Three Scenarios Where Hiring a Marketing Consultant Makes a Tons of Sense
Can I assume that you’re outsourcing some services that your business needs right now? It could be accounting, IT support, or maybe HR and hiring. Perhaps your company provides one of these outsourced services for other businesses. Outsourcing makes a whole lot of sense when you want to bring in expertise that you don’t have internally.
Is This You?
Unfortunately, many business owners wait too long to hire the marketing expertise that they need to put their marketing resources to best use. Do you find yourself in any of these three scenarios?
1. You’re the Owner and You’re Doing Marketing Yourself
As the owner, you’re probably the person at your company who knows your customers best so you’re leading all of the sales and marketing activities. It’s absolutely essential to know your customer, but oftentimes the owner is very operationally oriented and tends to create marketing messages that are focused on what you do and how you do it, instead of the problems you solve for your customers. Surprisingly, this approach creates a big disconnect with your prospects.
Bringing in a consultant to lead your marketing function is a cost-effective way to get a better target on your buyers and the messages that will resonate best with them. Additionally, a good marketing consultant will collaborate with you to document a marketing plan that is focused on your business objectives.
When you have a strategic plan guiding your efforts, your results will be better than you were getting with the hit or miss activities that you had time for previously, and you’ll be freed up to do the activities that provide the most value to your business.
2. You Have Someone Doing Marketing Who Wears Other Hats
It doesn’t make sense for many businesses to have a full-time marketing position. What often happens, though, is that someone gets assigned marketing because they show some interest or aptitude. “You like social media! Let’s have you do marketing!”
Even when it turns out that this person is really excited to take on marketing, the results could be lackluster because what’s missing is the knowledge and experience that are needed to be strategic.
In this situation, bringing on a freelance marketing consultant can really empower this staff person who also wears other hats. By working alongside a marketing expert, they learn a ton that they didn’t know before, and are exposed to new resources and ideas.
The marketing consultant can guide the process of creating a documented marketing plan that gives the marketing role the structure needed to help your business consistently show up in front of the people you want to reach.
3. You’re the Marketing Director and You’re Swamped
If marketing is your one and only role, I’m sure that you’re going to agree with me when I say that marketing is complex. Not only that, it’s changing all the time and it’s a part-time job just to keep up with learning about new tactics.
Companies that are big enough to have a full-time marketing manager probably need to be present in many marketing channels. What happens though, is that certain activities get prioritized over others, and the things that are always on the back burner are some of the things that could really boost your success.
You could hire an assistant in this situation and take the time to train them to take over the responsibilities and activities that you can’t get to. Depending on their experience level, they may not have the expertise to execute quickly or as effectively as you would like. It might make better sense to hire a marketing consultant, either short or long term, whom you can trust to take on the job, who doesn’t need to be trained, and who needs minimal supervision. Not only that, but the consultant can also be a great source of new ideas and a sounding board when you want to try something new.
Getting Started With a Marketing Consultant
If you find yourself in any of these scenarios, it’s worth your while to at least explore how a marketing consultant can help you get better results from your marketing. If you’re hesitant about outsourcing, see if you can try before you buy.
Test the waters by having a consultant do some project work for you. Writing client success stories is a great first project, and it gives you something that you can use in your marketing and sales process right away.
From Hit or Miss to Consistent Presence and Better Results
While the tactics of marketing are complex and changing, the secret to marketing is pretty simple. You have to show up. When you outsource all or part of your marketing function to an expert, you’re going to set yourself up for better results because your consultant will help you focus your resources on the tactics that will have the most impact
Get a Helping Hand with Marketing
Read about how I helped a Los Angeles IT support company quickly gain marketing capacity and improved marketing results. Then contact me to get acquainted and talk about ideas for a project to test the waters.
