What Is A Marketing Consultant
I am a marketing consultant and often get questions about what being a marketing consultant is and what exactly I do.
The answer is that as a marketing consultant, I am an independent person offering companies a different, less traditional option for fulfilling their marketing needs.
To further explain what a marketing consultant is, per Wikipedia, a marketing consultant is a person who is generally called upon to advise around areas of product development and related marketing matters including marketing strategy.
Marketing consultants provide a variety of services for both short-term projects and longer-term engagements. The key differentiator between a marketing consultant and a marketing employee is that a marketing consultant is an independent contractor who is not employed by the company they are doing work for.
We know we need marketing help, but we don’t know what to do.
When companies realize they need to invest in marketing they traditionally start the process of filling a role by thinking through the business needs, identifying the role responsibilities, they might do research and determine a salary range, plus benefit offering, and then write a job description to hire someone.
The challenge with this approach is that sometimes, especially when it’s a new role within the organization, it can be difficult to fully define the role and even harder to justify the additional headcount. Especially when marketing is new and the financial return to the organization is unclear.
What is usually clear is the need for marketing. As businesses grow, the need for strong, strategic marketing grows as well.
- Sometimes companies realize they need to ‘raise the bar’ on their brand and communications.
- Sometimes companies need to increase awareness or generate more leads.
- Sometimes the competitive landscape changes and the company needs to react with differentiation or innovation.
- Sometimes the value proposition changes and the company needs to react.
- Sometimes customer expectations change, and the company needs to react.
Whatever the reason, when growth is needed, businesses need to rethink and reevaluate how they are doing marketing.
When this change happens, it’s time to bring in a person with a strong background and track record in designing and developing strategic marketing plans, teams, and budgeted to fulfill the plan.
How to know if a marketing consultant might be right for my business
There is an overwhelming number of marketing options available, with multiple smart, experts offering solutions. So, what’s the best option for bringing marketing into your business? Should you hire a full-time person? Should you engage a marketing agency? Should you hire an independent marketing consultant?
Here is a summary of my perspective on the pros/cons of each marketing solution option.
Full-time marketing employee: hiring a full-time marketing person will benefit a company. The full-time hire can own marketing for the business and be the main point of contact for any external execution support partners. However, if your company is on a limited budget, you will probably hire a less experienced resource. This type of full-time hire can grow into being a strong marketer for your organization but will not be able to be a leader without receiving coaching and mentoring and will not be able to help steer the strategic direction of the business or the marketing discipline without a mentor or marketing expert who they can learn from.
Marketing agency: hiring / contracting a marketing agency can be extremely beneficial. A full-service marketing agency can support your business with all your marketing needs; from strategy to creative to the execution of multi-channel communications. To receive the full-service experience, you will have to pay full-service experience expenses. For a small company, marketing agency expenses are too steep for their budget. And even if you decide to invest in a marketing agency relationship, the agency will need someone within your company to provide them with business insights and direction-so someone within your company will still need to ‘own’ marketing.
Marketing consultant: contracting an independent marketing consultant may be an ideal solution for augmenting an existing marketing team or in developing a new marketing team, starting with just an independent consultant. Marketing consultants can be engaged to help companies with a variety of business and marketing needs. When a company doesn’t have the expertise or bandwidth within its internal teams, hiring a marketing consultant can allow a company to ‘try out’ marketing and to gain marketing expertise at a lower cost of entry-without the cost associated with a full-time hire or the cost of a full-service agency.
If you answer ‘yes’ to any of these questions, a marketing consultant may benefit your business.
- Are you a small business with revenue under $50M?
- Are you interested in bringing marketing into your organization but aren’t ready to invest in a full-time hire?
- Are you looking for someone to grow your marketing discipline in-house and/or partner with external agencies, freelancers, or contractors?
- Do you want the expertise of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) but cannot support the expense?
- Are you looking for a partner to join your leadership team to drive business growth through strategic marketing and sales alignment?
- Do you need assistance to learn more about customers and think Voice of the Customer research may help you to create better product innovations, connect with your current customers, and acquire new customers?
- Do you need a partner to drive strategic marketing initiatives and/or projects?
Contact us to learn more about how a less traditional approach to fulfilling your marketing needs may help to better position your business for a strong marketing foundation and future growth.
Williams Brand Consulting is an independent marketing consultancy providing services that range from Fractional CMO: senior-level omnichannel marketing strategy and team leadership on a long-term basis to strategic project expertise: ad-hoc / project-level expertise available to support short-term projects and initiatives. Contact us to learn more about how an outside-the-box approach to fulfilling your strategic marketing leadership needs may help build a strong marketing foundation and future growth.
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