As with a freelance business, growing your teamlance client base takes plenty of selling tactics. Since it’s a small company in itself, you can utilize your individual skill sets to make a case for your services. One highlight to focus on is creativity.
As brands look to improve their bottom line, meet their goals, tackle new projects or invest in new services or products, they need innovative, powerful ideas. That’s where nimble, flexible teamlancers can offer more value than a full-time hire or a single freelancer. Here, we spoke with executives who frequently use teamlancers to discuss the creative benefits you should definitely promote.
6 ways teamlancers bring more creativity to a brand
- Brands can improve their weaknesses with teamlancers.
- Brands are able to outsource to grow.
- Brands can work more than 24 hours in a day.
- Brands capitalize on hiring passionate small businesses.
- Brands can move fast and work on multiple projects at once.
- Brands will benefit from a plethora of ideas.
1. Brands can improve their weaknesses with teamlancers.
Many brands have limitations in how many people they can afford to hire, yet there are still holes within their staff that need to be filled. When companies ignore these pivotal pieces of the success puzzle, their weaknesses are easy to spot.
Kari DePhillips, the CEO and founder of The Content Factory, says one of the most significant benefits of hiring teamlancers is being able to push through both personal and corporate mindset blocks, schedules and hurdles.
“You might be able to write content and copy all day for other people. You might be able to sell dust to the moon on a call, as long as it’s someone else’s dust. But when it comes to doing it for yourself, perhaps you get self-conscious,” she shares as an example.
By hiring a teamlance that consists of a content writer, a content marketer, an SEO specialist and perhaps a brand professional, the brand allows their business to stay strong and keep moving forward.
2. Brands are able to outsource to grow.
Since starting their business in 2013, Bombas has worked with a wide range of freelance talent and has seen the power of working with outside agencies firsthand, according to their vice president of creative services, Jessica Krantz. Especially during the first few years of becoming what Bombas is today, Krantz says they were fueled more by freelancers than full-time employees since they weren’t quite big enough to create in-house teams.
This proved to be an instrumental and pivotal way to outsource, utilize the best minds out there, and still scale smartly. “For us, it was beneficial to work with a wide range of freelance agencies, especially in those early startup years, because these individuals specialize in specific areas where we needed additional help,” Krantz shares.
As an example, they outsourced all of their technology needs to make sure they had 24-hour technology support for their customers without having multiple employees’ overhead, which would’ve been costly at the time. “Their team was comprised of frontend, backend, and full-stack stack engineers — all of which we didn’t have in-house at the time, so it was an added benefit that this freelance agency had people on staff with these varied skill set,” she added.
3. Brands can work more than 24 hours in a day.
Senior account executive Jason Myers has been part of The Content Factory under DePhillips for a decade. Initially, they were all freelancers before they were able to offer full-time employment to the core team. But, because they’ve been a remote company before it was trendy — or necessary in a pandemic — the concept of creating teamlances for projects has always been an organic part of their process.
Myers says even now, in their 10th year (and highest volume of marketing contracts to date), they are still split into two categories: five full-time employees and a five-person teamlance. With all of these hands-on deck, they can work smarter in all sorts of time zones without stretching the core staff to their limits. And it allows them to cover more basis.
“While our core team is made up of industry-recognized experts in PR, SEO content creation, and social media management, there are only so many hours in the week. And more clients being onboarded necessitated an infusion of additional workers to cover those new tasks,” Myers shared. “Since we’ve become adept at training executive teams on how to market themselves, that ability transferred seamlessly into training freelancers how to market using our techniques.”
4. Brands capitalize on hiring passionate small businesses.
Since a teamlance is a micro-sized small business, DePhillips says brands benefit from the flexibility and the genius they offer. She says all teamlancers have an extraordinary knack for understanding their role and the company as a whole, allowing them to be flexible, nimble and effective.
“With that, they usually come with a more diverse skillset than they market themselves for. We often find ourselves designing new positions for our freelancers that highlight talents they really want to — and can — use with us specifically. And it’s always a lot more than what they put on paper,” she adds.
5. Brands can move fast with multiple projects at once.
When Bombas decided to invest in video production, they decided against hiring full-time, and instead, utilizing a teamlance of video producers, videographers, and other audio/visual professionals. Not only does this allow them to innovate and keep their video approach fresh and compelling constantly, but they are able to do it faster, too.
“You can have multiple projects going on at once. By leveraging multiple external partners, we can produce more assets quickly and hit those internal deadlines,” she shared. “Nearly all of our TV campaigns have leveraged freelance talent.”
Another example of a recently wrapped project where they relied on external partners was a branding refresh. This included new fonts, logos, a color palette and branded lockups. They decided to outsource to a teamlance branding agency in New York who brought expert perspectives from folks who are not as close to the business. This provided far more creativity than they would have leveraged on their own.
6. Brands will benefit from a plethora of ideas.
When a brand only relies on their traditional employees, they’re limited by a few things:
- Finances and resources
- Set working hours and salaries
- Limited skill sets that don’t fit every business need
- Pending deadlines and a skeleton staff
However, when they invest in a teamlance, opportunities — and ideas — multiply. Claudine DeSola from Caravan Stylist Studio says they love collaborating with other freelancers because together, they create a much larger network and impact. One example is through their home shopping live event experiences. They join forces with a social media organizer, a graphic designer, a publicist, a media buyer, an SEO specialist, and an affiliate marketing professional to create the project’s perfect experience.
It’s because of this approach that they’ve been able to continue to prosper. “We work with all different clients, so we constantly tweak suggestions for freelancers based on the niche — tech, beauty, fashion and so on,” she shares. “It is a great way to have each freelancer utilize their skills and network, and together there is a lot of gain for the client.”
Plus, diversity says teamlancer, Page Jeter, founder of Create Entertainment and Create Hospitality. “When the room is colorful and made up of a variation of people who are working on a larger array of projects, with all kinds of experience, you are only widening your opportunities, network and thinking, and therefore expanding your brand storytelling opportunities,” she continues.
“When you’re in brand communications and marketing, reaching more consumers in a meaningful and thoughtful way is key, and there’s no better way to do that than having a diverse team from the start, especially freelancers. It’s about the people, not the company.”
