Modern business processes have been becoming more and more digital over just last five years and much of this has only been accelerated by the pandemic.
And just as processes have been becoming more digitized, so to have customer and prospect interactions with businesses.
Websites are a company’s first impression because the internet today is overwhelmingly most people’s primary way of finding, researching, and interacting with a business.
With that comes the importance of strong digital marketing to make sure you’re able to manage and communicate with your digital patrons in the most effective way possible, which is where marketing consulting and strategy services come in.
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What Does a Marketing Consultant Do?
In order to help businesses with their digital marketing, consider working with a marketing consultant who can help you with your website, lead generation, SEO, content strategy, and increase your business’ exposure across multiple digital platforms.
A modern marketing consultant’s primary responsibility is to help an organization build a digital strategy for their online presence and communications.
Typically, a marketing consultant comes in one of two forms: an individual consultant or a full marketing agency that has multiple members on staff to strategize and execute each aspect of a digital marketing plan.
What’s the Process for Building a Strategy?
Performing a Marketing Assessment
First, a marketing consultant will audit a business to determine a business’ strengths, weaknesses, and most pressing needs in order to get a full understanding of where their current marketing efforts—if they have any—can be improved.
During the assessment, a consultant will take a deeper look into every aspect of your current digital marketing efforts, including:
- Brand Positioning: Does your audience view your brand the way you want them to?
- Website Health: Deciding whether your current website is optimized and user-friendly to your visitors and potential leads.
- Competitive Analysis: Learn how you stack up to your competitors in the digital space.
- SEO Performance: Are your pages ranking on Google? How easy is it for your potential customers to find your business?
- Social Media Presence: Measuring the effectiveness of your social media presence.
Recommending a Tech Stack to Carry Out Initiatives
After learning more about your company and your previous marketing initiatives, a consultant will recommend a set of technologies and software that will help you alleviate any pain points and optimize your processes. Here are a few of the tools that are likely to be recommended:
CRM
A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool will help you to manage your company’s relationships with its existing and potential customers.
This means tracking a customer through their entire buying journey—from initial website visit to completing the sale.
A CRM has tools to help you in many facets of the sales process, including marketing, sales, and customer service.
Email Marketing Platform
An email marketing platform helps you design compelling emails; organize your campaigns; and track analytics like click-through rates, open rates, and deliverability.
Using an email marketing platform also helps you utilize your CRM to send targeted emails to leads and customers for when they take certain actions or reach certain milestones.
The right email marketing platform can streamline your processes and make your email marketing strategy more efficient and effective.
Analytics Platform
To help you understand what marketing strategies are and aren’t working, an analytics platform will provide you with reports and statistics that show you exactly how different things are performing.
You’ll be able to collect reports from every aspect of your marketing strategy, including social media, websites, email marketing, and SEO.
Most analytics platforms integrate fully with your CRM, email marketing platforms, social media management software, and other tools to help you collect all that data into one place, making it easier to collect reports that cover every part of your digital marketing strategy.
Social Media Tools
A social media tool will help you manage your social media accounts across all platforms, making it easier to post regularly, schedule out posts in advance, track your post’s performance, and engage with your audience.
You’ll also be able to create tailored feeds to track your competitors and collect your mentions and direct messages into one place.
What’s the Ongoing Role of a Marketing Consultant?
Beyond the assessment and initial creation of your strategy and tech stack, a marketing consultant can continue to help in different ways on an ongoing basis, such as:
- Discovering new opportunities for your business to engage with customers
- Determine new data-driven marketing initiatives to build onto your strategy
- Improving company branding to continue sharpening your public appearance
- Optimizing blog and website content to increase traffic and organic growth
- Managing marketing campaigns and using analytics tools to measure their success
The ongoing role of a marketing consultant is flexible. They can continue to help you refine processes, measure campaigns, develop new strategies, and more.
Should You Hire a Marketing Consultant?
Whether you should hire a marketing consultant or not depends on your in-house team’s expertise and available bandwidth.
A lot of time and unique skills are required to create an efficient digital marketing machine and businesses that have small or understaffed marketing departments (or no marketing department at all) should consider working with an agency or service provider for their marketing needs.
Though some businesses might be hesitant to outsource their marketing to an agency, it’s very common to do so.
For businesses who recognize the need for digital marketing but can’t afford to build a full-sized marketing team in-house, working with a consultant or agency is a very attractive option because it not only hugely expands their marketing capabilities, but it also gives them access to a team with a range of expertise and abilities.
Not to mention, an in-house marketing team is significantly more expensive to maintain than it is to hire and work with an agency.
Investing in your digital marketing has quickly become an essential need for businesses as digital is now the primary competitive landscape for them.
Establishing a strong digital presence—with a solid website, good SEO, CRM capabilities, email marketing, analytics, and more—has become an absolute must-have in order to stay competitive.
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