What Does a Digital Marketing Consultant Do?
Digital marketing gets more complicated as more tools and platforms enter the market offering different ways in which you can reach your audience.
In the 1990s, “digital marketing” didn’t exist at all. We were just building static websites, with big buttons so that everyone knew where to click.
It was in the early 2010s when digital marketing was no longer an afterthought of an existing marketing strategy, but rather a fundamental part of the strategy.
Now, digital marketing includes various activities such as search website design, engine optimization (SEO), local SEO, content marketing, email marketing, Google My Business (GMB), online ads, social media marketing (SMM), marketing automation, and much more. Marketing agencies and marketing managers have a hard time adapting to constant new realities and the fast changes.
Understand the Brand, Long-Term Business Requirements and Marketing Objectives
A good marketing consultant will not start by talking about campaigns and marketing tactics, but rather start with understanding your brand, your business, your market, your potential market, and your overall marketing goals.
Brand
A marketing consultant will review your existing brand identity to ensure it is updated to the current market and market opportunities. If any updates or enhancements are needed, the right resources will be brought in for that purpose. Your end results should be a thorough brand guide or brand book that defines the “hard traits” (colours, fonts) and “soft traits” (tone of voice, differentiators) of your brand identity.
Business
Surprisingly, there are many businesses within which the business leaders are not able to unanimously agree on what they business actually sells. It sometimes seems to be a simple disagreement that the products are the primary key offering, while services are supporting offerings, or the other way around. The definition of the business’ key offerings is essential to delivering consistent messaging and achieving brand recognition. It is also important to understand what the business does well and what the challenges are.
Market
Defining your audience is essential for successful messaging. The most effective approach is to build ideal customer personas. This is the definition of a fictitious personality that best describes your ideal customer: one that loves what you offer, is easy to work with, and brings repetitive business. These personas should then be used by all client-facing staff and external resources to define their tone of voice, creative approach, and overall messaging.
Potential Market
It is often the case that business owners miss out on potential customers by alienating them from the way they communicate, or where they communicate. Defining potential target customers, via personas, makes it easy to create marketing assets that speak to them.
Marketing Goals
No business should invest in marketing without first defining what their marketing goals are. These can consist of contact emails, phone calls, additions to a mailing list, sales of goods online or offline, or even traffic to a website for increased brand awareness.
Create the Marketing Strategy
A marketing consultant will create a marketing strategy that reviews all of the above, and ensures it caters to the current market. An analysis of competitors online and offline will be done, with a breakdown geographically.
Understanding what your competitors are doing online and offline is vital to your strategy.
Define the Best Marketing Plan Within a Specific Budget
There are endless opportunities for digital marketing for lead generation, but not all of them will deliver the leads that will convert into paying customers. Understanding how various demographics behave online and their preferred messaging is vital for a successful campaign.
The job of a marketing consultant is to understand the landscape and audience of each digital marketing activity, such as web design and development, social media networks (Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc.), Google Ads (SEM), Email Marketing (mailing lists), websites (search engine optimization) and much more.
However, putting together the perfect online marketing plan with amazing marketing campaigns is pretty useless if the budget does not cover it. Most small- to medium-sized businesses have not thought about what their marketing budget should be, and therefore cannot judge what to spend.
A marketing consultant assists in providing the data to show what are proven returns on investment, so that your business can feel confident with defining a digital marketing budget. The consultant then provides the expertise to put together the right marketing plan that makes the most out of a specified budget, i.e best ROI.
Create the Team for Perfect Execution
Digital marketing is not simple, and requires resources that understand each tool and platform. This usually requires a combination of individual freelancers and specific agencies. Leveraging the network of a digital marketing consultant can save you a lot of time and energy.
Deliver Analytics for Ongoing Optimization
The biggest advantage of digital marketing over mass marketing (TV, radio, print) is the real data that can be collected. The challenge, however, is always how to collect data on campaign results from several platforms and combine them so that you can get a holistic view of the results.
A digital marketing consultant will advise on the type of reports that make sense and give a true picture of how your marketing is performing, and what can be done to improve results.
Do you have any questions on the above, or would you like to share your experience? Just email ideas@mawazo.ca or call +1 (833) 503-0807.
At Mawazo Marketing we work with owners of B2B companies who want to accelerate their business. We help them with a concrete digital growth plan, a website that saves operational cost, and a digital marketing system that generates leads. For qualifying clients we offer a 5x ROI guarantee: if we don't reach the objective, then we pay back the difference. Book a Free Strategy Session to find out more.
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