What are Marketing Consultants and How Can They Help My Business?

So, most people will think they have an idea about what a marketing consultant is or what a marketing consultant does.

And most people are probably about 60 or 70% correct. The struggle really is that most people don't understand the best way to use a marketing consultant or understand the results that they should be trying to achieve if they employed somebody as a marketing consultant.

So, here are 5 key areas about who marketing consultants are and what they can do for you.

Marketing Consultants are Trained Professionals

They are generally people with broad marketing knowledge across different industries and different sectors, and more often or not, most of them have done lower level marketing work, so coordination, content creation, those kinds of things, and have worked themselves up into senior roles in big organisations.

Normally at that point is the time when they decide that they want to go out on their own because they prefer to work for themselves or they prefer the flexibility that being a marketing consultant can offer.

But generally, they have a lot of experience and maybe just a little caveat.

In saying that they’ve got broad skills and broad knowledge is probably a key thing for marketing consultants, but that isn’t necessarily the same for all of them.

There are some that may have specific knowledge in a singular specific industry or they may have a particular skill set in a certain area of marketing. And so they might be, you know, strong in digital or they might be strong in automation or they might be strong in advertising, something like that. But they are professionals, and that’s probably the key thing to understand.

Good marketing consultants live and die by their results.

So, you know, if someone’s been a marketing consultant for a long time, chances are they’ve had some good success throughout their careers. And the job really with businesses is to help improve marketing strategies and increase that company’s visibility. Now again, those are broad statements of objectives but marketing consultants can have broad objectives and specific ones as well, but really that’s kind of the two.

Big error is to improve those marketing strategies and increase visibility.

Marketing Consultants Have a High Level of Experience

We’re sort of diving deeper into that broad range of exactly what else they can do.

So point #2 is that marketing consultants can offer expertise in multiple areas. Now, this could be market research, branding, advertising, product development, or creative strategy.

Marketing is big. It’s big. It’s a big discipline with lots of small sectors and disciplines underneath it, so, whether you get someone who has got specific experience in branding or specific experience in product positioning or someone with broad experience in lots of these different things, that’s really up to you to decide what you need. But their job is to bring that expertise to you that you may not have in-house. It might be filling a gap that you have in your existing team, in your senior leadership team, or even in your marketing department. 

Another key thing here is to say that it’s probably a lot more cost-effective. Sometimes recruiting and marketing and so on is actually employing people or going to a bigger agency so, the idea of point #2 is that they’re here to be delivering their expertise to you. Add that expertise to your existing team.

Marketing Consultants Can Help You Identify Markets and Behaviours

Marketing consultants can help companies identify their target markets, and understand consumer behaviour, develop effective marketing campaigns and so much more.

There are all sorts of things that they can do for you and it is best that before you approach these marketing consultants perhaps have a think about what you need.

It may be that you don’t know what you need, which is often the case with some companies. In some cases, companies don’t actually understand what it is that they need help with.

Bringing a marketing consultant on can help to identify these needs also. If those things have already been identified, then you’re bringing someone on to solve those particular problems.

Marketing Consultants: Self-Employed or Consulting firm?

Obviously, the challenge of hiring somebody who is self-employed is that you really only have them to rely on, you are hiring them for their skills, their personality, and probably the way that they engage with your team or your board of directors.

You’re bringing somebody in and they have to match the company really well for them to succeed. You may bring them in simply because they aren’t aligned with all your existing people, and they may be there to ask questions of your team that perhaps haven’t been asked before. 

Either way, bringing in a single self-employed person is definitely cost effective and also the bonus of that is that they can become really good members of the team.

You know that you’ll see them on a frequent basis, they might come into your office every week, or they may have come into your office multiple times a week. They start to really understand and become part of your team and your culture and understand what’s going on in your business allowing them to make better decisions, and better recommendations for your marketing moving forward.

Hiring a marketing consultant, a self-employed one, or a freelancer, however you want to describe them, is a fantastic opportunity.

You can have them on short-term contracts, long-term contracts, whatever suits you to a particular project. Or it could be an ongoing strategic piece that they need to work on.

You could also bring them in via consulting firms. There are lots of big, small, and medium size consulting firms all over the world that specialise in marketing. There are some that are broader than that and focus on business and as part of that, marketing is one of those divisions.

The challenge with a consulting firm is it’s a little bit more arm’s length. There aren’t necessarily people getting into your business and certainly consulting from in your business.

There’s a little bit more distance from a marketing agency and so on and that may be something that you want. You may actually want an arm’s length approach so that they can perhaps challenge you more, perhaps ask some harder questions and perhaps call out some of the decisions that you feel other people in the business have made that aren’t particularly good for your business.

So really again, it depends on what your objectives are and where you want to get to, work out whether you want to hire somebody who’s self-employed or a consulting firm. 

Obviously going through a consulting firm, you are going to pay more money. You’ve got their overheads to think about and that’s one of the big challenges there.

Marketing Consultants Bring a Fresh Perspective

Marketing consultants can bring a fresh perspective to your business. They can deliver you insights, they can help you stay ahead of your competition, and they can help you achieve your marketing goals even if you don’t know what those marketing goals are, they’re there to help.

Perhaps set those goals and then let them help you achieve them. It is worth thinking about. It’s worth remembering that a marketing consultant isn’t just there to come in, come up with an idea, give you that idea, and then walk away.

Good marketing consultants should be there to help you deliver the ideas. The agreed-on ideas help you execute and help you work through the challenges that come with those ideas and that new strategy that they’ve thought up for you.

Just remember not to hamstring them by telling them that they can only operate in a certain way or that they can only talk to certain people and all those kinds of things or that your business is already going down one direction.

And it may well be, but give them some flexibility, give them some latitude to ask harder questions to challenge you because challenging questions, especially for a leadership team, CEO, board members, and those kinds of things are always good questions.

Challenging questions are always good questions because it makes you think, it makes you defend your point of view, and makes you defend the status quo. It makes you defend decisions that you’ve already made, and if you can defend those successfully, then your strategy, your ideas, and your direction become even more robust in the long term.

So look, that’s a little bit about marketing consultants and the benefit that they can bring to your business. If you are looking for a high-quality marketing consultant to help you with strategic planning, content delivery, or graphic design, whatever it might be, that’s why we created Cemoh.

You can find all sorts of wonderful highly skilled marketing consultants through our platform.