What’s your current marketing plan like? How successful are your campaigns? Are you seeing the ROI you’d expect from your marketing efforts?
If you don’t have a marketing consultant, there’s a good chance you’re not getting as much out of marketing as you could.
With new marketing trends like interactive content, influencer marketing, and live streaming emerging all the time, it’s impossible to stay up-to-date unless you hire a pro.
Even if you’re not interested in being on the cutting edge of marketing – and you really should be – then a consultant is invaluable when it comes to creating a strong strategy and executing it successfully.
Want to learn more about how a marketing expert could help your business?
Read on.
1. Create a Solid Marketing Strategy
Is your marketing strategy a solid, actionable plan, or is it a bunch of vague ideas you’ve thrown together?
If your current plan sounds something like, “Start blogging, post on Twitter more often, set up some Google ads,” then you need serious help.
A marketing consultant will help you create a strategy that ties into your wider business goals, and can be adjusted as your needs change.
The basic plan will usually include:
- SWOT analysis
- Market analysis
- Sales forecast
- Budget
Once you’ve got these basics in place, your consultant can draw up a detailed action plan laying out exactly what you’re going to do.
A successful marketing plan will include specific, measurable goals which can be broken down into smaller tasks, a list of platforms you plan to target, details on your key strategies, and a plan for analyzing your results.
A solid plan is the backbone of any successful marketing strategy – you won’t get far without one.
2. Strengthen Your Brand Identity
Whether your business is brand new or has been running for years, a strong brand identity is essential.
A marketing consultant can help by looking at your current brand identity and making suggestions around your logo, website design, brand guidelines, brand voice and social media presence.
If there are certain aspects which don’t match – like a young-sounding brand voice but an old-fashioned logo, your consultant can help make changes to form a coherent brand.
3. Maintain a Blog Content Calendar
Most businesses have some kind of blog nowadays, but few take the time to put together and maintain a content calendar.
A content calendar allows you to plan posts months in advance, making sure they tie into your business goals for each quarter and planning for any special promotions, events or holidays.
Your marketing consultant can draw up a content calendar which includes post titles, content ideas, targeted keywords, call to action suggestions and deadlines.
You can share the content calendar with your team of writers to ensure you have a consistent and targeted content marketing strategy – not a load of random posts that serve no purpose.
It’s easy to make mistakes in content marketing, but a skilled consultant will keep you on track.
4. Write Your Blog Content
If you don’t currently hire writers, your marketing consultant can also write your blog content.
They’ll be able to optimize posts for online readability, stick to your brand tone of voice, include links to authoritative sources and generate ideas for strong calls to action at the end of posts.
Having high-quality writing on your blog is essential. If customers see spelling or grammar mistakes, huge walls of text, or poor formatting, they’ll click off your blog immediately.
Don’t let bad writing ruin your content strategy.
5. Boost Your SEO
Once you’ve got a great blog, you need to make sure people can actually find it – and that’s where SEO comes in.
Your marketing consultant can help by carrying out keyword research, optimizing posts and web pages for the right search terms, and improving the SEO of existing pages by adding keywords and tags, editing text, and adding alt tags to images.
They’ll also stay on top of algorithm updates to ensure your site isn’t penalized.
All of these small tasks might never get done if left to your regular team, but together they have a huge effect on the amount of traffic you see.
6. Organize Guest Blogging
Guest posting on authoritative sites in your industry is a great way to build backlinks and boost your search engine ranking, but it can be time-consuming.
A marketing consultant can take care of everything from reaching out to sites, sending pitches, organizing cross-promotion opportunities and ghostwriting guest posts.
You can be involved as much or as little as you want, and either way you’ll soon see lots of new traffic.
7. Promote Your Content on Social Media
Did you know that 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media, but 85% aren’t sure what social media tools are the best to use?
If your business falls into this category, a marketing consultant can help.
They’ll carry out research and testing to figure out which channels will drive the most engagement for your business, and can help you to manage multiple accounts at once.
They’ll create content specifically for each site, like sharing graphics for Pinterest, quotes for Twitter, and images for Instagram, then use these to drive traffic back to your site.
Good social media marketing will also boost your SEO, so it’s a win-win.
8. Create Marketing Videos
It’s been shown that marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users, but getting into video marketing can feel daunting if you don’t have any experience.
An experienced marketing consultant will look for areas of your business where video content could be helpful – for example, explainer videos for complex products, or promotional videos for live events.
They can then organize the planning, shooting, editing, and sharing of the content – all you’ll need to do is sign off on the final cut.
9. Design Interactive Content
Marketing is becoming more interactive all the time, and tapping into new areas is essential if you want to drive engagement.
Instead of trying to keep up-to-date with all the new trends in interactive content, and figure out how to create it, let a consultant get involved.
