There are a lot of benefits to hiring freelance and contract workers to boost your sales and marketing efforts. You can secure exceptional talent while also decreasing overhead costs.

While those benefits are bountiful, there are also some considerable challenges you’ll need to keep in mind. If you are thinking of hiring contractors and freelancers, here are some positions to consider to help you achieve your sales and marketing goals.

Website Developer

Every business needs a website — it’s the brochure, billboard, and business card of the digital age. With a strong website, customers can interact with your brand, purchase goods or services, and interact with your customer service. Consider hiring HTML5 expert to code the elements needed to create a user-friendly online shop that boosts your ROI. Of course, if you’re savvy with web design, you can do this yourself with online tools like Squarespace.

Graphic Designer

Contracting a graphic design professional can give your brand a boost, making it relevant to the times and your customers—and this professional is ideal to have on a retainer for future projects. Aesthetics for your print and digital materials are extremely important for the first impression your company makes. Whether someone lands on your website, picks up a brochure or pockets your business card, a professional graphic designer can give your brand a crisp, clean look that visually tells your company story.

Social Media Specialist

Social media isn’t just a place to share pictures; it’s a place to share stories. Contracting a social media specialist to manage your profiles can tell the story of your company and brand while also promoting your products and services to people most likely to engage with them. They can also monitor your online reputation and respond to inquiries and negative feedback. Social media is a great way to interact with your customers in a conversational, more personal way.

Project Manager

Using a freelance certified project manager can help you build projects in a platform like Asana, Basecamp, or Trello with milestones, timelines, due dates, and assigning tasks. This person can also manage the project process or simply build the project and pass it on to someone on your team. Either option can be especially helpful for business owners in small shops who wear a lot of hats. That way, you can focus your time on more important or time-sensitive tasks.

Digital Marketing Strategist

Business isn’t going to find you if you don’t let potential clients know you’re out there. Of course, that’s where marketing comes in. While a web developer, graphic designer, and social media specialist all wear some kind of marketing hats, connecting the dots into a cohesive strategy is where a marketing professional comes into play. A freelance marketing manager can help you build a long-term marketing strategy to hand off to your employees or manage the campaigns and projects that promote your brand.

Customer Relations Manager

Hiring a freelance professional to build your CRM will help you deepen your relationship with your existing customers while also targeting your brand appropriately to potential customers. Customer relations management allows you to document encounters with customers, as well as their needs, wants, contact and billing information, and financial portfolio. Armed with this knowledge, you can target sales pitches and marketing campaigns that are more appealing. When your products and services are tailored to help customers solve a problem or reduce a pain point, you start building a strong base of loyal, repeat customers.

Where to Find Freelancers or Contractors

These essential professionals can be found on job boards tailored to digital marketing work. Whether you're looking to fulfill a short-term project, or you foresee a role that will last longer, you can find a freelancer to fit those needs. Aside from sales and marketing, these job boards cover just about every other industry from copywriting to software development.

Searching for freelancers online will require that you have a laptop (or a desktop PC). If your computer is looking a little worse for wear these days, it may be time to get that upgraded so you won’t encounter any problems when you start searching websites for your next freelancer.

Supplementing your business or team with freelancers can be a one-time or on-going solution to gaps in skills, knowledge, and capacity. By investing a little in the above professional skill sets, you can set your small business brand apart from competitors who are trying to do it all themselves.