What is a Freelance Digital Marketer and What Do They Do?

Online marketing transforms how businesses promote themselves and their products or services. Businesses are starting to understand the role that digital marketing, with all its caveats, plays in improving their brand awareness and online presence. 

There is a lot of competition with all the various kinds of products and services that customers are bombarded with on a daily basis. To make sure they're getting in front of the right audience and leveraging all the tools at their disposal, they often turn to a freelance digital marketer or a content marketing specialist. But what is a freelance digital marketer, and what do they offer for marketing services?

Freelance marketers can help your business by offering marketing services that are aimed at SEO, content writing, copywriting, email marketing, paid advertising (including Google ads and Facebook ads), influencer marketing, PPC, brand awareness, analytics and conversion rate optimization (CRO), and overall building up and optimizing your online presence as a brand. Essentially, they are incredibly experienced marketers who offer their marketing services contractually.

Their responsibilities can vary depending on what you as a business need, but more freelance consulting services provide "done-for-you" services in the following areas: 

Growth marketing: More popular in the marketing world and involves a marketing consultant building marketing strategies focused on growth, such as social media channel experiments, A/B testing on ads, and more.

SEO: ensuring that all facets of your company's SEO are aligned with the keywords associated with your industry. This will also include SEO audits, strategy, and determining which SEO keywords the business should create content for. 

Content marketing focuses on creating and developing content strategy, auditing what your business is already producing for content, and determining how new ideas can be implemented. 

Social media marketing and content creation focus on a business's social media strategy, how it produces content for social media, and what content it produces. They will often respond to comments and messages on behalf of your business and monitor accounts for mentions while tracking analytics.

PPC: ad campaigns are a huge part of a company's marketing strategy, and these consultants will create, manage, and report on ad campaigns for platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, TikTok, Google, and Youtube. Marketing consultants typically do keyword research and track how well the paid ads are doing.

Conversion rate optimization: A marketing consultant will examine your conversion rates and try to optimize them by improving UX (user experience), funnel optimization, landing pages, and call-to-actions. 

Brand marketing: A marketing consultant will manage your overall brand identity and ensure brand awareness. They do this by PR and monitoring your brand through sponsorships, events, and research. 

Email marketing: email marketing will involve the management of your email lists, planning, implementing, and reporting on the success of email campaigns. They might also leverage certain third-party tools to help with automation and A/B testing of various campaigns. 

Marketing analytics and marketing strategies: Examine your overall marketing analytics and strategies by measuring performance, customer segmentation, testing campaigns and social media, and ultimately reporting on the data collected. 

Affiliate or influencer marketing: this is a newer concept being leveraged by businesses, and a marketing consultant will help by developing relationships with affiliates and influencers who will help promote your brand to their audiences. They will manage and report content campaigns and figure out new trends to leverage. 

The list of what freelance digital marketers can do could go on, but these are the major responsibilities that most digital marketing freelancers specialize in. They will look at various KPIs and analytics associated with the marketing strategy of paid advertising and find ways to improve that to maximize brand awareness and the overall conversion rate of your online presence. 

There isn't much difference in terms of responsibilities and the overall role of a full marketing team compared to a freelance digital marketer. However, a full marketing team usually consists of 3-5 marketing specialists, possibly more depending on the size of the company, who each contribute to the range of responsibilities we just talked about. 

A freelance digital marketer will instead take on a more specialized role and offer marketing services in one of the areas, or they will encompass all of the digital marketer's responsibilities as one person. So, while the only difference may be the specialized skillset or the number of people, freelance marketers are a fantastic asset to any business, and there is a lot of potential as a freelancer once you step into the world of a marketing career. 

Suppose you want to get even more technical. In that case, you can bring on a freelance digital marketer to be part of your full time marketing team to help with a specific area like SEO, copywriting, email marketing, Google ads, content creation, analytics tracking, or other marketing roles that aren't already filled by other digital marketers on your team.

While any vast array of skill sets can get you started in a marketing job, there are specific elements you'll want to hone and gain more experience in to launch your freelance marketing career.

Content writing and copywriting: a huge part of digital marketing is copywriting and content writing. After all, despite the digital medium, word still conveys your message and offers a way to connect with your target audience. Even if you don't specialize in copywriting or content writing, a digital marketer needs to be able to spot good writing and provide suggestions - especially in terms of conversion rate optimization.

