There comes a time when you must hire an online marketing consultant to help you with your company’s marketing efforts if you want to stay abreast with the current trends and outdo your competition.
With online marketing consulting, you can get new insights and outside perspectives to help push your digital marketing strategy beyond its current limits to bring in more leads and actual sales.
What is an Online Marketing Consultant?
An online marketing consultant is an organization or individual specializing in online marketing for companies/businesses. They use online marketing channels to bring in more leads and boost actual sales conversions.
An online marketing consultant is also called a digital marketing consultant. However, digital marketing is the better, broader term for all forms of marketing that take place online via the internet.
The digital marketing consulting expert you hire may oversee part of or your entire marketing strategy, depending on your budget, needs, and their industry expertise. For example, you can hire them to help you with content marketing only.
An online marketing consulting expert is trained and well-versed in data analytics, advertising, marketing, public relations, copywriting, consumer behaviour psychology, business, and communications.
What Does an Online Marketing Consultant Do?
An online marketing consultant offers digital marketing consulting services such as:
- Social media marketing
- Marketing strategy (development and implementation)
- Search engine optimization, including local SEO
- Email marketing
- Analytics and evaluation
- Paid media advertising, including Google AdWords, Facebook ads, and Instagram ads
- Online reputation management
- Video advertising, including YouTube ads
- Content marketing, including infographics, blog posts, eBooks, white papers, and more
- Branding and brand development
- Content planning/strategy
- Project management
- Website design and development
The daily responsibilities of an online marketing expert include:
- Finding new opportunities for the company or business to net in new customers as well as retain existing ones
- Enhancing online presence, client communication, and engagement by setting up a vibrant social media strategy across each social media platform the business is on
- Overseeing the production and utilization of various content, such as blog posts and landing pages
- Using search engine optimization techniques to ensure the content produced is search engine friendly and stands a chance to rank on Google and other popular search engines like Bing and Yahoo
- Doing performance evaluations on every current marketing effort, such as SEO, paid media, email marketing, and social media
- Using the insights gained through the evaluations to develop more effective and efficient marketing techniques
- Improving and managing a company’s branding online
- Managing any ongoing marketing campaign done via mobile marketing, SEO, local marketing, email, and social media
- Managing paid media advertising, including maximizing the ROI on your ad spend for Google Ads and Facebook advertising, among others
- Using analytics through marketing analytics tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to measure the success of every campaign geared toward increasing the company’s market share.
The internet marketing consultant you hire covers the following steps:
1. Defining Your Company Goals
Questions to ask here involve your current marketing efforts, what you have accomplished so far, what you want to achieve, and your short- and long-term goals.
2. Creating a Robust Marketing Strategy
For this, the consultant considers aspects such as the target audience, buyer persona, how digital assets will be developed, what digital channels the business will use, the person or people responsible for implementing the strategy, measuring success, determining costs of the strategy, and more.
3. Implementing the Marketing Strategy
The client and consultant discuss and agree on how the designed strategy will be implemented, who will oversee the implementation, the timeframe for the implementation, and when results are expected.
4. Monitoring and Measuring Results
For an online marketing consulting expert, the internet marketing strategy is not complete if they don’t monitor and measure the results of their marketing efforts.
Results are measurable in metrics such as the number of generated leads, the conversion rate, or the cost of acquiring each lead.
Results can also be measured in goals, such as increasing the number of social engagements on the company’s socials like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
5. Reporting Observed Results
A digital marketing consultation professional must report their progress with the implemented strategy to their clients. This can be done through simple ways like emails or complex methods like white papers.
The report shows the performance of various marketing techniques across different channels using metrics or definable goals.
Why Do I Need an Online Marketing Consultant?
Online marketing consultants are necessary for any serious business that wants to enhance its positioning on the market and reach out to an even bigger portion of its target audience. What benefits can a company enjoy after hiring a consultant?
Benefits of an Online Marketing Consultant
Below are the key benefits you can enjoy as a business owner when you hire a talented digital marketer.
Gaining New Insights/Outside Perspectives
As an internal marketing team, you may not always succeed at innovating new ideas and roping them into your marketing strategy.
When you bring a consultant on board, they bring in new insights or external perspectives you weren’t exposed to before. You can then intertwine these with your other working ideas to create a better marketing strategy.
Saving You Time and Money
Most of the time, you’ll struggle to figure out what online marketing strategies to follow. With an online consultant, you can save yourself money as they work faster, complement your internal team, and can even work part-time.
Quicker Results and Higher Returns on Investment (ROI)
Because of their advanced online marketing automation tools, online marketing consultants can achieve good results faster at a higher ROI.
When to Know You Need an Online Marketing Consultancy Expert
If any of the following applies to you, it’s time to enlist the help of a digital marketing agency like Canopy Media:
- Your internal internet marketing team lacks proper knowledge and expertise for online strategies.
- You want a more robust and results-oriented marketing plan for the short and long term.
- Your company needs help monitoring and measuring crucial analytics.
- Your internal online marketing team is small or already overwhelmed.
- You want a fresh set of eyes on your existing and future online marketing strategies.
- The cost of hiring full-time online marketing employees exceeds that of an online marketing consultant.
- You want to branch into a different line of online marketing, such as local marketing, that you don’t have the internal human resources for.
What to Consider When Hiring an Online Marketing Consultancy Expert
There are several factors to consider before hiring an online marketing consultant. These may relate either to your business or the consultant. Here are some aspects you’ll want to consider:
1. Your budget and the Cost of the Consultant
Depending on the industry and the consultant’s experience, you may end up paying more for online marketing consulting than an internal team.
You must look into your marketing budget and compare it with the consultant’s price to see whether hiring them will be affordable and sustainable for at least six months.
Some online marketing tactics require patience, such as search engine optimization, even when you design a foolproof SEO strategy. You should be in it for the long run.
2. Your Business Needs and Objectives
Are you looking for more social engagements? Do you want to generate more leads and increase sales conversions?
Your specific internet marketing and business needs and goals should guide you on what type of consultant you need. For example, you can hire a lead generation consultant if you want more leads and sales.
3. Consultant’s Reviews, Testimonials, and Case Studies
You’ll definitely want to work with the best consultant for your industry. Some key ways to determine if they are the best fit is to look at their Google reviews – or other online reviews – testimonials, and verifiable case studies.
If their past clients highly recommend them, then chances are you’ve hit the jackpot and just got your company one of the top online marketing consultants.
Conclusion
Now you know what an online marketing consultant is, the consulting services they offer, why you need one, when to know when you should hire one, and what to consider before getting one for your company or business.
If you are looking for a veteran digital marketing consultant, Canopy Media is your one-stop-shop for marketing services such as SEO, PPC management services, online reputation management, WordPress website design, and other digital marketing techniques.
References:
- Kevintpayne: What Does A Digital Marketing Consultant Do (and How To Hire One)
- Wearemarketing: Why Should Your Business Hire A Digital Marketing Consultancy?
- Smekdigital: WHAT DOES A DIGITAL MARKETING CONSULTANT DO?
- Neilpatel: Digital Marketing Consulting
- Webfx: Digital Marketing Consultants: 10 Steps to Find the Best One
- Honestfox: What does a digital marketing consultant do?
