Avoid the trap of cheap Freelance small business marketing

When a growth-stage business or nonprofit needs marketing help, the initial impulse is often to hire a small business marketing freelancer. It feels quick and affordable. You hire a contractor for a specific project, like a new website, quick ad campaign, or some one-off content creation.

You spend a few weeks getting them up to speed, they deliver the task, collect their check, and disappear.

Then, you wait. You realize the new website doesn’t align with your email strategy. The ad campaign had a short-term bump but didn’t build any lasting momentum. The content is nice, but it’s not generating leads.

Suddenly, that “affordable” decision feels like a huge waste of time, money, and momentum. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

The freelance marketing model fundamentally fails businesses focused on long-term growth. It relies on a series of short-term transactions instead of committing to your long-term vision. That’s why we ditched the transactional model and favor the Embedded Partnership.

Here’s why shifting your mindset from hiring a vendor to embracing a vested marketing partner is the only way to achieve sustainable growth.

The Great Freelancer Pitfall: Why Short-Term Vendors Hurt Long-Term Small Business Marketing

The short-term, contract-based marketing model fails because it lacks a vested interest.

A freelancer completes a task for pay; they don’t achieve your company’s mission. Their goal is to close the project and move on to the next client. While this is a fine business model for them, it creates a massive structural gap between their success and your actual business success.

This disconnect is where growth-stage businesses consistently lose time and money.

1. The “Minimum Effort” Trap

A vendor’s pay is rarely tied to your long-term success metrics (like sustained revenue growth, donor retention, or increased market share), and there is little incentive to do more than the absolute minimum required by the contract.

• Example: A freelance content writer delivers a batch of blog posts. Do they stick around to analyze the SEO performance of those posts, figure out which ones are driving leads, and optimize the underperforming ones? Unlikely, so your growth suffers because the necessary post-launch optimization never happens.

2. The Cycle of Wasted Institutional Knowledge

A rotating cast of contractors comes with a dangerous side effect: the loss of institutional marketing knowledge.

Every time you hire a new freelancer, you have to spend valuable weeks bringing them up to speed on your brand voice, ideal customer profiles, existing tech stack, and past marketing efforts. You pay them to learn what the last contractor already knew.

When that freelancer leaves, all that accumulated data and knowledge leaves with them. You are forced into a costly and inefficient cycle of agency-hopping that prevents any strategy from ever gaining enough traction to truly pay off.

3. Your Marketing Strategy is Scattered

A freelancer is almost always a specialist: a PPC expert, a social media manager, or a website developer. Growth-stage businesses, however, don’t need pieces; they need a cohesive small business marketing roadmap.

When you manage multiple freelancers, you become the Chief Marketing Strategist—the person responsible for making sure the SEO person, the email person, and the ad person are all working from the same playbook.

This forces you to take on the very “guesswork” and management burden you hired an external partner to eliminate. Marketing efforts become siloed, and ultimately, ineffective.

The Herringbone Solution for small business Marketing: Trade the Freelance Model for a strategic Embedded Partner

At Herringbone Strategies, we recognized that businesses need a relationship built on trust and shared goals. We don’t want to be a vendor; we want to be an extension of your own team. To accomplish this, we use an embedded partnership model.

This model is designed to fix the three major flaws of the freelance approach and replace them with a powerful framework for sustainable, long-term success.

1. We Share the Vested Interest

Our entire model is built around long-term business agreements. Why? Because it aligns our success with your success. We are incentivized to move past short-term wins and focus on creating compounding growth.

• The Difference: We aren’t paid to simply send an email campaign; we are paid to develop an email strategy that increases your customer lifetime value (CLV) over the next two years. Our success is measured by the growth metrics that truly matter to your bottom line. We have a vested interest in making sure our efforts in month one set the stage for success in month twelve.

2. Institutional Knowledge Stays Put and Grows

When you partner with Herringbone Strategies, you gain access to a dedicated team, not a single person juggling dozens of clients.

This team is responsible for documenting everything, ensuring that the valuable data we learn about your market and customers stays with us. There’s no retraining, no lost history, and no wasted time. We continue to build upon what worked last quarter, allowing your marketing strategy to mature, deepen, and become more efficient over time.

We act as the friendly, embedded partners who know your business inside and out.

3. Small Business Marketing Doesn’t Have to Feel Scattered

Growth-stage leaders have enough on their plate. You shouldn’t have to spend your time managing marketing contractors and worrying about whether your various channels are aligned.

Our partnership model ensures you get a holistic, cross-channel strategy from day one.

• Strategic Command: We manage the entire marketing roadmap. We ensure the Facebook ads are driving traffic to the landing page, the landing page is converting leads, and those leads are nurtured by an effective email sequence.
• A Fun, Friendly Experience: We take our work seriously, but not ourselves. We want this collaborative process to be fun. We want the complex process of performance marketing transparent and easy to understand. We believe marketing should be something you’re excited about, not stressed over.

Time to Trade Transactions for Transformation

The freelance marketing model often looks like a great deal on paper, but in practice, it forces a cycle of short-term effort, wasted money, and chronic instability. For businesses and nonprofits that are ready to scale, this model is a liability.

What growth-stage organizations truly need is a trusted, embedded partner—an expert team that cares as much about your long-term success as you do.

At Herringbone Strategies, we don’t do short-term fixes. We build scalable, sustainable small business marketing engines designed for the long haul. We eliminate the guesswork, put you on a strong foundation, and serve as partners dedicated to making sure your hard work turns into lasting success.

Contact us to set up a free 45-minute discovery call. A discovery call is our chance to understand your organization and how you’re hoping a partnership can help you grow. We’ll share a bit about our process and offerings, but you’re the star of the show!