Ep.117: Ryan Bettencourt, Co-Founder, Growth Collective: Freelance Marketing As a Better Way To Drive ROI Positive Growth

Leaders, marketing can be tough. While we all know we need it, and while freelance marketing is nothing new, marketing is one of those areas that is tough to measure, tough to validate success, and the industry as a whole has undergone massive transformation.

According to Ryan, a key problem is that the industry has undergone so much change thanks to technology, that it’s no longer enough to put the responsibility on a good CMO. Instead, good marketing is the result of having multiple experts, working on and testing multiple different channels and strategies until they’ve found what works.

Which is why Ryan, and his team’s growth studio Legion, acquired the marketing freelance platform Growth Collective in 2021. Expert marketers themselves, Ryan and Legion know how to grow companies through digital marketing, and they had grown their own companies and agencies with freelance marketers in the past, thus Growth Collective was an extension of their expertise. As Growth Collective grew, they started to get more companies asking for full teams that could help find and scale the right channels so they created Growth Assembly for Bespoke Growth Teams.

In this episode we’ll get deep into what they’ve learned and how every leader can embrace freelance models to grow their brand.

Key takeaways:

The value of marketing today is knowing why and where growth comes from

Successful marketing leads to successful product launches, new markets, and new channels

Today's online marketing technology created a chasm where hiring generalists, or a good CMO, isn’t enough

Good marketing requires an elastic network of experts approach rather than a default full time approach

Existing large, horizontal marketplaces can’t provide the level of vetting to ensure an elastic network of growth marketing experts

Now is the perfect time to embrace freelance and fractional work due to the challenges in raising capital and the cost of debt