Digital marketing is a necessity for most businesses these days. Both large and small businesses alike must navigate the ever-changing virtual sea of online social platforms, email marketing, and website SEO.
While digital marketing agencies certainly do have their selling points, especially for large businesses, digital marketing freelancers are more often the better choice for small businesses. Read on to discover why freelancers are better for your brand.
There are four fundamental ways that freelancers are better than digital marketing agencies for small businesses.
Without a doubt, the best reason to hire a freelancer over a digital marketing agency is the cost difference between the two.
Digital marketing agencies are more than a single individual, they're a team, or even a team of teams. That means that when you hire a digital marketing agency for your marketing campaign you're paying for the services of multiple people, and larger agencies even have overhead costs such as administrative assistants, upper management, and office space.
It's often the case that digital marketing companies have minimum account budgets as well. That means you may need to sign up for a $4,000 per month commitment or larger to cover basic non-working costs before the agency will even begin to work with you.
Freelancers, on the other hand, come at a fraction of the cost of a full-service digital agency. If you have a small business, you may not be able to afford an agency. Freelance digital marketers, though, are available at a wide range of prices. With a freelancer, you can plan to pay anywhere from tens of dollars to tens-of-thousands of dollars on a project depending specifically on your business needs and budget.
Freelancers tend to be much more flexible than digital marketing agencies.
A digital marketing agency will often be working for multiple clients at once. As such, the agency will need to plan out multiple project timetables so that they can use their team members as efficiently as possible. This makes their schedules more rigid. If you decide to alter your marketing budget or plan midway through a project, an agency may flat out refuse your request, or they may charge you extra to work their employees overtime to compensate for any scope changes.
Freelancers, however, are flexible. You may be a freelancer's only current client, or at most one of a select few. If you want last-minute changes to your marketing plan, a freelancer is much more likely to adjust on the fly without a complaint or concern.
And if there are changes to your overall scope or budget, a freelancer will likely be able to tack on extra work without charging you any extra overtime fees. The same applies to on-going work, too. You can work with a freelancer on a week-by-week basis, altering the workload, strategies, and budget as the campaign analytics necessitate.
The larger a digital marketing agency is, the less the people of the agency will be focused on you and your business, especially if you have a relatively small business compared to the bulk of their clientele. That's not to say that the work will be substandard, but you are less likely to have a say in your own marketing campaign the larger the agency is that you work with. There may be a number of agency team members working on your project, but you may never even see or speak to most of them.
But with a freelancer, you will have as much or as little communication and control as you desire. Freelancers thrive off of client feedback, but they're also well-equipped to take the lead on a project in their given field. If you'd like to have direct communication with the person who is controlling your brand's image, you'd be better off hiring a freelancer.
This may come as a surprise, but, more often than not, digital marketing expertise lies in favor of the freelancer.
A digital marketing agency has a team of marketers at the ready, many of whom have worked with numerous clients, perhaps even some big-name brands. But, are the people working on your brand the best that the agency has to offer? Maybe they're experts in digital advertising, but do they know anything about SEO or email marketing? Who knows? How do you find out?
With a digital marketing freelancer, especially so with the fine folks on the Fiverr Marketplace, you can search for and hire a digital marketing expert with specific expertise in the type of marketing you need for your business. Do you need a local SEO expert? An influencer to promote your product? Or maybe you could use a social media marketing master to blow up your social pages. Whatever the expertise you need, there's a Fiverr freelancer who specializes in it.
