need for successful marketing campaigns.

“I’ve been a full-time freelancer for over 5 years. And I’ve never worked with a company so organized and transparent as groost. I know exactly what is expected of me, and I can not only feel but also see the good impact my work is having. Knowing that my work is helping entrepreneurs all across the globe achieve their goals is highly motivating.” Caio, copywriter at groost

What To Consider Before Hiring Any Freelancer

Now that you understand how difficult it is to hire, manage, and keep freelancers motivated, I would like to ask you one simple question.

Why bother?

I mean, why should you put yourself in that position if you can just login to your groost account, order your content, and get top-notch campaigns delivered to you in a couple of days without all the drama?

It’s the best of all the worlds:

• Top-notch, Agency–level quality for a fraction of the cost and no long contracts or hidden fees
• Easier to use and better results than free templates
• Marketing expertise with your best interest at heart and no empty promises
• Freelancer awesomeness without the drama

With groost, you can literally have your cake and eat it too.

And it’s your favorite cake, but without any calories, and it’s free, and it’s more nutritious than kale.

Don’t like cake?

Give groost a chance, and you’ll see that groost is the best thing since sliced bread. If bread was social media marketing and slices were on-demand campaigns