Internet Marketing Consultant

8 Ways an Internet Marketing Consultant Can Improve Your Business

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If you run your business without the input of external specialists, you risk falling behind your competition and losing your market share to them, especially if your internal marketing team is pressed for time, resources, or knowledge. Hiring an internet marketing consultant can help you bridge the gap between the current results of your ongoing marketing efforts and what you hope to achieve within a given timeframe.

An internet marketing consultant is an organization or individual that leverages a business or company’s online marketing channels to bring in more qualified leads and turn them into buyers.

As an external advisor, an internet marketing consultant (a.k.a. a digital marketing consultant or an online marketing consultant) acts as an extension of your in-house marketing team. They work together with the team to achieve the company’s long- and short-term goals through the internet (web-based and mobile-based) to sell a company or business’s goods or services.

Internet marketing consultants fulfill various online marketing services for business owners, including:

  • Paid advertising (YouTube ads, Facebook ads, Google ads, and more)
  • Content marketing
  • Online reputation management
  • Search engine optimization (SEO)
  • Website design and optimization
  • Lead generation
  • Artificial Intelligence marketing (chatbot, customer relationship management)
  • Local marketing
  • International marketing
  • Email marketing
  • Video marketing
  • Social media marketing

As the digital marketing arena keeps evolving, internet marketing consultants do much more than just offer advice on areas that need improvement.

Online marketing consultants also perform some of the recommended tasks, which is a more specific way of helping the business grow.

Some of these ways that an online marketing consultant can help your business grow are discussed below.

8 Ways an Internet Marketing Consultant Improves Your Business

In case you are on the fence about hiring an internet marketing consultant, here are eight aspects to consider.

1. Competitive Analysis

The individual specialist or digital marketing agency you hire as an online marketing consultant can help you do a thorough competitive analysis to understand your competitors better.

The analysis will differ in extent and character depending on the consultant. For example, at Canopy Media, we analyze the five main competitors to your business and produce a comprehensive 30-page report.

Through a detailed competitive analysis, your business will be able to learn various things about itself and its competition, including:

  • Your competitors’ relative weaknesses and strengths
  • How they execute their digital marketing strategies
  • Gaps in solutions, techniques, or strategies that your business can exploit
  • The internal challenges your business faces
  • Areas of improvement in your online marketing efforts

The competitive analysis covers crucial aspects such as paid search, online reputation, organic search, website performance, local search, and social media prominence.

Once you know how your business stacks up against the main competitors, you can exploit the gaps discovered in all your marketing strategies to help you outdo the competition. Again, the consultant can help you put the report into action.

2. Lead Generation and Conversion Rate Optimization

There are three critical aspects of your digital marketing strategy that your business should focus on to get qualified leads:

  • Who you are
  • Where you are
  • What you do

In online marketing, your web- and mobile-based channels, such as websites, apps, blogs, and email newsletters, are the touchpoints where your business interacts with its leads. Each potential customer should be able to reach you easily through those channels.

These are the gateways for bringing in traffic. They become leads that can be nurtured and turned into customers. However, not all visitors turn into leads since each has a unique personality.

Here’s how your internet marketing consultant helps generate leads:

Social media – Each social media platform is a potential goldmine for your business. You can use social media to get in touch with your potential customers, including new ones that come through recommendations or referrals from past clients.

Your consultant can boost your social media leads by sharing information in the form of posts, answering industry-related questions, and engaging in conversations in groups.

Email marketing- Email marketing is held as a high-ROI digital marketing tactic, producing up to $44 for each dollar spent.

The consultant helps you create and nurture an email list that you can use to inform your subscribers about new products or services.

Business Listings – Putting up business listings like Google My Business Profile helps potential customers find you when they do a local search for product or service providers in your industry. You need a good consultant to help you draft an optimized business listing.

Website and Website Content – It’s one thing to have a website up and running. It’s another to generate enough qualified leads from it. Good website content and blog posts can help you get more leads, especially if your content brings good traffic.

Backlinks – Earning quality backlinks from high-reputation websites is one of the best ways to generate more sales through your website.

A good marketing firm or expert can help you develop and implement a robust link-building strategy to earn your business quality backlinks.

To raise the number of leads, digital marketing professionals use lead magnets, which are usually free resources created and promoted by marketers.

Each lead magnet aims to gain details about the channel visitor, which you can later use to turn them into customers.

Some common lead magnets include:

  • eBooks
  • Reports
  • Video training sessions
  • Webinars
  • Discounts
  • Contact lists
  • Free trials
  • Cheat sheets

Lead generation goes hand in hand with conversion rate optimization. 

If, for example, your website was receiving 1,000 visitors per day, and about 100 completed an action like subscribing to a newsletter, better conversion rates may see more than 250 new subscribers realized.

The digital marketing consulting expert or agency will, in this case, increase your website conversion rate from 10 to 25%.

3. SEO and Website Optimization

A website needs analysis. That’s crucial for showing how your website stands regarding issues like trust signals, calls to action, communication avenues, social media links, visual appeal, usability, and marketing blogs.

The idea for the needs analysis is to ultimately optimize a website for better results in user experience and website conversions. 

A digital marketing services specialist ensures your website is well-optimized, complete with relevant calls to action, ease of use, well-written blogs, and a great overall appearance that appeals to your visitors.

The specialist or agency also helps ensure that your website visitors can contact you easily without spending all their time looking for your phone number or email address.

Another critical aspect that goes hand in hand with website optimization is search engine optimization, commonly abbreviated as SEO.

SEO services are essential for website content and blogs to increase your chances of being discovered through search engine results pages (SERPs).

