When to Hire a Freelance or Fractional Marketer

The challenges of engaging with your customers, marketing your products, and growing your brand rest on your marketing team. Year after year, new trends emerge, and there are new technologies and tools to use. 

But with the right professional marketer, you can create better, more effective marketing strategies guaranteed to take your business closer to your customers.

Fractional Marketing Can Help You with Your Marketing Goals

While searching for expert marketing specialists, you may have stumbled upon fractional marketing or a fractional marketer. According to Digital Authority Partners, fractional marketing is hiring a fractional worker, an expert who works part-time to help you and your team with various marketing tasks.

A fractional marketer can be a freelance worker who is an expert in:

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing includes all marketing activities on the web, including social media, search marketing, email marketing, and online media advertising.

Content Marketing

Content marketing promotes your business using relevant, creative, and quality content. This type of marketing is not just about text content. Using videos, infographics, images, podcasts, etc. is also content marketing.

Marketing Science

Marketing science is a new skill set, and its role is still difficult to define. It primarily deals with data gathering, modeling, and storage, which are essential when creating successful marketing strategies and programs.

Customer Experience

Marketers also deal with enhancing customer experience using inbound strategies. Improving customer experience is a continuous marketing process that involves strategies to develop an emotional connection with your clients.

Fractional marketers can provide any of these services and more. As a business manager, it is up to you to decide whether you need help in any of these areas.

How to Tell Whether You Need a Fractional Marketer

You know that you need a fractional marketer to handle marketing tasks when the following issues arise:

You Ran out of Fresh Marketing Ideas

Having new marketing tactics shows that you are relevant, updated, and willing to embrace change. Your customers need to see that you are innovative and flexible, something that consumers look for in a business. With a fractional marketing expert, you will always have fresh ideas on the table.

Because of a fractional marketer’s expertise in the market and their years of experience working with other companies, they have mastered various marketing trends. They know which ones will work today and which ones to set aside for your subsequent campaigns. In short, your business will always stay relevant with new marketing ideas that are sure to drive success.

Your Engagement Rates Are Failing

Hootsuite describes engagement as the metric that shows the amount of interaction your social content gets in relation to the number of audiences.  Engagement is valuable, especially when it comes to social media marketing. 

You can also check engagement by keeping tabs on your posts. Check for the number of likes, reactions, comments, mentions, direct messages, shares, etc.

If you find that your engagement rate is failing with fewer and fewer reactions, shares, likes, etc. on your posts, it is time to turn things around. A fractional marketer who is an expert in social media marketing can help revive your ailing engagement rate by creating new marketing strategies and tactics.

Your Marketing Team Needs a Strategic Leader

Is your marketing team losing focus? Do you need someone who has a strategic mind and can lead you through the changing marketing environment? Your marketing team might have excellent ideas but lacks the focus and the drive to put these ideas to action.

For this, you need the help of a fractional marketer. You need someone who will motivate your team and trigger new ideas. A fractional marketer is a leader who will brave new marketing challenges. 

The past years have been rough for many businesses. The pandemic has made many changes; most of these changes have largely affected your marketing strategies. With a fractional marketer as chief marketing officer (CMO), you can finally plan for your post-pandemic comeback.

Your Marketing Strategies Are a Guessing Game

Is your marketing based on guesswork? Do you rely on trial and error to develop good marketing ideas? If so, you are only wasting time, effort, and money! 

But it is not too late to turn things around. You can still save your ailing marketing efforts with a fractional expert on your team.

A fractional marketing expert uses the latest tools and analytics to produce the best strategies. They do not rely on hunches or guesswork, but they conduct thorough research and study the trends relevant to your market. Fractional marketers are dedicated and ready to overhaul outdated or unproductive strategies. 

You Can’t Afford a Full-time Marketing Expert

Adding a marketing expert or a CMO to your staff can make a lot of difference but may be costly for a startup. Small businesses and startups may not have the budget or the amount of marketing work for a full-time expert. But it does not mean that these businesses cannot enjoy success from hiring a marketing specialist.

Your small business or startup can hire a fractional expert or freelancer, which costs only a fraction of the price of a full-time worker. This is one of the obvious reasons they are called “fractional” workers. 

A fractional marketer works for a limited time each week but can complete all tasks expected of them. They often work under a contract with a set deadline and marketing goals.

Fractional workers work only part-time, so they do not receive complete employment packages and perks. There is no training, unlike regular employees. 

All in all, you can save money if you hire a fractional marketer instead of a full-time employee. A fractional worker can also fill in for a marketing role until you have found a replacement.

Final Words

You know it is time to hire a freelance or fractional marketer when the decrease in engagement, poor marketing results, and reduced revenue is noticeable. It is time to recruit a fractional expert if your team lacks strategic guidance. And if you can’t afford a full-time marketing expert, you can still grow your business with the help of a fractional marketer.