Some quick-turn marketing and advertising campaigns require more heavy lifting than an agency’s current staff can handle by themselves. In these cases, it can be beneficial to bring in contractors or freelancers for reinforcement.
However, it’s unwise to hire the first affordable freelancer you encounter. Instead, you should ensure that any contractors you work with are on the same page with the rest of the team and fully understand the campaign’s focus and direction.
To help agency owners effectively onboard project-based workers, 14 Forbes Agency Council members offered their advice to get freelancers up to speed on a time-crunched campaign.
1. Develop A Well-Defined Brand Style Guide
At our company, we utilize 400 freelance writers to create more than 50,000 words of content a day for our various clients. When working with freelance writers, it is important to make sure you have a well-defined brand voice document and style guide. Further, it’s important that they receive sample pieces that they can review and ask questions about before they begin the project. – Brent Payne, Loud Interactive, LLC
2. Form Long-Term Relationships
Great freelancer relationships are just that: relationships. So developing long-term relationships enables those hiring the freelancers and the freelancers themselves to have an ongoing understanding. This makes individual projects easier to start, easier to manage and much more successful in terms of results. – Paul Furiga, WordWrite
3. Vet Your Freelancers
First, you should have vetted freelancers that you know are good enough, know how you work and would, ideally, be a culture fit. Avoid the scramble for talent. Make sure they’ve at least done a dummy project so that the onboarding briefing process is super-efficient when it comes to the real deal. Then, it’s all in the quality of your brief; blend context and detail for the best outcome. – Raman Sehgal, ramarketing
4. Incentivize Your Freelancers To Perform Well
One of the things that I have found works great is incentivizing. If the bare minimum outcome is X, the idea is to incentivize each freelancer so that if the campaign achieves 1.5 times that bare minimum, then their payout would go up to, say, 1.4 times the value of their contract. This has worked with 200-plus freelancers on a campaign. Knowing that each one’s value adds to everyone’s payout helped not just to align, but also redefine cooperation. – Sandeep Rao, One Source
5. Maintain Regular Communication
Keeping regular communication is extremely important. With freelance workers, it helps to have daily meetings to make sure they understand exactly what the campaign needs and how to approach each aspect of it, putting them in tune with what you are trying to accomplish. This also allows you to have a better working relationship and increase cooperation. – Lisa Montenegro, Digital Marketing Experts – DMX
6. Bring Them On Early For Seamless Integration
In times of rapid growth, many agencies leverage freelancers for everything from new business pitches to onboarding new accounts, so it’s critical to ensure that the freelancers seamlessly integrate with the agency culture and the objectives of the brand. Bring them on early in the process so that they are able to get a full onboarding experience and have enough historical context to bring in fresh ideas. – Mike Popowski, Dagger
8. Start With A Strong Brief And Process
Create a strong brief with defined needs and delivery expectations. Have a process. We often need to scale to meet the needs of our clients. We create a good brief and make sure that all team members follow our collaborative process and use the same tools we use to facilitate the creative process. This provides the new team members with clear goals and a positive platform to voice ideas. – David LaRosa, Verso
9. Find Freelancers Familiar With Your Industry
Having a fully formed and detailed creative brief can go a long way toward ensuring that freelancers and contractors understand the campaign’s focus, direction and purpose. We’re fortunate to have developed relationships with freelancers familiar with our industry whom we can call upon and trust to be onboarded quickly and get down to work. – Ajay Gupta, Stirista
10. Test Them On Internal Campaigns First
The best way I’ve found to ensure that we don’t trip up while running full speed with a client campaign is to test the freelancer/contractor beforehand on internal agency campaigns, providing similar fast-paced requirements and quality standards as we would for a client. You don’t want to be surprised in the middle of a touch campaign by finding out you have a prima donna freelancer who is only willing to work 10 hours a week. – Terry Tateossian, Socialfix Media
11. Set Clear Parameters With All Parties
First, find contract workers with experience who know how to insert themselves seamlessly into a team. Then, set clear parameters so that all parties involved (your contractors, employees and client) understand the role of the contract workers and their role in the team. – Valerie Chan, Plat4orm PR
12. Provide Written Clarification Up Front
Provide written clarification of what exactly you are looking for up front so that it can be easily referenced throughout the process to avoid any confusion. Ask the freelancers to explain what they intend to provide before they begin working to make sure you are aligned. Clear, consistent communication is key to success in a quick-turnaround campaign to make the best use of everyone’s time. – Corbett Drummey, Popular Pays
13. Guide Their Support Of Your Strategic Concept
Do the heavy lifting on the strategic concept and provide a detailed brief including key goals, target outcomes and specific content elements required for inclusion to effectively manage external freelancers. The more specific and detailed direction, the better the outcome. – Ilissa Miller, IMiller Public Relations
14. Establish Retainer Agreements
Developing long-term relationships with contractors solves many potential issues. They’re familiar with our processes and tools, shortcutting ramp time. Unless it’s a new client, they are also familiar with the products and brand. We’ve picked content writers for their domain expertise so that we can focus on the job. Retainers help, too, so that they view you as a high priority on tight timelines. – Khali Henderson, BuzzTheory
15. Give Freelancers In-House Context And Background
It’s important to onboard freelancers with the same dedication you would when onboarding a new full-time team member. Give them all of the context and background you have as well as access to all of the materials the in-house team has. When possible, you can even give them recordings of client meetings so that they can hear the direction from the client directly, even if they are not on the calls. – April White, Trust Relations