 A good digital marketing service provider should do extensive keyword research to discover which key phrases or words customers in your niche or industry use to find your products or service. Good keyword research is the backbone of a good SEO strategy.

As it happens, you may not always have all the right tools for conducting thorough keyword research. Your consultant steps in and eliminates the need to buy a hoard of SEO tools, which saves you money.

Your site can rank higher on the SERPs through thorough SEO, translating into more visitors and possibly even more conversions.

4. Marketing Automation

The digital marketing scene is constantly changing. New trends come up almost every day, and you must stay abreast with the changes to retain your market share and compete in the industry.

Digital marketing consulting experts step in and help you automate your marketing so that each campaign can be executed faster. Automation saves you time and money since you need fewer people to achieve the same, or better, results.

As with the SEO tools, your business doesn’t have to buy its own marketing automation tools. The digital marketer can provide you with the tools they have already purchased.

Be aware that the marketing process is a long one. The tools needed to automate it are extensive, ranging from social media marketing tools, content marketing tools, email marketing tools, and customer relationship management tools, to analytics tools.

Some common tools for marketing automation include:

When it comes to digital marketing tools, you may not know which ones will best serve your small business. With a marketing consultant in the mix, you will get good advice on which ones are best suited to your business.

5. Keeping You Updated on Current Marketing Trends

Since marketing trends keep changing by the day, a marketing consultant helps keep you up to date so you don’t miss out.

For example, the digital marketing world now often uses artificial intelligence (AI), such as chatbots and AI writing tools, for communication and content production. Your marketing experts will advise you on the best AI tools to use to your advantage.

If yours is a small business or a localized brick-and-mortar establishment, you might be using the same old marketing tactics you have been using since the beginning. These may be outdated and realize fewer positive results.

Providers of digital marketing consulting services help you choose the newest, trending, or time-tested marketing techniques that best fit your business.

Besides AI marketing, you can also try other recent tactics like virtual reality marketing, augmented reality marketing, short video marketing on Instagram, geo-filtering on Snapchat, and YouTube Shorts.

6. Building a Stronger Brand

The strength of your brand doesn’t stop at realizing good brand awareness in your industry. It goes beyond this into other areas, such as brand persona, identity, and voice.

A marketing specialist looks at your brand identity and evaluates aspects like your logo, social media presence, website design, and brand voice.

Where any of these aspects do not align well with the overall identity, the specialist can help your business realign.

Building a better brand helps position you better in the industry as an authority, which sets the business apart from the many others competing with you. 

Other branding elements your digital marketing agency can help with include fonts, slogan, and colour schemes. Your customers will have an easier time with your business if they can easily identify it because of its consistent use of these unique brand elements.

The marketing consulting service must understand aspects like brand purpose, unique selling points, market status, competition status, target audience, and brand voice to best build your brand.

7. Content Planning, Creation, and Promotion

Your business’s internet marketing strategy isn’t likely to be successful if you don’t have a good content marketing plan.

At a time when digital marketing revolves a lot around content, you’ll want your business to be on the frontline and stay up-to-date on all the content marketing trends.

Several types of content can help catapult your business to success, but it takes considerable investments to produce quality content.

The most common types of marketing content your consultant can help with include:

  • Videos
  • Case studies
  • Blog posts
  • E-courses/online courses
  • Ultimate guides and checklists
  • Email newsletters
  • Infographics
  • Memes
  • eBooks
  • User-generated content (UGC)
  • Reviews and testimonials 
  • Webinars and podcasts

A good all-around internet marketing consulting agency or professional can help with content planning, production, and even promotion.

The three aspects above are a holistic approach to content. Don’t try to create content randomly without a concrete plan. What’s more, you should define how the content will be promoted for more reach.

The digital marketing consultant helps you develop a content calendar in the planning stage. Here, you can rely on tools like Asana, Excel files, Trello, and AirTable. 

Content creation and research tools, such as Canva, SEMrush SEO Content Template, Hemingway App, Grammarly, Frase,BuzzSumo, AnswerThePublic, and the Originality.ai Blog Topic Generator, come in handy.

Once your content is up and running, you’ll need promotion tools like Buffer, Hootsuite, Bitly, Sprout Social, MailChimp, LinkedIn Pulse, and Viral Content Bee.

8. Creating an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

Your business needs an effective internet marketing strategy. While your internal marketing team can whip up a good one, there’s no harm in having an outsider looking in to help you polish it.

Digital marketing consultants help ensure your digital marketing strategy is in line with the goals and personality of your business while still setting you up for success in sales.

The digital marketing strategy becomes the roadmap that informs your marketing campaigns.

A good marketing strategy sets goals, budget, timelines for various campaigns, target audience, techniques/tactics, marketing channels, and Key Performance Indices (KPIs).

Depending on your arrangement, the internet marketing consultant will be responsible for various aspects of the entire strategy, such as:

  • Running online marketing campaigns
  • Developing the marketing strategy as informed by research on your industry, prevailing digital marketing trends, the effectiveness of your current marketing efforts, and the target audience
  • Recommending and running marketing campaigns on various platforms like SEO, YouTube ads, and Google Adwords
  • Determining the most crucial goals your business should set, such as gaining more website traffic, generating more qualified leads, and increasing conversion rates
  • Measuring results of various marketing campaigns

Conclusion

If you want to build a stronger brand, beat your competition, or increase sales conversions, hiring an internet marketing consultant is one of the best decisions you can make for your business.

A good consultant not only advises you but also plays an active role in ensuring the recommendations bear fruit for your business.

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