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Steps on How to Find and Hire the Best Marketing Consultant for Your Business

Amidst the rapid growth of the digital space, a marketing consultant with a solid digital marketing plan will help you earn more leads and conversions and, ultimately, more revenue for your company.

Discover how to find and hire the best marketing consultant for your company, from exploring their portfolio to reviewing their prices. Keep reading to get started on your search on what online marketing consultants are expected to do, what skills are needed for the benefit of your business, and how to partner with an award-winning digital marketing consulting company.

The Role of a Marketing Consultant

Marketing consultants are important to small businesses because they offer fresh thinking and objective advice on marketing strategy. They have a wide range of experience in delivering successful results for various companies in different market sectors.

A marketing consultant can help you improve your marketing performance, get better results from your market budget, take you into profitable new market sectors or even act as your outsourced marketing department. Selecting the right consultant is therefore critical to the success of the engagement.

Does your company really need a marketing consultant?

Before you search for a marketing consultant, decide what you want to achieve. You may want to resolve problems or poor performance in your existing market sectors.

A newly established business or if you plan to restart your business a few years back, you might want to increase share or launch new products. If you are new to marketing, you need advice on how it could help your company.

If you are struggling to reach your target market or aren't reaching your set revenue targets, it's time to hire a digital marketing consultant.

Hiring a digital marketing consultant comes in handy when you lack:

Knowledge of the marketing fundamentals to boost your business.
Understanding your target customers.
Resources to focus on marketing initiatives.
Skills to understand consumer behavior and your industry to differentiate yourself from your competition.
Offline marketing campaigns to get more customers within your community.

To identify the right type of consultant, draw up a checklist of essential requirements. Your marketing consultant must be able to demonstrate experience in solving the type of challenges your company faces to market yourself effectively to get more leads and customers.

What does a marketing consultant do?

Here are the basic marketing consulting services that you can expect in hiring one:

1. Produce an End-to-End Digital Marketing Strategy

A marketing strategy serves as a roadmap for all the campaigns you'll launch, making sure your company will be successful online. It includes the specific business goals you want to achieve, your available resources, timeline for analysis and results, marketing channels, and KPIs.

Depending on your arrangement, your digital marketing consultant will be responsible for:

Planning a fitting approach for your company based on your industry, target audience, and current digital marketing effectiveness and activities.
Identifying priority objectives for your company (e.g., getting more traffic, generating more leads, and increasing conversions).
Exploring select online marketing channels and platforms to start (e.g., Google Adwords, Facebook ads, and SEO).
Regularly check data analytics to get results relevant to your company's priority objectives and recommend the next steps.
Updating online campaigns for retargeting and optimizing leads to increased conversions.

A given marketing campaign strategy details the key messages to be used, the audience segments to be targeted, and the mix of channels and tactics to reach them.

2. Boost Brand Awareness beyond Visuals

Branding goes beyond your logo, tagline or slogan, color schemes, and fonts.
There's also your brand identity. This includes your unique selling proposition, personality, and the feelings you want your target customers to feel about you and your products.

To achieve this, you and your digital marketing consultant should follow and align on the points below:

Brand purpose: Know your products and services like the back of your hand and the 'why' behind them.
Target audience: Define your customer and understand them through their digital footprint and behavior.
Competitor and market landscape: Scope the critical players in your industry, identifying what they do differently and how to angle your approach.
Unique selling points: Understand what makes your brand, product, or service unique.
Brand voice: Know how best to communicate with your target audience using a consistent and cohesive voice so your brand will be 'seen' the same way across different platforms.
Brand recognition: Digitally engage with your customers in many ways and be consistent in how you speak to them.

Following a compelling digital brand strategy with the above points, your company should be able to enjoy an overall increase in brand awareness, loyalty, and advocacy.

Thus, the best marketing consultant aims to improve the overall brand image with creative online marketing campaigns that, hopefully, effectively results in conversions and leads.

3. Content Planning, Management, and Storytelling

A digital marketing consultant creates a content calendar to document and guide efforts based on the company's overall content marketing strategy.

This calendar provides focus and direction for your company's content creation that will later prove valuable and relevant as you grow. There are different content calendar templates that you can explore, such as Trello, Asana, Airtable, or just a simple Excel file.

The digital marketing consultant should manage your workflow process and answer the following questions about the content strategy:

Who's the target audience for your content?
How does your content answer your target audience's specific problems?
What to highlight to differentiate your products and services from competitors?
Which content types work best to achieve your digital marketing priorities?
Which marketing channels work best for your content?
How to better allocate and manage human resources to address all content planning needs?

Project Management and Content Mapping

Project management involves combining various admin skills, management techniques, and knowledge to complete specific content mapping tasks.

