How Freelancers and Companies Can Collaborate on Effective Marketing
Recently Wripple conducted our third Team Up Research study aimed at understanding how freelancers and the companies that hire them come together to get great work done.
Given the essential role that blended teams of freelancers and full-time employees play in the modern marketing workforce, this latest version of our Team Up Report takes a deeper look at how well these teams function — what’s working and what’s needed for teams to reach their full potential as one seamless workforce.
The Story From Both Sides
Wripple partnered with MDRG, an independent research company, to conduct two surveys. One targeted freelancers and the other focused on the marketing and HR leaders at enterprise and mid-market companies who hire freelancers. In total, we collected 414 completed surveys: 200 from freelancers and 214 from company marketing and HR leaders.
What’s Working Well?
Despite a topsy-turvy economy and labor market, both freelancers and companies feel good about the project work experience, the value they get from their work, and the potential for future engagements.
Overall Satisfaction With the Work is High
Both freelancers and companies are satisfied with their engagements. Satisfaction has also improved since 2022 — up 14 percent for freelancers and 15 percent for companies.
The Outlook is Bright for Future Work
Both freelancers and companies anticipate working together more in the future. This is likely due to a more positive mindset coming out of the pandemic and increasing acceptance of freelancing in the economy.
But like any relationship, there are always areas to improve.
While freelancers and companies have positive views about teaming up, they both perceive there's still work to be done operationally and strategically.
We see that freelancers and companies are fairly in sync on ways to improve how they work as a team, pointing to a need for clear guidance and support, more consideration of fit for the assignment, and better onboarding and briefing.
One significant difference — freelancers point to the need for stronger standards and professionalism, while companies are far less likely to say that this is an issue. This tells us that companies, even if they think things are going well, should look at how they engage freelancers and be open to feedback that could improve the freelancing experience.
Digging deeper, we start to get into one of the most fundamental limitations of freelancing’s role within the workforce — both freelancers and companies view freelancing’s overall role in the workforce as constrained.
Insights from the research provide five recommendations to put complacency in its place:
- Reduce the professionalism deficit. Instill more trust, confidence and respect throughout all aspects of the relationship. This requires establishing partnerships built on mutual understanding, transparency, and a commitment to process standards.
- Modernize end-to-end. Leverage tech to provide a better talent experience, gain speed to market, and reduce friction. This entails integrating FTE and freelancer data which will also support more holistic workforce planning, risk management, and optimization.
- Wipe out persistent process pain points. Set quality standards for hiring, onboarding and delivery. Pay close attention to providing thorough job descriptions, informative project briefs, and clear points of contact for freelancers to resolve HR and work issues.
- Capitalize on freelancing’s multidimensional nature. Embrace the freelance marketing workforce as a deep, cross-disciplined pool of experts. Many specialists are leading the charge in tech innovation, and using freelancers provides unmatched flexibility for building fit-for-purpose teams.
- Commit to core values across the entire workforce. Engage freelancers with a genuine commitment to values that are important to the modern workforce, most notably DEI, flexibility, and opportunities that provide meaningful challenges and growth.
As stated, freelancing already plays a critical role in marketing. These five recommendations will help companies and freelancers drive even stronger returns and gain strategic advantage through a more modern approach to on-demand work.
For the full research, including freelancer and company deep dives, download the report.
Angie Vaughn is the director of marketing for Wripple, marketing's on-demand talent platform.
Angie Vaughn is the marketing director at Wripple. She is a seasoned marketer whose results-driven approach has been crucial to exceeding performance goals for over two decades. She spent most of her career in the agency world as an Account Director before becoming a freelancer in 2018. As luck would have it, in 2023, she went back to working full-time for Wripple, a freelance platform focused on helping marketers use on-demand talent to increase scale, flexibility, agility, and cost-effectiveness.
She’s a strategist, researcher, data geek, and project manager all in one. She is passionate about thoughtful, data-driven work. Angie has worked with major brands such as Equifax, Coca-Cola, The Home Depot, Simmons Bedding Company, and Nissan.
