Freelancing isn’t new, but its prevalence is. In 2021, freelance work grew by an estimated $100 million over the previous year, and 36% of the labor force did some kind of freelancing.
This growth means that, among other things, hiring freelancers is a more visible and more viable option than it has been in the past. Plenty of marketers might now find themselves unsure if they should hire an employee or a freelancer for their newest content needs.
If this is something you’ve been wondering, here’s a freelancer’s take on five of the biggest benefits of getting freelance help for your content.
1. We’re Cost-Effective
To be clear, freelancers aren’t cheap — we cost more per hour or per project than a traditional employee does. But we don’t cost any more than that.
That means you don’t have to worry about paying for benefits, vacation time, or all the hours we spend answering emails instead of producing content. Even finding freelancers is cheaper than hiring traditional employees, since HR usually isn’t involved and we do most of the follow-up tasks ourselves.
A lot of people see this cost-effectiveness as an exploitative relationship, but if you’re working with a professional who knows what their work is worth in the market, it’s not. We set our rates knowing how much we need to earn to build a relationship that’s equally cost-effective for us and the business hiring us.
2. We Save Time and Effort
Companies often try to save money by keeping their teams lean, but leanness means that when an upsurge of work comes, employees get stretched too thin. Getting stretched too thin leads to burnout and resignation. The remaining employees then have even more work on their plates, and the cycle continues.
The solution? Offload some of that extra work to a freelancer.
Often, freelancers specialize in work that takes a significant amount of time to complete. If you were to have someone in your marketing department write a white paper, for example, that could be the employee’s entire day—or several days. But that employee’s day-to-day tasks and meetings wouldn’t stop, so they would have to figure out how to cram hours of content production into an already-full schedule.
On the other hand, if you gave that assignment to a freelancer, they would have much more flexibility to fit the work into their schedule and get it delivered in a timely manner. Your employee, meanwhile, would be free to focus on their core job.
If you want to avoid the burnout and resignation crises currently plaguing businesses and keep your employees relaxed and happy, giving some of their more time-consuming tasks to a freelancer is a great way to go.
3. We’re Experts in our Fields
We wouldn’t have gone into business selling our services if we weren’t completely confident that our services were valuable. In other words, we wouldn’t be doing this if we weren’t really good at what we do.
Of course you can find expert employees, too. But many freelancers live or die by our ability to do one or two skills exceptionally well. As such, we put a lot of our professional development energy into honing and perfecting those skills. You can be reasonably confident that an established, full-time freelancer will deliver a very strong end product.
4. We’re Exceptionally Reliable
If an employee misses a deadline, they will still have a job (unless they miss a lot of deadlines). If a freelancer misses a deadline, they have risked losing that client.
As you can probably imagine, we’re really good at meeting our deadlines.
Similarly, if an employee turns in subpar work, they’ll be given a lot of training and second chances before being let go. If we turn in subpar work, clients can easily choose to work with someone else. So, we try not to turn in subpar work.
A freelancer’s livelihood depends on whether we can deliver high-quality work on or before deadline on a consistent basis. Coasting through our work is not an option. So if you want to work with someone who will give every assignment 110%, a freelancer is a pretty good bet.
5. We’re Self-Motivated
It takes a special kind of crazy to decide to strike out into business on your own. In most cases, it’s the kind of crazy that finds making color-coded schedules fun.
I enjoy being my own boss for many reasons, but chief among them is that I enjoy challenging myself and will do so without anyone else’s prodding. Many freelancers have a similar type of drive. This particular drive may also lead us to find more efficient ways to complete tasks, suggest creative new approaches to working together, or develop interesting topics for your content.
A freelancer isn’t usually your project manager, but we are always our own project managers. As we make plans for the best way to complete your project, it can amount to roughly the same thing.
We’re not always content strategists, but we have a strategic mind that can help you find new avenues for your content once we’ve come to understand your brand.
In short, we’re not comfortable just coasting along — not just because we can’t, as I mentioned earlier, but because we don’t want to.
Everyone wants a self-motivated employee. When you decide to work with a freelancer, you know that self-motivation is basically guaranteed.
There are plenty of situations when hiring an employee, whether full-time or part-time, is the right choice for a business. But there are also a lot of situations where a freelancer is the best fit — and there are likely more of the latter than you realize.
If you’re wondering whether a freelancer can support you in developing your content, feel free to reach out to discuss how I can support you.
Nicole D'Angelo 