Refund thinking hurts clients. You will find the most success as a client if you understand some basic principles:
- Not every client/freelancer pairing works out
- Clients can fire freelancers at any time, for any reason
- Effective clients proactively review the work done by freelancers, especially early on, and they close the contract on underperforming freelancers, while continuing to work with the freelancers who provide them with the most value
- Upwork does not guarantee the quality of any freelancer's work
- It is much safer to stop paying a freelancer money rather than pay a freelancer a bunch of money and then ask for that money back.
re: "Help on what to do if the hired marketer gives unusable stuff?"
Upwork never guarantees that if you hire a freelancer, you will receive usable stuff.
If you hire a freelancing using an hourly contract, you pay for the freelancer's TIME.
If you hire a freelancer using a fixed-price contract, you pay for a specific agreed-upon DELIVERABLE or TASK.
Nowhere does Upwork say that if you hire a marketer, you will be guaranteed to achieve specific results.
re: "I was hiring for a social media marketer for a Kickstarter."
Are you saying you hired only one freelancer for this?
If you hire only one person to do this, then by definition you can not compare her work to the work done by other freelancers working on the project.
re: "The guy that I hired talked me into doing an email campaign. I don't know marketing at all which is why I was hiring for a marketer. He then gave me a list of emails. I sent a test email out to them to make sure they all agreed to sign on since Kickstarter doesn't allow for unsolicitated spam contacting. They all said no."
Based on what you have said here, the freelancer you hired appears to be completely incompetent when it comes to Kickstarter.
I strongly advise you to stop working with this particular freelancer if your goal is to achieve success with Kickstarter.
re: "The guy is now demanding payment even when the site he was doing the marketing for he broke their terms of service so what he did is of 0 use to me. What do I do in this case?"
You can learn more about getting refunds or avoiding paying freelancers here:
https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211062058-Get-an-Escrow-Refund
https://support.upwork.com/hc/en-us/articles/211062158-Dispute-an-Agency-or-Freelancer-s-Hours
In my opinion:
The SMART BUSINESS decision in situations like this is nearly always the same:
Release any pending payment and then close the contract and stop working with such an underperforming freelancer.
It nearly always makes the most sense to stop wasting time with people like that.
But of course I say this without knowing the SPECIFICS of your contract.
If you want to get some money back, and this is a fixed-price contract, then the EASIEST way to get money back is to ASK the freelancer, and get him to agree to a full or partial refund. It costs nothing to ASK. If the freelancer agrees, then you can close the contract, edit the amount of money to release, and then finalize contract closure. Then the freelancer will agree to the refund request and you'll receive the refunded money back in you funding account (e.g., credit card) within 5 business days.
But if the amount of money involved is relatively small, then I wouldn't even bother doing that. I would personally just release escrow and close the contract.
If you would like additional help, please answer these questions:
This was a fixed-price contract, correct?
How much money in total have you already released to this freelancer?
How much money is currently in escrow?
Is this contract still open or closed?
