If you haven’t heard the term ‘gig economy’ before then get ready because you’re about to see it everywhere. It’s used to refer to the fact that more and more people are opting for self-employment, accompanied by a boom in freelancing websites and a corresponding rise in the number of people who are hiring them.
And the reasons for that are pretty simple. It effectively cuts out the middleman and allows creatives to charge clients what they’re worth instead of being paid a flat salary, and it benefits their clients because they don’t need to pay inflated costs to cover a company’s overheads. You can also do things faster because there are fewer layers of sign-off, although that also means that you’ll have to act as a creative director, taking charge of quality control yourself.
Moving quickly is super important when you’re working on lead gen campaigns because if you want them to be successful, they need to be relevant. Some companies start out with the best intentions but spend so long deploying a campaign that they fall at the first hurdle. Nobody signs up to their mailing list or converts on their landing page because the offer they have is no longer relevant.
The real benefits of the gig economy
The gig economy and the use of freelancers comes with its pros and cons, just like hiring a full-time employee. In fact, when you’re committing yourself to long-term content creation as a way to generate leads and inbound traffic, it’s more economical to hire a full-time employee than to keep on outsourcing to a freelancer.
But where the gig economy truly shines is when it comes to short-term support. For example, you might not need a full-time web developer to sit in the office year round, but you’ll need short-term support when you’re developing a microsite. In the same way, you can hire designers or film-makers to create key content that you’re using to bring in leads.
We’ve already talked about how using a freelancer is generally cheaper than outsourcing to another company, but the gig economy has another advantage. As a rule, you have to be pretty good at what you do if you want to make a living from it on your own steam. Because of that, many of the top freelancers are more skilled and more experienced than the workers you might find at an agency – especially if they’ve specialised in a niche or an industry.
Conclusion
As with most things, the gig economy is best enjoyed in moderation. It’s a useful tool to add to your marketing toolkit, but you can also overdo it. Remember that freelancers are best used as a form of short-term support, and that if you want to set yourself up for long-term success then you’ll want to build a team of your own.
Freelancers can help when it comes to making great creative, but when it comes to developing a strategy and executing it, you need a full team. That’s where we come in. Request a demo of Bant.io today to find out how we can help your company to grow by sending hot B2B leads directly to your inbox. You won’t regret it.
Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.