Dear Marketing Manager – How to onboard freelancers to get all the benefits

By: Carsten Bjerregaard, CEO, Marketingcapacity.com

The marketing landscape is constantly changing. That’s why marketing departments must also adapt in order to deliver results. New technologies, pressure on performance and an increased need for specialized knowledge make it impossible for a permanent internal team to solve all tasks with high quality. That’s why more and more companies are supplementing their core team with an ecosystem of specialized freelancers. As a strategic choice to be able to create greater impact from a given marketing budget.

The trend of thinking in ecosystems with more freelancers will continue and grow, but if you as a company want to get the full benefit of freelance collaborations, it may require you to rethink onboarding, collaboration and management. This article offers a suggestion on how you can do it.

Why the strategy with freelancers in marketing is winning

Freelancers are not just for emergencies or bottlenecks. Used correctly, they can be a necessary strategic extension of your team. Among the most obvious benefits are flexibility, quality and cost-effectiveness.

• Flexibility and scaling

One of the biggest benefits of freelancers is flexibility. You can quickly scale up and down, depending on campaigns, seasonal fluctuations or new projects. From a sales campaign to a website relaunch. According to a report from Deloitte, 85% of senior executives consider flexible labor to be a crucial competitive advantage in organizations of the future (Deloitte, Global Human Capital Trends, 2023).

• Expertise at your fingertips

With an ecosystem of freelancers, you have access to many of the necessary disciplines – SEO, paid, email automation, content, CRO, and much more. Freelancers give you in-house access to deep specialist knowledge without having to find an external specialist agency within a niche. This makes it easier to operate with an agile and competent team that can deliver across channels and tactics.

• Increased efficiency and lower costs

Freelancers are driven by deliverables – not processes. They often work project- or hourly-based, and this often means a higher effective output per hour compared to permanent employees. According to Upwork’s Future Workforce Report (2023), 73% of companies that use freelancers state that they achieve higher efficiency in deliveries when the collaboration is well-defined.

But precisely because freelancers work differently, they also need to be onboarded differently. In my work finding and integrating freelancers into, among others, over 40% of C25 companies’ marketing work, I have gained some experience on how to get the best possible benefit.

Light onboarding – with clear direction

If you find the right freelancer with relevant experience, you can get started quickly. Many who collaborate with MarketingCapacity.dk are actually surprised at how quickly they can have a freelancer on site. And that freelancers often ‘hit the ground running’.

Despite this, I would recommend that you think about how to get started in the best possible way.

The good news is that you don’t need to pull out the entire HR manual. Freelancers don’t expect (and some may not want) the same onboarding process as a permanent employee. But that doesn’t mean you should skip onboarding. You just need to focus differently.

Freelancers are usually chosen because they are experts. Therefore, they don’t need professional training, but rather:

• A brief introduction to your company’s tone of voice, target groups, and way of working
• Access to necessary systems and platforms (CMS, campaign tools, Slack/Teams, etc.).
• A contact person they can go to during the first week

A study in the Harvard Business Review highlights “access to information and decision-makers” as the most important success factor in freelance collaborations, especially in shorter or project-based engagements (HBR, 2021).

3 contrete steps you could easily do:

• Create a checklist with the most important links and logins
• Use a short Loom video, for example, where you present the project and the team
• Provide a clear framework for how feedback, iteration and submissions take place

NB: Not a “single point of contact”

Many marketing teams make the mistake of treating freelancers as small agencies that must be managed through one permanent contact person. This may be very natural if you are mostly used to working with external agencies. But it kills both pace and value. Just as it would if permanent employees always had to go through a common contact person.

Freelancers are best when they are integrated into the team – and work closely with colleagues, stakeholders and decision-makers. According to Forbes, freelancers both feel more engaged and deliver faster when they work partly onsite and have direct access to the team (Forbes, 2022).

View your freelancers as part-time colleagues – not as external “suppliers”. Give them:

• Opportunity to participate in relevant team meetings
• Access to project threads and communication channels
• Shared goals and evaluations with the team

It doesn’t just create faster progress – it also provides mutual learning and better results.

Time tracking and structure = better collaboration

One of the places where friction can sometimes arise in freelance collaborations is around time, scope and billing. It’s not enough to “expect about 20 hours” if you don’t follow up.

Make sure you have a system in place for:

• Time tracking (e.g. Toggl, Harvest, Clockify)
• Project status and task overview (e.g. Asana, Trello, Notion)
• Billing and payment agreements (preferably in writing)

According to Upwork’s latest report, 63% of companies experience that they get a more productive and transparent freelance effort when time consumption is continuously documented and shared with the team (Upwork, 2023).

On the MarketingCapacity.com platform, time, scope and billing are collected in one place – and help to make the collaboration run more smoothly. Every week, hourly reports are generated and sent to the company that the freelancer works for. With a statement of what, when and how much is worked on various tasks.

Conclusion

Freelancers are not just a temporary solution – they are a strategic asset if you onboard them correctly. You get specialized knowledge, scalability and execution power.

But make sure to create the foundation for them to deliver:

• Provide an easy but structured onboarding
• See them as part of the team – not as “externals”
• Ensure clarity around time, scope and communication

With the right setup, your freelancers won’t just “help” – they will significantly accelerate your team’s performance.

Checklist:

• Short intro to brand, target group and project
• Access to systems and files
• A permanent contact person for clarifications
• Access to team channels and relevant meetings
• A simple system for time and billing
• Clear expectation alignment on scope and deadlines