5 Reasons to Hire a Marketing Consultant

Marketing consultants aren't just a contractor that fills a gap. A marketing consultant is equipped with the skills and experience to look at your business, develop a strategy that identifies the best marketing opportunities to reach your goals and plans, and gets to work implementing the best marketing tactics. 

Marketing consultants as an alternative continue to grow in popularity. In a tight labour market, more businesses seek to outsource marketing activities, while finding skilled workers is increasingly challenging. 

This blog looks at five compelling reasons why outsourcing your in-house marketing activities to a marketing consultant is a win for your business. 

Marketing knowledge and efficiency

Let's face it. We can't know or manage it all when working on growing a business. Understanding when to outsource parts of our business is sometimes the first step towards growth and becoming more efficient. That's when marketing consultants can make a big difference in managing tasks. Because marketing consultants are well-researched and experienced, they can slot right in and get started on campaigns and projects immediately without lengthy onboarding processes.

Marketing consulting is a specialised service where the experience and expertise from previous roles is combined to offer businesses an alternative to in-house marketing.  Generally, a consultant is experienced in various digital marketing practices avoiding the need for training and is equipped to take a broad picture overview of your business. 

Marketing Consultants have built vast experience and insight into which practices best suit your business objectives and target customers. It's not just guesswork; Consultants understand all the nuances within their field and are up to date with current practices. This allows them quickly identify the best marketing opportunities and activities you should follow. This knowledge can be challenging to replicate in-house. Outsourcing your marketing means you avoid handing off marketing tasks to staff who don't have the knowledge or interest in finding the answers.

A good marketer can view the situation strategically and provide solutions you may not have considered. For example, identifying organic marketing methods for ongoing brand awareness, ensuring SEO practices are up to take, and providing a better understanding of your ideal customer.

They can bring fresh perspectives to your business, develop solutions to age-old problems and ensure all marketing activities work together. Their experience and expertise can offer new ways of looking at things to help your business innovate and succeed.

More affordable pricing structures for small businesses.

Just have a 'little bit of marketing' you need help with? Or perhaps there's a specific campaign you want support on. The beauty of a marketing consultant is that you only pay for the services you need at the time. This helps with ebbs and flows in work and is particularly useful in times of uncertainty or when staff are on long-term leave, such as maternity leave or ill health. It’s a flexible overflow option that avoids overloading current employees, is low-risk and avoids an additional employee overhead. 

Many marketing consultants offer custom pricing plans tailored to the specific needs of businesses, especially small and medium-sized businesses, making it easier to find the right consultant for your business and budget. For example, you may only need help with a specific 6-month campaign to be managed and implemented during your busy season and then scale back when things are slow. Or, you may need support managing day-to-day marketing elements but don't have enough hours to warrant employing someone permanently. Moreover, consultants also have experience implementing campaigns quickly so you can get results faster and at an affordable price.

The flexible option of starting and ending with a consultant means you can scale up or down depending on your budget and your business's current needs. It allows your business to grow at a more manageable rate without the additional concern of employing permanent staff members. 

Fresh perspectives on your business goals

We know that your business goals hold you and your team accountable, but sometimes it takes outside help to understand the best levers required to meet goals. Getting a fresh perspective from someone with experience and in-depth market knowledge helps shed light on new ideas and helps redefine how you market your product or service. When you enlist the help of someone who doesn't have a personal connection to the company like employees do, you'll more likely get an objective view about exploring different marketing strategies for success.

When in business, it's easy to overlook opportunities and gaps in marketing as we work on the business's everyday operations. If you've been in business for a few years, relooking at business goals and plans is necessary to identify completed projects and what hasn't and needs to change to achieve business goals. 

To determine the marketing activities required, marketing consultants start with a solid marketing strategy so there is a clear 'game plan' to work through that is actionable, achievable and measurable. Without this, business goals are fraught with problems. 

Take the business objective of increasing brand awareness and gaining market share from a competitor. How is this to be achieved? Which marketing tactics will work best at achieving this goal? Your marketing consultant can take an objective approach, will know which practices are best suited to meet this goal and will start implementing a plan with a measure in place to check progress. The level of wealth, knowledge and experience marketing consultants bring allows businesses to tap into an area of expertise often not available in-house.

Connect with target audiences more effectively

How well do you know your target audience? This is beyond simple demographics. Understanding your target audience means considering their purchase behaviours, social and family settings, psychological influences, income levels and locations. This blog 5 techniques to improve customer audiences, provides a good starting point for understanding your customer further. Getting things right on your target audiences is one of the most important starting points when marketing your business. You need to get this step clear to avoid marketing your product or service to an audience that isn't your ideal customer.

With their knowledge and understanding of research, a marketing consultant can work to identify who your target audience is and how best to reach them. They know the correct channels to research and metrics to interpret and provide a broader picture overview of the ideal customer you wish to target. Once this is clearly defined, it puts your business in a better position to create content and campaigns which resonate more deeply with prospects, resulting in higher engagement and conversions.

Implementation of your best digital marketing opportunities

So, you've got your marketing strategy all planned out. You know your target audience, what you want to achieve, and how to get there. But how do you turn that strategy into a reality? What about the actual execution of it? Say 'goodbye' to getting all your ducks in a row and never acting on them. Say 'hello' to a marketing consultant to do all the heavy lifting, sorting out the actual 'doing' of your marketing. A marketing consultant can manage the day-to-day implementation of your strategy's most relevant marketing tactics. 

There are some key areas that a marketing consultant can manage and oversee when it comes to getting specific marketing activities underway.

Consider the following:

Social media marketing

Hand over all your content creation across social platforms and Facebook Ads Management. They can create, schedule and manage content and ads across your social platforms and make adaptions as and when required. 

Email marketing

One of the cheapest and easiest ways to build customer relationships, from awareness to a purchase. A marketing consultant can create nurture sequences, manage email campaigns and ensure your email marketing is on brand and reaching the right people along their customer journey.

Website development & SEO 

Sometimes we think our website is working well and easy to navigate, but it's not until we get some outside perspective that we 

Marketing Analytics

Monitoring and analysing key metrics across your social pages, website and email campaigns. Being able to understand and make adjustments as necessary based on click-through rates and conversion rates.

Content Marketing

Get all the content you need, including blogs, social media posts, articles, tip sheets, ebooks and 'how to' guides managed by your marketing consultant. 

In a nutshell, your marketing consultant can help you identify untapped opportunities, develop a plan, optimise your campaigns, stay up to date with trends, and provide expertise in a variety of areas. By working with a marketing consultant, you can ensure that your marketing strategy is turned into a successful reality.

Need more marketing help?

If you’re unsure where to start or your current online marketing solutions aren’t achieving the desired results, reach out! I’m keen to ensure business owners are getting the right solutions for their organisation.