83%, that’s the number of small businesses that admit digital marketing is working well for them. Do you know what these businesses have in common? They all have excellent marketing teams or digital marketing consultants handling their marketing strategy.
If you’ve been trying to DIY your digital marketing ever since you started, and all you’re seeing is moderate traffic, unimpressive reach, and barely any appeal among your target audience, it’s time to STOP.
At this point, if you want growth and a substantial reach, your only option is to hire a qualified and experienced digital marketing consultant in Nashik. But what good will that do you? What does a digital marketing consultant do? And how do you know which one you should choose? Read to find all your answers!
What Does A Digital Marketing Consultant Do? – Key Responsibilities Of A Digital Marketing Consultant
A digital marketing consultant is responsible for designing your brand’s personalized digital marketing strategy. They help promote your brand on various platforms through techniques such as social media marketing, SEO, paid ads on search engines, and other digital marketing approaches and digital technologies.
A digital marketing consultant can work with your in-house team of full-time employees or help you manage an external digital marketing agency and outsource the job to them.
Experienced digital marketing consultants analyze your brand’s current digital position, public perception, and performance on various marketing metrics. Then, they sit down with you to discuss your marketing/conversion goals and the future you envision for your brand. They also identify the weaknesses in your current strategies and suggest fixes for search engine optimization, social media marketing, online advertising campaigns, etc.
1. Establishes A Digital Marketing Strategy
Before your business begins implementing anything, it’s essential to have a clear roadmap. A digital marketing consultant designs that roadmap when it comes to online marketing.
They first study your business objectives and the resources they can utilize to meet those. After that, they analyze current reach, key performance indicators (KPIs), marketing channels you use, and conversion/success rates.
Once your digital marketing consultant has this knowledge, here’s what they do:
- Based on the industry your business operates in and your target audience, they design an approach to reach out to them through multiple channels. These channels might include a mix of social media ads, organic SEO, etc.
- If your business is just starting its digital marketing strategy, a consultant will identify which online marketing channels you need to make a presence in first.
- They’ll constantly track metrics of active or newly launched campaigns and tweak them if they don’t show expected results. This might include retargeting, optimizing the campaign, or canceling it altogether.
2. Help You Establish Your Brand – Brand Thinking
Branding isn’t just about promotion. Business and brand are two completely different things. People can recognize you by name when you’re a well-known brand. Your USPs and products are crystal clear to your target audience. Moreover, you have a defined set of characteristics that your competitors don’t.
Digital marketing consultants seek to highlight your USPs, give your business a unique brand identity and voice, and make you stand apart from competitors.
3. Focuses On Valuable Content-led Marketing
A sound content strategy goes a long way in establishing your business’s brand identity and bringing in organic leads.
Digital marketing consultants allocate your resources effectively to ensure your multi-channel content strategy works as intended. Highlighting your business’s products and services or just creating a strong information base around the industry you serve is another part of their content-led marketing strategy. This might involve running a campaign to solve your target audience’s most basic queries or bringing traffic to your site via blogs with backlinks.
4. Manages Your Marketing Projects And Campaigns
Marketing campaigns are essentially projects. So any competent digital marketing consultant should also be an excellent project manager.
Be it for a trendy social media campaign or a multi-week blog post project, they will have to collaborate with multiple team members and ensure timely delivery. This requires top-notch project management capabilities.
5. Bring Your Brand’s Story To Life As A Storyteller
To gain customer trust, your brand needs to tell its story in a meaningful way to the target audience. A digital marketing consultant focuses on establishing an emotional connection with the audience through a compelling brand story.
- They determine the inner voice of your brand and what makes you different.
- They find out what pains your customers the most and what makes them happy.
- They determine what platform, format, and medium would be the best to bring forward your brand’s story to your customers.
- They create a consistent tone and style to communicate the story to your target audience.
6. Ensures Your Website Is Search Engine Optimized
63% of shopping begins online. And to ensure that you never miss out on this huge opportunity, your digital marketing consultant will employ a range of on and off-page SEO techniques. Here are the ways in which they’ll do the same:
- Designing and publishing content that revolves around the keywords your target customer searches for the most.
- Ensuring you are publishing blogs most relevant to the topics frequently searched for in your industry.
- Maximize click-through rates by optimizing images, URLs, headers, and other components of a blog.
- Generating backlinks or establishing your website as a high-authority source.
- Ensuring proper schema or snippet markup to boost your SERP positions.
7. Can Handle PPC Advertising
Pay-per-click advertising is an incredibly effective way of bringing targeted audiences to your business. It is affordable for most businesses, has a wide reach, and, if done right, can result in high conversion rates.
