When to hire a marketing strategy consultant?
If you work in marketing or have a business of your own, you probably hired or at least thought about hiring an external workforce for some of your tasks. Most often, companies hire freelance graphic designers or copywriters like this, but what about freelance marketing strategy consultants? Let’s review these eight situations when an external marketing consultant can be a good short-term addition to your team.
How every consultant should be.
1) When your hit-or-miss marketing stops working and you start running out of ideas
Small and medium business owners sometimes react to every cold call email selling a media space or read about a new technological advance in the MarTech industry and want to implement it in your business the next week. While these things do not have to be bad per se, they may be not suitable or crucial for your type of business. If this approach to marketing does not consistently work for your business results, then it’s time to consider hiring a marketing strategy consultant.
They can help you design a solid data-backed strategy that will define guidelines for your marketing that you will employ in the next period altogether with good reasoning for them. No more shooting in the dark!
2) When you are too busy to take a step back and review what you are actually doing
Do you have a ton of immediate marketing tasks to execute? Campaign bids need optimization, your newsletter needs a new copy, and your website tracking is broken – all of this requires immediate hands-on attention. If the size of your team is limited, it is easy to get lost in the rut even as a marketing lead.
If you need to see where you are going and get a high-level direction backed by data, consider a consultant. They can work independently and deliver all the input you need for decision-making.
3) When your team lacks the strategic marketing experience
Hiring a marketer usually means hiring a person executing tactical tasks in communications. Most of the open marketing vacancies in young companies revolve around digital marketing, social media, content, or performance marketing. Senior strategic marketers are usually expensive to have as a part of the team and therefore hiring a consultant is a good way to substitute the lack of this experience.
4) When you get stuck in converting users into customers
Did you reach the point of your conversion rate to stagnate or decline? Did your conversion become too expensive? A strategy consultant can analyze the reasons and propose a plan for restitution. It may be caused by issues that are not so easy to pinpoint, but an experienced consultant should consider all the aspects of the marketing mix. Maybe the pricing sensitivity of the target group has changed, or you reached a point of segment saturation – a freelance strategist can review all these aspects.
5) When your competitors are crushing you
You are trying to gain new customers and increase the loyalty of the existing ones, but the competition becomes tougher and they start to bite into your market share. What now?
Get a closer look at the market and your competitors, analyze their positioning, and segments they are attacking. Try to get as much marketing intelligence as you can and use the knowledge to knock the competitor out. This is a job for a strategist - they know how to do secondary market research from available sources and run qualitative and quantitative research to get all the necessary information to protect your business against fierce peers.
6) When you have issues with not enough people knowing your brand
Some marketers say that building a brand is a waste of money or that it is only for the largest companies, but don’t fall for this common mistake! Try to send your sales representatives to a market where you have no brand awareness, and your competitor does. Unless you will have an extremely aggressive pricing policy, they will likely fail.
The more known your brand is, the more people become your customers – it is truly an easy equation. If you haven’t done any brand-building campaign yet, consider a strategy consultant. Doing the first brand campaign is a challenge for young companies, but an experienced freelance senior marketer can help overcome it and plan a successful campaign based on your marketing strategy.
7) When you do not understand your customers
Unless you talk to your customers regularly, you probably don’t know what they think of your company. Do they think your products are useful? Why did they decide to leave you and switch to your competition? Getting your customers to talk is a crucial thing for every business and their innovation, customer loyalty, and of course, sales.
Organizing interviews or getting survey data to deep dive into customer attitudes can be quite time-consuming. For a strategy consultant and/or a market researcher, this is their bread and butter, and it is quite an independent task to outsource. You will usually get a recording of the interviews too, so you won’t miss a thing that your customers say.
8) When you have way too many goals
A good marketing plan is usually simple, elegant, and has one or two goals. However, if you overdo it with your goals, you won’t likely meet any because you will spread yourself very thin on all of them.
Business goals should be easily translated into marketing goals and each person in your team should be responsible for a different part of the marketing funnel. Marketing consultants can calculate the numbers and justify them with clarity. You will see that once you have fewer goals, your work will become more focused and goals easier to meet!
Those are the most common scenarios when you should consider getting some help from a marketing strategy consultant. Did you find yourself in any of these situations and feel you could use the services of a marketing consultant? Feel free to reach out to me via the contact form or directly schedule a free consultation and together we can find the most fitting solution for you.