When looking to expand, or grow your business, a marketing consultant can make all the difference for you and your brand. Top marketing consultants are fresh thinking, objective, experienced, and deliver results. They can help you improve your marketing performance, get better results from your budget, and even act as an extension of your marketing department.
Choosing the right marketing consultant is essential for your success. Here are four key things to consider when looking for the right fit.
1. Transparency Is Key
This works both ways — meaning you're transparent about what you need from your marketing consultant, and they're transparent about what they’re able to deliver. Consider asking yourself the following questions to help you gain insight into the process:
- What are your goals? Have you established quantifiable goals? Are they realistic?
- Do you need someone to help you improve your marketing performance, or capture new market shares? Do you have a plan to accomplish this?
- Are you new to marketing?
- What’s currently being employed? What’s working? What’s unknown, or not working?
- Do you need advice to validate what you’re doing and to make some suggestions as to how you can improve the effectiveness of your marketing?
To identify the right fit, create a list of essential requirements and ask potential consultants how they would address your goals. The right consultant will be transparent and answer your questions directly and honestly and let you know if you're doing a great job, or if they can provide some service to help you improve your performance.
2. How Much Experience Do They Have?
When it comes to one of your most valuable assets — your brand image — there's nothing more important than its safekeeping in experienced hands. A consultant’s experience with your industry, target audience, goals, and challenges can bring more awareness to your campaigns and improve your results in a measurable way.
Consultants with experience will also allow you to take a dive into past customer reviews to gain more insight into how they've helped (or didn't help), previous clients, with their endeavors.
Some questions to consider in this area include:
- Can your marketing consultant demonstrate experience in solving your marketing pain points?
- Do they have access to your target market?
- Do they have case studies showing success stories?
3. Skills to Pay the Bills
Another important factor to keep in mind is the consultant's skills. You'll need to make sure your marketing consultant's skills align with your goals to ensure they're fit for a meeting or, better yet, exceeding them.
For instance, if you want to improve your digital marketing results, you will look for a consultant well versed in digital tactics. This means they have evidence and examples of times when they’ve utilized their skills to help other clients reach their digital goals (i.e., email, social media, pay-per-click, etc.). They should also have an idea of how their skills will help them get your digital marketing efforts where they need to be.
In this case, some digital marketing skills to look out for include:
- Technology-Driven
- SEO and SEM
- Video
- OTT and Streaming
- Data and Analytics
- Content Marketing
- Adaptable to the ever-changing digital world and forward-thinking
4. Are They Good at Relationships?
You'll also need to consider the professional compatibility between you and your consultant. Do they seem enthusiastic to build a relationship with you and get to the root of your problems and help find solutions?
This is an important quality to have in your marketing consultant, as their ability to build and maintain relationships with you shows what they can do for your brand with its audience. Conversely, it could reflect poorly on your brand if they're not good at making connections and developing relationships.
To get a better feel, consider asking questions to uncover their discovery process and how they plan to make recommendations.
Takeaway: Make an Informed Decision
Knowing what to look for in the right marketing consultant is the first step to experiencing all the wonderful benefits of choosing the RIGHT partner for you. By looking for transparency, experience, skills, and their ability to build relationships — you ensure that your most valuable asset is in reliable hands that can help you reach your business goals. Follow our Bonneville Bay Area blog for more insight and resources on marketing and more.