Thus, a marketing consultant offers a smoother process of identifying the right type of content to produce, topics and subtopics to be covered, frequency, and publishing timeline. Furthermore, a plan must also cover selecting the channels to feature the content, team member allocation for specific content, progress updates, and the like.

Storytelling and Content Marketing

Establishing an emotional connection with your consumers increases trust between you and your customers by connecting with them on a personal level. Storytelling responds to this purpose that can be shown in different types and formats.

To write a compelling brand story, a marketing consultant focuses on these aspects:

Know the core brand identity and create a brand narrative or signature story.
Provide clarity to the 'why' of your company.
Find and understand what makes your target audience tick.
Optimize the impact of different content formats, types, and styles.
Utilize the strengths of different online platforms for specific content formats or types.
Create consistency in the look and feel of your content.

4. Strategize the Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM), and Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns

The best marketing consultant stays up-to-date on the latest SEO and SEM best practices and trends, which go hand in hand.

Some of the ways that your digital marketing consultant can do are:

Publishing relevant content that stays true to your brand story while providing industry-related news to give your audience an update.
Building an SEO strategy around relevant topics to your industry and company, and make sure to update the content regularly.
Doing keyword research to optimize relevant SEO keywords with high traffic potential on your content.
Building links across your content to make it worthy of sharing.
Familiarize the ranking algorithm and maximize click-through rate (CTR) with your titles, URLs, and descriptions.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a primary method to boost quality traffic that acts as an online marketing method to your website through organic search results. When your content's optimized, your rank in search engine results will be higher and more visible to your target audience as part of SEM.

Paid Search Management

Campaigns dedicated to paid search services managed by a marketing consultant support your SEO, SEM, and content marketing strategies. By getting your messaging in front of relevant people immediately, the strategy comes into success.

Using enterprise software to optimize keywords, ad bids, ad spends, call to action text, and other important factors. Brands that submit high-quality ads can actually end up paying less per click.

Marketing strategists work collaboratively with you to understand your company, its mission, and its current objectives to help you:

Define your goals to steer your search campaign toward maximum results.
Bid management to optimize and diversify your paid spend across display networks and platforms.
Determine your ad scale to slice your messages into ad groups.
Analyze performance to gain important market intelligence and periodically adjust tactics & spend based on performance reports.
Identify competitive keywords to balance value, volume, and relevance to your campaign goals.
Test landing pages to improve your Quality Score and convert site visitors to customers.
Craft engaging copy to grab attention and entice potential customers.

Depending on your industry and target audience, your marketing consultant helps you launch thoughtful paid search campaigns on search engines like Google and Bing, as well as syndication platforms such as Taboola and Out brain.

5. Development, Analytics, and Evaluation: A Marketing Consultant's Advanced Skills

By reviewing and analyzing your data analytics, a digital marketing consultant can determine quantitatively the types of content and the specific topics which bring in more traffic to your website, social media accounts, and other digital channels.

Heat mapping and A/B testing for user behaviors to determine high- and low-value touchpoints.
Call-to-action marketing efforts, including CTA placement.
HTML and XML Sitemaps
Assessment of how many conversion opportunities you're actually generating.
How your site's visual design may be influencing user behavior.
Adherence to Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
The number of fields in your "Contact us" forms.
Mobile-friendliness of your form fields and CTAs.
How findable gated-asset landing pages are in search.
Template and UX elements of your email marketing campaigns.

A digital marketing consultant can also use data analytics to understand your target audience's behavior and preferences.

You can then leverage these insights to create campaigns that'll help you build more trusting relationships with your customers, get more leads, and generate sales.

Cam Roberts is a Premier Digital Marketing Consultant

The working relationship between your company and the marketing consultant is important. In your initial discussions, ask how the consultant plans to gather information on approaching the project, the consultant's strategic capabilities, and the best skills profile that matches your company's needs.

As a top-notch digital marketing consultant, Cam Roberts has a good track record of launching new products or building market share that can focus on your new product or service development program. Our team has highly skilled professionals with efficient expertise and industry experience to help companies reach their full potential by facilitating growth.

Everything you need to grow your business is here. Let's start working by defining the current situation of your business. Schedule an appointment today!

Welcome, I’m Cam Roberts.

I am not one to waste time with all the fluffy unnecessary stuff.

You’re here because you want to make your business and online promotions highly profitable with a model that helps you achieve your financial and lifestyle goals in one year or less.

Not because you want to hear about me.

Want to discuss how a Fractional CMO service can help scale your marketing and grow sales? Click the button below to schedule a complimentary 20-minute Strategy Session via Zoom Meetings

Apply Now For Your 20-Minute Strategy Session

Cam Roberts. Fractional CMO.
30 years of Marketing Experience.

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