Hiring a freelancer or consultant who does "marketing" puts your effectiveness and reputation at risk.
Even if you don't hire me, I want you to avoid hiring one of them.
The best freelancers and consultants are trained to a high standard and have a healthy amount of experience. If they have over ten years of applied practice with consistently good results, and have worked above middle-management (such as senior manager / head of marketing / director level), chances are they are going to be reliable, knowledgeable, and adaptable.
Here's the issue: very few of those marketers go into freelancing or consultancy.
Do they have balanced expertise?
Balanced expertise means they can deliver work that is based on knowledge and built with best practice, and they have the depth and breadth to work around problems that arise without compromising effectiveness.
Imbalanced expertise is dangerous, as your project will pull them out of their depth and they won't be able to deliver much of any quality. By the time you find out they were not up to the job, they've got your money and gone.
Most freelancers and consultants fall into one of four categories that you need to approach with caution.
A lot of applied experience
x
little to no training.
Their knowledge is limited to their experience, so they can't anticipate issues that might arise, or know how to work around them when they do. Their practice is heavily reliant on repeating what they have done before, which might not be the best solution for you.
The lack of training means they lack the broader knowledge that makes them adaptable beyond their direct experience, and they don't have a benchmark to judge sources against. There's a good chance they are taking on flawed information, and will replicate the errors and misunderstandings in the work they do for you.
Too much theory
x
too little practice.
They think that academia and/or training has given them all the answers, but their limited applied experience makes them unaware of the theory and practice gap. They don't know how to formulate a plan B when the theory doesn't work, resorting to theory-hopping or pot-shots.
They also replicate and amplify the flaws of their educators, whose exposure to marketing is majority or even wholly academic, unable to advise how to workaround unexpected problems. The academic focus of their training makes them very good at talking to to other marketers about abstract concepts, but very poor at understanding marketing's influence on the concrete mechanics and operations of a business.
Specialists presenting themselves
as generalists.
Trained and highly competent in specific areas of marketing, they think that there is no difference between the parts and the whole. They overestimate their ability to deliver work outside of their specialism, so they take your money for work they don't have the expertise to deliver.
As each stage of the marketing process responds to the former, all of them have to be done equally well for marketing to be successful. They think that their subjective choice of specialism makes it objectively more important than the other parts, leading to suboptimal choices and poor integrations due to the bias toward their preference.
They charge money to parrot the 'experts' and gurus, pushing trends and bandwagons, because they don't have anything else. They don't understand the theory, so they get that wrong; they don't have much practice, so they throw stuff at the wall and hope some of it sticks.
They are completely unaware of how much they don't know and massively overestimating the value of what they do. They know how to say the words and use the tools, but have no idea what the job is or how to do it properly. All the gear and no idea; all style and no substance; you know the type.
Little training or experience.
What do they have to say for themselves?
Why do I put up so much information when other freelancers barely tell you anything?
So that you can make an informed decision before you contact me. I'd rather we start a conversation when you're convinced it's worth your time, as that's better for both of us.
Many freelancers provide very limited information upfront to get you into a conversation as quickly as possible and get a rapport going. Why? It distracts from expertise. If they get you to like them, you are less likely to ask questions that might lose them the gig.
I've dealt with many freelancers like that in the past, I really don't like that way of doing it.
You have a few calls before you realise they are not right. A few hours you could have been doing one of the hundred other things you need to do, and a few hours they could have been spending on likelier commissions. Multiply that across a handful of freelancers or consultants, and you've just lost a day of working time.
If this is indicative of how they work, it doesn't look good for you.
First, it shows they don't have much substance. They are unlikely to have enough about them to give you any advantage.
Second, they are playing a poor marketing move of chasing quantity over quantity, which shows they are prone to questionable choices.
Third, it doesn't show much business sense. They've spent time chasing a lukewarm lead for no return instead of spending it on paid work or focusing acquisition on fewer but better leads.
Fourth, it shows they don't have any customer orientation. They've wasted your time when they could and should have created a process that minimises or avoids it.
There's more reasons for concern than that, but you get the picture.
Are their actions matching their words?
If you have been looking for freelancers and consultants for the past few days or weeks, have you noticed that...
... they don't talk about the approach behind their marketing?
... they all have the same template websites with the same profiles and imagery and tone and...well, everything?
... you only ever find them on search engines, you never see any promotional campaigns or advertising?
Isn't that a bit...strange?
They don't have a defined approach so they can tell you what you want to hear to get the job.
They don't have positioning because they know the theory and debates about it, but they don't really know how to do it.
They don't run campaigns because they don't have any proper strategy, so they don't know what to do with their tactics.
I would be very suspicious of any freelancers or consultants who are not doing the things they claim they can help you with.
If they are not doing these things for themselves, you should be wary how well they will do them for you.