Consulting lets you benefit from special expertise you don’t have in-house. This additional expertise can be used to help you develop better KPIs, launch a presence on new social media platforms, or use your marketing budget more efficiently.
Are you interested in the work consultants can do for you? This guide will answer common questions about digital marketing consultants and their work.
You’ll learn what a digital marketing consultant is, what these professionals can do for businesses like yours, and what problems they are brought in to solve. Then, you’ll find out what it costs to hire these services.
What Is a Digital Marketing Consultant?
A digital marketing consultant is an expert in online promotion. When hired, they provide insights to businesses based on their expertise. The value a consultant provides is often founded on what they can uniquely offer you.
For example, advice from consultants may be drawn from years of experience, organized teams of pros working together, or the result of valuable custom data operations. Consultants' advice is often based on your current needs and goals rather than a universal approach.
What Does a Digital Marketing Consultant Do?
Digital marketing consultants can advise you on every stage of planning, developing, or launching digital marketing campaigns. Here are some examples of common digital marketing consulting services—
Recommending or Implementing Analytics
Consultants will often recommend analytics for digital marketing because it is essential to improve any marketing plan over time.
Consultants must do some research or data collection to understand your problems and recommend solutions. They often use data from Google Analytics, Google Adwords, and other marketing manager tools. They may also have their own completely proprietary systems for case studies and other types of research.
If your business currently doesn’t have a way to track and monitor your online marketing, that will often be one of the first recommendations.
Recommending or Developing New In-House Procedures
Your consultants may recommend overhauling your procedures for more successful digital marketing. New procedures can help you raise the standards of everything your marketing team puts out. A consultant may recommend new processes for:
- Your marketing content creation process
- Your ad creation or ad buying process
- Your ad management process
- Your performance tracking and monitoring process
Team training is often recommended when the problems are serious. Consultants may be able to help you train your team to handle special challenges like analytics for eCommerce.
Recommending New Platforms, Formats and Channels
Choosing the wrong platform can hold your online marketing back. Your consultant or team may recommend that you choose different channels to reach your audience more effectively. You may have more success through:
- Email marketing
- Content marketing
- Social media marketing (through social media accounts on LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, or others)
- Pay-per-click ads
Consultants can also provide plans for succeeding on these new platforms and channels if you're using them for the first time. They may have recommendations to help your team develop new skills for digital marketing or what you need to know about reaching potential customers on these platforms.
Planning Marketing Automation
Consultants can help you make big changes and manage marketing initiatives such as automation within your company. Machine learning and AI tools have dramatically increased in power in just the last few years.
Automation tools are capable of generating simple content, posting to social media profiles on a schedule, and returning tailored reports about engagement. If you’re still struggling to develop these capabilities in your business or start-up. Your consultants may be able to help you catch up in a short amount of time.
They may recommend skills to build on your team or ways to make the most of your expanded capabilities.
What Problems Do Marketing Consultants Solve for Clients?
Marketing consultants are often called in to solve problems that don’t have easy explanations. Here are some examples of problems that marketing consultants may be called in to resolve—
Poor Responses to Marketing
Consultants are often called in to examine why online marketing produced by in-house teams isn’t getting any response from its audience. These problems may be marked by low rankings for content marketing, low conversion rates for ads, or other bad marketing trends
The consultants and their teams may recommend a number of problems based on what the research reveals. Consultants may be able to identify problems like:
- Ineffective audience targeting
- Flawed ad or content creation policies
- Impractical expectations for your strategy (for example, targeting competitors that are too large to unseat)
Bad Public Relations Online
Consultants can assist businesses with special or emergency problems that in-house marketing teams don’t have any experience handling. A public relations disaster is a good example of a problem that requires special knowledge to navigate correctly.
Difficulty Managing Advertising Properties Efficiently
You may have metrics platforms or effective marketing tools not currently used to their full potential.
A consultant can help you understand the gap between your capabilities and what’s possible if your team is trained to use your current resources correctly. They can help your team understand the difference between reporting and analytics and develop new skills.
How Much Does a Digital Marketing Consultant Cost?
Every business will have different online starting points and needs, so predicting costs is difficult. However, the work of digital marketing consultants can be done at all scales.
Consultants may work for a fixed cost over a period of time or bill by the hour for individual meetings. This allows businesses that need marketing consultants to control their costs very closely.
To help you understand what activities consultants might engage in at different budget levels, here are some ideas. Below, you’ll see examples of the work a consultant might be free to perform depending on the resources they have..
Examples of Small-Scale Digital Marketing Consulting
When assisting on a small scale (for example, a few limited meetings or a few weeks of discussions), consultants often focus on the most immediate problems. These are issues that are most likely to be impacting your online presence.
For example, if your landing pages have technical issues, that’s likely to completely undermine all of your marketing efforts, including the ads that are delivering visitors to your landing pages.
Even with a limited number of research hours, a consultant can tell you a lot about your problems. A consultant working on a small contract may help you to do all of the following:
- Identify a list of urgent pain points
- Spot roadblocks that can be cleared quickly and affordably
- Prepare competitor reports
- Provide general advice on your marketing and business goals
Examples of Medium-Scale Digital Marketing Consulting
At a medium-level budget, digital marketing consultants provide more comprehensive services. When consultants have more to spend on research, they will often go into your problems in greater detail so that they can provide more nuanced insights.
- Recommending team training or new digital marketing tools
- Assisting in developing landing pages for SEO
- Analyzing existing strategies for inefficiencies
Examples of Large-Scale Digital Marketing Consulting
When you can provide a high budget, marketing consultants can develop comprehensive, long-term plans to address your problems.
In these cases, consultants are often asked to overhaul or replace current marketing processes and goals completely. Consultants working with these budgets may expand their role to include:
- Developing new training processes
- Launching a new strategy
- Planning or perfecting your entry into completely new digital channels
Do You Need Digital Marketing Consulting Help for Your Business?
You may need digital marketing consulting if you can’t seem to leave a footprint online or do it fast enough for your business needs. A consultant can help you develop a stronger digital marketing agency or finally make an impact on the marketing channels that matter most to you.
Our team can help you if you want consultants to improve your online operations. We can advise you on digital marketing strategies, content marketing efforts, search engine optimization, web design, and more. Contact us about your needs today.