They can enhance your campaigns with interactive content like:
- Quizzes
- Mobile apps
- Polls
- Competitions
- Surveys
- Virtual reality experiences
- Games
The possibilities really are endless when it comes to interactive marketing, so let someone with the skills and experience explore them for you.
10. Organize Online Ad Campaigns
Need new leads fast? Online ad campaigns are one of the quickest and most effective ways to drive new traffic and increase sales, but there’s a science to getting your campaigns right.
A good consultant will help you decide on the type of paid ad that’s right for you, the keywords you should target, the length of the campaign, and the amount of budget you should allocate.
They’ll also keep an eye on ongoing campaigns and make adjustments as needed. This means you’ll save money by pulling ads that aren’t performing and increase sales by boosting ads that are doing well.
They’ll experiment with PPC ads, video ads, social media ads, affiliate marketing and more, finding the channels that work best for your unique needs.
11. Build Your Email List
Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to stay in touch with potential customers and drive new sales. It’s not much use if you have a tiny email list, though, and that’s where your marketing consultant comes in.
They’ll work to build your email list through targeted campaigns which could include free downloads, guest posts on other sites, direct mail, competitions, and special offers.
They can also segment your list, allowing you to create highly-targeted campaigns further down the line.
12. Create Lead Magnets
Tying into the previous point, your consultant can optimize your site for email sign ups and create effective lead magnets to massively boost your list.
Lead magnets often take the form of free resources, which your consultant can create and promote for you.
Depending on your needs, lead magnets could include:
- Cheat sheets
- Contact lists
- eBooks
- Free trials
- Video training
- Discounts
- Quizzes
- Reports
The key is to create content that visitors to your site really need, and then ask for their details in return.
13. Plan Your Email Marketing
Once you’ve got a good email list built up, you’ll need a strong email marketing plan.
Each campaign should have a clear purpose which ties into your long-term marketing goals, emails should be targeted towards specific list segments where appropriate, and your plan should cover at least the next few months.
Your marketing advisor can put together a plan which helps you achieve your goals, create templates for regular emails, and write winning email content for you.
Since they’re up to speed with the rest of your marketing efforts, you can be sure that your emails will complement and support your other marketing strategies – for example, by encouraging readers to follow you on social media.
If you tend to receive lots of replies to your email marketing, your consultant can also manage your inbox.
14. Carry Out A/B Testing
Marketing is more of an art than a science, and first attempts won’t always be perfect. That’s why carrying out A/B testing is so important.
A good consultant won’t just try one strategy, or write one piece of content. They’ll create several, and then test them side-by-side to compare the results.
This could mean putting together several different landing pages for a special offer, testing different subject lines for your email campaigns, or offering different promotions to different list segments.
By analyzing the results of A/B tests and making changes, your marketing consultant will help you to create the best possible campaigns, ensuring you make the most of your budget.
15. Analyze Your Marketing Efforts
A/B testing is great for comparing small parts of your campaigns and making necessary tweaks, but about evaluating the success of your overall strategy?
Hiring a marketing consultant to look at your past, current, and future marketing efforts and analyze their effectiveness is essential for any business that’s serious about growth.
They’ll combine in-depth analytics and statistics from all your marketing channels and put together a report which gives you a clear picture of where you currently stand. You might be surprised by the results.
Campaigns which seemed successful at the time might look less than cost-effective once you crunch the numbers, and channels you’ve ignored could show hidden potential. Keep an open mind and be willing to learn from your consultant.
Once you know what’s working and what’s not, you can start to make the changes that will increase your growth and save you money.
16. Keep You Up-To-Date with Marketing Trends
There are so many developments in the world of marketing that it’s just not possible to stay up-to-date unless you hire a dedicated professional.
Even if you’re pretty content with your current marketing results, hiring a consultant to keep on top of new developments is a really smart move. Being one of the first to adopt new platforms gives you an edge over your competitors and shows that you’re on the ball.
Your marketing consultant can create content that’s designed specifically for new platforms, like geo-filters for Snapchat, or short videos for Instagram stories. They’ll suggest new marketing avenues that you might not even know exist yet.
They can also advise you on new technologies like virtual reality. These offer huge potential when used in the right way. Perhaps your latest product could be promoted using an interactive VR experience? Or maybe you could release an augmented reality phone app?
Staying current is essential when it comes to marketing, and you don’t have to go it alone.
Why Hire a Marketing Consultant?
There are so many plates to balance in marketing that it’s just not possible to create a good winning strategy without professional help.
Hiring an expert to create and execute plans, carry out research, analyze your efforts and stay on top of trends is essential for success.
Do you want more growth for less money?
Arrange a consultation today and you might be surprised by how much a marketing consultant, like Riserr SEM, will help your business.