Search engine optimization (SEO): Once you have the copywriting and content writing down, you need to be able to adopt an "SEO specialist" mindset and ensure that the writing is search engine optimized. Whether the content is for LinkedIn, blogs, product descriptions, or paid advertising, SEO is an important part of digital marketing. 

Marketing analytics tracking: Paid advertising and Google ads won't do any good if you can't track the analytics and determine if the strategy you're using is performing well. You might look at analytics for email marketing,, such as open rates and internal link clicks, or for Facebook and Google ads,, like click rate and conversions.  

General business skills: a marketing career is no different from any other job in that you need general business skills to perform well and excel as a digital marketer. Some top skills to look at are: 

Leadership

Finance management

Project management

Problem-solving

Marketing and sales (no-brainer here)

Customer service

Negotiation

Network

Recruitment

Delegation

People management

This is a short list of the skills you should prioritize if you are looking to become a freelance digital marketer or are looking for a digital marketing job. There are always things you can learn and ways to improve, and since the world of digital marketing is constantly changing, there will never be a point where you know everything. 

If you're a business looking to hire a digital marketer, these are the top skills you want to look for when hiring. These skills are the biggest aspects of digital marketing and content marketing, and anyone looking to step into a marketing role must have these skills. 

Some freelance digital marketers make anywhere from $2,800 to nearly $100,000 annually. The hourly rate at anywhere from $25 - $50 per hour can generate $4,000 a month in additional income. That being said, the great thing about being a freelancer in digital marketing is setting your hours. So you could be making that $4,000 per month by charging $25/hour and working 40 hours a week - or you could be working 10-15 hours per week and charging $100/hour.

The biggest factor that affects freelance digital marketers' rates is their experience, portfolio, and skillset. When you have a freelancer who has a ton of experience in digital marketing and understands the ins and out's of Facebook ads, Google ads, content writing, SEO, email marketing, PPC, content creation, and influencer marketing, you get a truly well-rounded and experienced designer that can charge more for their service offerings.

While the pros and cons can look different for everyone, let's review a brief overview of some things you want to consider. 

Flexible schedules can be a pro or a con, depending on how well you can prioritize or if you need a lot of structure in your daily routine. 

Variety in daily tasks and choice of which clients to work with: again, this can be a pro and a con. Suppose you're a sucker for variety in your daily routine and are okay with one day focusing on SEO and content creation or content writing for a client and the next day focusing on brand awareness. In that case, the online presence of the client, and the overall marketing strategy by leveraging paid advertising, then becoming a freelance digital marketer might be right up your alley. 

Flexibility in location: The entire concept of being a contract-based, freelance digital marketer compared to taking on a more traditional marketing job is that you can travel if you'd like, you can work with brands and businesses that may not be local to you, and because the tasks of digital marketing can be done remotely, you have freedom of choice when it comes to where you live and how often you travel. 

Income potential: Becoming a digital marketer has quite a bit of income potential, and you can earn upwards of $100,000 a year, depending on your qualifications, skill sets, and ability to meet deadlines. 

The ability to niche down: as a freelance marketer, you can niche down into a specific specialization or keep your offerings broad. You can take on the role of "freelance digital marketer," and all it may encompass, or you can niche into one of the many specializations businesses seek. 

SEO Specialist

Copywriting and content writing

Email marketing

Marketing Analytics

Paid advertising (PPC and paid search)

Marketing strategy

Content creation

Influencer marketing

Content marketing manager

There is much room to advance in digital marketing and build a successful digital marketing career out of these skill sets. And again, you can hyper-focus on one of these skills or you can truly embody the term "digital marketing specialist" and do it all for your clients. 

Being a freelance digital marketer is an incredibly lucrative career, and I can leverage a ton of skills to help businesses and brands with their digital marketing. There are a lot of benefits to being a freelancer and working with clients on a contract basis instead of taking on a traditional marketing job. Still, the biggest part of the job is leveraging the skills needed to succeed in a digital marketing career and truly benefit the clients you are working with. 

You can hyper-focus on a skillset or broaden your service offerings to encompass all that goes into online marketing. By honing your general business skills and ensuring you have at least a basic understanding of the ins and outs of marketing, you can start slow and build your way to becoming an expert digital marketing freelancer.