Could your business benefit from decades-worth of successful strategies, available on tap? If so, hiring a marketing consultant could be the ideal option.
Maybe your business has attempted marketing without getting great results. Or perhaps you’ve used a successful long-term approach that’s now no longer working. If so, you might have reached the point where looking outside your organisation for marketing inspiration and knowhow feels like a good idea.
In some situations that might mean permanently investing by bringing on a full-time marketer, and building a department around them.
However, if your business isn’t able to make that commitment, or you only need the expertise for a short time, hiring a marketing consultant can be an ideal solution.
Why hire a marketing consultant?
A marketing consultant is a highly experienced marketer who can be brought into a business temporarily to evaluate your marketing and suggest ways to improve it.
First, they’ll use their (often vast) experience to devise new, relevant strategies. Then they’ll help you to plan and execute them across all of your campaigns – be they print, social, web, or any combination of those and more besides.
Crucially, a marketing consultant is results-focused and will help you measure any KPIs – while potentially training other in-house team members in those analytical tools, too.
What’s the difference between a marketing consultant and an executive interim director?
Regular readers of my blog will have spotted that last month’s post was on Interim marketing directors. I’m skilled to provide both services, but it’s helpful to note the distinction between the two.
In a nutshell: a consultant advises, supports and guides; focusing on steering your campaigns and measuring the results. A director does more – including leading from the front, transforming your business’ operations, and leaving behind efficient workflows.
Because of this, a marketing consultant is usually the more affordable option, and the go-to especially for SMEs looking to quickly boost their numbers without breaking the bank.
5 reasons to hire a marketing consultant
Marketing can be one of your company’s biggest financial investments – and also one of your biggest profit-drivers… if you get it right. Making the right choice on hires is therefore essential – whether it’s a full-time staff member, a director, or a marketing consultant.
These five benefits of hiring a marketing consultant should help make that choice a little easier.
Specialised marketing experience in your sector
One of the biggest benefits of hiring a marketing consultant is that they come with years – sometimes decades – of marketing experience gained in specific areas or industries.
My several decades as a marketer have been spent mostly in the B2B arena, across multiple sectors, helping businesses develop campaigns to market their products and services to other businesses.
That experience makes me a particularly good fit for working in specific industries including Food and Beverage, Infrastructure and Construction, Oil, Gas and Chemicals, Engineering and Manufacturing, Technology, and more.
And therein lies one of the big benefits of hiring a marketing consultant: you can pick the consultant with the right expertise for your sector and business, trusting that their experience will allow them to start quickly and deliver effectively.
Time-saving and low maintenance
The second reason why you should hire a marketing consulting involves your own valuable time.
Because a marketing consultant isn’t a full-time staff member, you won’t need to manage them like one. That means no lengthy onboarding process, no performance reviews, and no handholding while they get used to the business.
Experienced and comfortable with working on their own to tight deadlines, an expert interim marketer will simply schedule the occasional planning or catch-up meeting with you or your team to outline ideas and objectives, then work diligently on their own initiative to the high standard that’s expected of them.
Cost vs an agency
One marketing alternative I’ve not yet mentioned is outsourcing your marketing (and potentially creative work) to an agency. Sometimes, this can make sense – particularly when your in-house team isn’t skilled for the technical or creative demands of developing a cross-channel, multimedia, content-led marketing campaign.
However, there are also plenty of instances where a business’ team certainly are ready, able and willing to meet that challenge, but lack the right strategies or knowhow to guide those skills effectively.
That’s a big benefit of hiring a marketing consultant. They’ll plug into your business and instantly provide the guidance needed to help you make the most of your existing resources – at a fraction of the cost an agency would charge.
Additionally, while an external agency would have a vested interest in maximising how much you use their services, the focus of a marketing consultant is on helping you make use of your own internal ones. That positive longer-term impact on your budget vs an agency is yet another benefit of hiring a marketing consultant.
Flexibility and availability
While they may be more cost-effective than an agency, a marketing consultant nonetheless offers a similar benefit. As a service for hire, a consultant will be there on tap when you need someone to come in and deliver quickly. Then they’ll move on when their job is done.
Unlike working with an agency, however, when a marketing consultant is working with you, they’re working only with you. There’s no juggling of different responsibilities or multiple clients. That means you have their full and undivided attention – allowing them to offer the best strategic advice and affect the largest change to your marketing in the shortest amount of time.
An unbiased outlook
Similar to an interim executive marketing director, a major benefit of hiring a marketing consultant is that they have no agenda other than the complete success of your marketing strategy.
That means they have no time for internal politics. No affinity for legacy thinking which may be holding your business back. No history or subtext fuelling any part of their decision-making. That makes a marketing consultant the ideal person to critique current ideas and approaches, suggest new ones, and offer you a fresh perspective which can prove transformative for your marketing output – and potentially, your whole business.
Why you should hire a marketing consultant
So, should you go about hiring a marketing consultant? Before you do, ask yourself these questions:
- Is your current marketing delivering the results you need it to?
- Do you need an executive-level marketer to completely transform your business’ technology and working processes?
- Can you commit to hiring a full-time senior marketer and building a department around them?
- Do you need the full-service skill set of an integrated digital agency – and are you prepared to pay for it?
If you answered no to all of the above, then your business could ideally placed for the big benefits of hiring a marketing consultant. If so, please get in touch – I’d love to see how I can help.