Freelancing and crowdsourcing marketplace Freelancer.com has revealed search engine marketers (SEM) are less in demand than SEO, Youtube and traditional advertisers in its quarterly Fast 50 Index for Q3 2022.
The index is based on data from 296,000 online jobs posted on Freelancer.com between July 1 to September 30, 2022 and showed that tech-related jobs dominated the rankings when comparing Q3 2022 to Q3 2021 year-on-year.
Projects for search engine marketing fell by almost a third (30.4%) in Q3 - from 2,300 jobs to 1,600 from the previous quarter.
On the other hand, digital marketing, traditional marketing and YouTube jobs spiked in interest.
Employers are looking for support with SEO ranking, with blog writing jobs spiking by 55% from 1,058 to 1,642 projects as companies hire freelancers to write SEO-friendly blog content.
Digital marketing also saw a 23.1% increase in Q3, jumping from 1,738 to 2,141 jobs. These jobs range from hiring business consultants supporting social media strategies to SEO managers.
Notably, Q3 also saw many employers turn to the platform to hire community managers, digital marketing campaign managers and social media managers.
Traditional advertising also saw an increase in Q3. Flyer design projects increased by more than a quarter (27.5%) from 1,658 to 2,114 jobs.
A similar increase was also seen for projects relating to covers and packaging, which increased by 27.3% from 1,253 to 1,596 jobs. Many employers turn to the platform to crowdsource ideas for packaging labels and shipping boxes designs. When comparing Q3 2022 to 2021, advertisement design is up 15.7%, from 1.516 to 1,755 jobs.
Hector Perez-Nieto, marketing director at Freelancer.com, said: “With the onset of new digital marketing channels, businesses are learning that their strategies must diversify and move away from primary channels, such as SEM.
“Paid advertising alone is no longer the most viable alternative.
“What we are witnessing is demand for freelancers with skills in social media, short video platforms, earned & owned content, SEO and a whole spectrum of marketing strategies that before were in the realm of large corporates only.”
Jobs seeking YouTube skills were the fifth fastest growing skill in Q3 2022 - growing by 32.3% from 1,138 to 1,505 jobs. Many of the jobs seeking YouTube skills related to vertical videos and Shorts content. While there was a 10% increase in TikTok related skills and projects seeking TikTok content creators, employers seek YouTube and video editing skills three times more.
The index also revealed a major surge in tech-related jobs.
Software Development jobs were the fastest growing skill (up 54.7%, from 1,587 to 2,442), while jobs for Coding ranked as the second highest growing skill (up 45.5%, from 1,004 to 1,461) and Backend Development came in third (up 37.7%, from 1,111 to 1,530).
The sudden surge in tech-related freelance jobs, first observed in Freelancer’s Q2 2022 index, comes off the back of global tech layoffs and hiring freezes across the so-called ‘tech winter’ that started with a ‘crypto winter’, as informed by Freelancer.com in earlier Fast 50 reports.
Overvaluations and dropping stock prices have also caused mass hiring freezes and layoffs across the tech companies globally in 2022.
Matt Barrie, chief executive at Freelancer.com, said: “The macroeconomic environment, tech winter and nosebleed inflation has led to an almost daily string of announcements of layoffs.
“The most similar event was the Global Financial Crisis where we saw three trends: businesses looking to cut costs and going online to hire freelancers, people looking for work online and a lot of startup businesses formed to bridge people through hard times.
“However this was mostly contained to the United States. We think that heading into 2023 we could see this all over again, but on a more global scale.”
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