A digital marketing consultant uses tools like Google AdWords, Facebook Business Suite, and other such websites to create powerful PPC ads. They also track the progress and success of such PPC campaigns and modify them if they don’t work.
8. Uses Data And Analytics To Help You Improve Your ROI
It’s important for any digital marketing consultant to have sound knowledge of data analytics because that’s the only way to track metrics associated with online marketing campaigns.
A good digital marketing consultant leverages data insights to learn more about consumer behavior to form a detailed buyer persona. This, in turn, helps create successful marketing campaigns targeting the said buyer more accurately.
When to Hire a Digital Marketing Consultant?
Identifying whether or not you need a digital marketing consultant is a bit tricky, especially if you have a small business. Here are some signs that indicate your business desperately needs a digital marketing consultant:
- Your marketing campaigns aren’t having a positive effect despite multiple modifications.
- You don’t have the necessary experts in your team to handle high-quality digital marketing as you scale.
- You’re multitasking too much while trying to handle your company’s digital marketing, which in turn is reducing your efficiency and slowing down growth.
- You haven’t been able to form a solid brand identity yet.
Things to Consider When Hiring a Digital Marketing Consultant
The main factors you need to consider before hiring a digital marketing consultant are as follows.
1. Your Business Goals
Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound – or SMART is a term often used by marketers and businesspeople. Setting SMART goals for your business is essential before onboarding a digital marketing consultant.
Why? Because you can hire the right digital marketing consultant only by communicating clear goals to them and seeing whether or not they align with your vision. For example, tell them something like, “I want to see a 30% increase in conversion rates within X number of months”.
See how they respond to that, what additions they make, and what tools they suggest using to achieve the goals. Solidifying all this when you have the first few interviews before hiring a consultant will make sure you choose the right person for the job.
2. Check If They’re Familiar With Your Favorite Tools
Some businesses tend to use in-house software to manage sales and marketing, while others use cloud-based CRM systems. Whatever is the case with you, ensure that the digital marketing consultant you hire is well aware of the tools and knows how to use them.
If they’re not aware of the tool, they should be flexible and willing to learn it, or at least be able to suggest a worthy alternative to use.
3. Check If The Consultant Is Familiar With Your Industry
A one-size-fits-all model doesn’t work well when it comes to hiring a digital marketing consultant. While the core of online marketing remains the same regardless of the industry, the nuances vary.
Make sure that the digital consultant you’re hiring has relevant experience in your industry or has worked in a related sector in the recent past. Doing this will ensure that the consultant is familiar with your target audience and knows their pain points pretty well.
Moreover, such a candidate will be able to innovate more and will have greater awareness of the platforms your business targets most frequently.
If you find a consultant you like but hasn’t worked in your industry then don’t hesitate to give them a chance. Sometimes, a fresh perspective is exactly what’s needed to succeed.
4. Your Budgets
Enough about the candidate. It’s time to analyze what you can or cannot offer a digital marketing consultant. Because let’s be honest. For any small business, money is tight most of the time.
Digital marketing consultants charge between $50-200/hr. Even the lower number isn’t cheap, so you’ve to be wise when deciding who to hire. A hotshot candidate might add a lot of value to your business but will come at a great expense, which you might not be able to afford.
To make sure you have a clear budget in hand, follow these tips:
- Try paying the consultant on a value-based model. Usually, this will involve a fixed minimum payment, and the rest of the salary will depend on how they’re performing. If a campaign works fairly well, they’ll receive better incentives and payment for it.
- You can even consider hiring them by providing them some equity. This hiring strategy is especially popular among tech startups in Silicon Valley.
- If you’ve had a large marketing budget for a while without comparable effects, refocus it and try to bring it down. This will help you fork out a little more for a worthy consultant.
5. Check Out Case Studies and Testimonials
Just like nothing speaks more about your company than employee testimonials, nothing speaks better about a potential digital marketing consultant than client testimonials. You can request them for a list of their previous clients and reach out to a few personally and seek feedback about the candidate.
Moreover, you can also check out any case studies they have ready. Did they assist a brand in developing a killer online marketing strategy within a few months? Do their services bring conversions? Do they write emails that have a high open-rate?
Case studies and testimonials will help you answer these questions and form an accurate picture of the consultant.
Wrapping Things Up
Whether you’re a budding startup or a well-established brand, there’s no way you can function without a successful, data-driven, and result-oriented digital marketing strategy. For that, you’ll need a qualified digital marketer.
We hope that our tips above will help you land the right digital marketing consultant for your brand. If you have any more questions about how to hire a digital marketing consultant, be sure to leave them in the comments below.
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. If you are looking for any help growing your businesses digitally, please reach out.