What is a Marketing Consultant?
When you hear marketing consultant, what is the first thing that comes to mind? Someone in a trendy, colorful outfit with bold glasses? Someone sitting quietly at a coffee shop with fancy latte? Someone glued to their phone Tweeting away? Well at Elevate Marketing Co., we like to think we are a healthy mix of all three!
As marketing consultants, creativity runs in our veins. We thrive on new ideas and trying new marketing techniques. One thing we often find when talking with potential clients is the need for new ideas. When a business owner is knee deep in running their business, and having done so for so many years, it can tough to think of something new. It can also be tough to rip the bandage off and try something new.
If you find yourself in this position, wanting to try something new but not sure what and how to do it, then this blog post is for you! We are going to break down our definition of a marketing consultant and how the one-size-fits-all consultant approach isn’t ideal.
Three Types of Marketing Consultants
In our experience, there are three types of marketing consultants.
- The Marketing Assistant
- The Marketing Coordinator
- The Marketing Director
The Marketing Assistant role is honestly the hardest role for marketing consultants to play? Why? Because we want more! We want to have our hands in marketing pot and we want to DO the work. This is our nature and more than likely, we are just too excited to see a company’s marketing plans come to fruition. Joking aside, the Marketing Assistant role (as we like to call it) focuses more so on assisting your marketing staff member or department. Typical tasks we would do at this level of consultancy include:
- Reviewing and editing social media content
- Quarterly/Semi-Annual marketing meetings
- Regular phone calls with the marketing team
- Providing a second set of eyes on campaigns and marketing materials
If your marketing needs are more than your team can manage, or if you don’t have a team at all, then the Marketing Coordinator is the next level up for consultancy. Managing vendors and advertising campaigns can be a job in and of itself, which is why we like to offload this responsibility. This way, your marketing team can focus on daily marketing activities. When we help manage your big picture marketing activities and advertising vendors, this might include things like:
- Meeting monthly with vendors
- Running and reviewing advertising reports
- Monitoring social channels
- Providing suggested changes to website developer
- Meeting with marketing team to help prioritize ongoing projects
- Creating new social media campaigns
If you need help doing all-the-things, then the Marketing Director is where its at! With the marketing director level of consultancy, we manage, do, tweak and repeat. Essentially, we become your marketing department. At Elevate Marketing Co., we believe in the power of face-to-face contact and cultural immersion! Even though much of what we do in marketing can be done remotely at a coffee shop with a big caramel latte at hand, we believe in spending time at your office. This allows us to become part of your team and it allows you to have direct access to us!
Tasks that we take on as your marketing director:
- Social Media Management: creating social media content, managing company’s social profiles, managing reviews and comments, reporting, etc.
- Website Management: reviewing existing content, writing/editing website content, working with website developer, creating new web pages, landing page creation, etc.
- Campaign Creation: meeting with the sales team, creating and managing marketing campaigns, managing vendors, etc.
- Event Management: coordinating events from start to finish, coordinating promotions for events, creating follow up campaigns, etc.
Why a Marketing Consultant is Beneficial
If you haven’t already gathered, marketing consultants can come in all shapes and sizes based on your needs. In many cases, companies will choose to start small and grow into a deeper relationship. It’s no surprise that this is the case. We too, want to make sure it’s a good fit!
We might be biased, but marketing consulting can offer a growing business an incredible amount of expertise without the commitment and overhead of a full time staff member. When you hire a marketing consultant, you are getting a wealth of knowledge, resources and connections. Yes, connections. It’s our job as marketing consultants to know people! People with answers, tools, recommendations, solutions…the list goes on. And better yet, if we don’t know the answer, you can count on us finding an answer for you. We become your best advocate, your researcher, your marketing guru. This is literally what we do, and we absolutely love it.
What does the process look like?
We get this question more than you’d think! “If we hire you as our marketing consultant, what are the next steps? How do we get started?” We typically begin with a discovery phase. Before we recommend anything to you, we need to find out what the current situation is – we don’t know what we don’t know. Once we complete the discovery phase, we will provide you with a mini marketing plan, list of recommendations, suggested improvements, and new ideas! All along with a timeline and implementation plan. We will also put together a plan for our relationship moving forward, schedule for time onsite, and plan for regular reviews. Open lines of communication are incredibly important when working with a marketing consultant.
Hiring a marketing consultant can be extremely valuable for your growing business. Not only do you get all the benefits of a marketing expert, but you will get a fresh set of eyes on your company to spark new ideas, creativity and excitement. To learn more about our marketing consulting services, or to schedule a free 1 hour marketing consult, contact us!