Yes, hiring a marketing consultant can significantly boost your revenue. For many new business owners, it’s hard to wrap their heads around how it works. Let’s do a deep dive. 

Depending on what industry you’re in, you can expect to spend anywhere between 5% to 30% of your annual revenue on marketing. 

The question is, are you spending the money on the right things? 

Yes, investing in a marketing consultant is the right move, especially if your business is in its early stages. 

Today, you’re going to learn what a marketing consultant can do for your business and how their actions lead to more revenue. 

What is a Marketing Consultant Anyways?

We’re all too familiar with the term “consultant”. They’re highly experienced professionals who offer advice according to your needs. 

When you contextualize it for marketing, their expertise obviously lies in getting you more exposure and sales. 

In today’s age, you’ll most likely need a digital marketing consultant who can shape and optimize your online presence. Their job description is pretty elaborate. Among many things, they:

• Meet with your stakeholders to understand and uncover marketing goals
• Review your company’s current strategies to identify gaps
• Review your current audience and see if their ideal customer persona (ICP) is set right
• Develop new strategies to fill the gaps
• Plan, develop, and execute targeted campaigns
• Repurpose assets for different communication channels
• Track and monitor analytics

Basic Skills of a New-Age Digital Marketing Consultant

When hiring a consultant, you should look for the following skills: 

• Copywriting 
• In-depth knowledge of marketing
• Creativity
• Market research
• Tech proficiency
• Collaboration
• Attention to detail

Tangible Actions You Can Expect

So, what will a marketing consultant do after you hire them? Once the initial meetings are subsidized and expectations are established, expect the following to happen. 

Marketing Assessment

The very first thing any credible marketer will do is run an assessment. The idea is to look into what you’ve been doing and how they’re working out. Primary practices here include: 

• Brand Positioning: Your business is ultimately a brand and it’s critical to what position it holds in your ideal customers’ minds. Your actions must align with the message you’re trying to send. 

• Web and SEO Health: If a website is your primary weapon, the consultant starts here. They run a site audit to find the health of the pages and look for obvious issues like content duplication, keyword cannibalization, HTTPS errors, and so on.

• Content Audit: Just adhering to on-page SEO practices is not enough. To get the exposure you want, you must publish content your ICP wants. Sadly, they don’t know what they want. That’s where a consultant comes in with their industry experience to suggest the best types of content. 

• Social Media Analysis: Currently, over 5.170 billion people actively use social media. Unless you buried your head in the sand when developing your initial marketing strategy, you have multiple handles where you post regularly. A marketing consultant should look into what you’re doing and what results the actions are yielding. 

• Competitor Analysis: An often overlooked aspect. No matter what industry you’re in, you have competitors. Some of them are doing well and some are not. There must be something the successful ones are doing that you can get inspired from, right? 

Recommending Tech Stack for Execution 

Once the consultant has a good idea of what to do, it’s time for them to develop a course of action. For that, your team will need a tech stack. Here’s what you can expect to invest in. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools

A CRM is a cornerstone of your marketing efforts. As the name suggests, these tools help you maintain your relationship with existing customers. A CRM typically covers the entire customer journey. 

A consultant can help you choose the right CRM for your business and train your employees to use it effectively. 

Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing is so far the highest ROI boasting technique. You practically spend nothing to get thousands of dollars in sales. To be more precise, this technique can bring up to 4400% ROI on average. 

A marketing consultant not only designs the perfect email marketing funnel but also suggests tools to streamline the whole process. If you know anything about sending emails in bulk, you should know it’s not possible to manage them manually. 

The best thing about these tools is that they integrate with pretty much all CRM tools on the market which means you get a unified dashboard to control everything. 

Analytics Platform

How do you know if your efforts are working if you don’t track their results? That’s basically what analytics is. It applies to your content, social media, SEO, and email marketing. These tools also integrate with CRMs quite easily. 

Social Media Management Tools

If you’re following the formula of successful competitors, chances are high you plan on posting across multiple handles, multiple times a week. In any case, you’ll need some kind of social media management tools to create, schedule, and track posts. 

Does Hiring a Marketing Consultant Mean More Revenue?

As long as you hire the right person for the job, the answer is yes. Business at the end of the day is about solving your customers’ problems. And you must establish yourself as the entity to solve those problems. The key here is putting yourself out there to let them know that you exist. 

That’s the essence of marketing. When you opt for a consultant, you pay for their expertise and years of experience. They know what works and what doesn’t. 

So, instead of going through the process of trial and error with an in-house team, economically it makes more sense to hire someone who already has the formula down. 

It also means you and your team can focus on the core business operations instead of trying to figure out what’s wrong. 

How Much Does Marketing Consultancy Cost in 2024?

The cost widely varies based on what you’re seeking. Of course, the cost for a multi-million dollar B2B business will not be the same as an SME. 

In the US, you can expect to pay anywhere between $50 to $500 per hour for an experienced consultant. We understand it’s a big range but so is the scope of work. 

Another factor is whether you’re hiring a full-time consultant for a part-time job. You can also go for floating contracts if it works for you. 

Is a Marketing Consultant the Same as a Marketing Agency?

No, not really. An agency follows the “done for you” model. If it’s a full-service agency, the consultancy aspect is often included in the deliverables. We, for example, help you find the answers as well as do what’s necessary to boost your bottom line. 

A marketing consultant, on the other hand, offers their expertise and advice but doesn’t do the work for you. You’ll still need to hire employees or outsource to execute their plans.  

Let Outlawed Narratives Help

Outlawed Narratives is a full-service SEO and marketing solution that can help you find your base. We may not know anything about your business but we live and breathe marketing. As we’ve already established, it doesn’t matter what industry you’re in because the principles of marketing always remain the same.

FAQ

What does a marketing consultant do?

A marketing consultant breaks down your efforts and actions to find areas of improvement. Also, they develop new strategies to expand your business’s horizon. 

What does a marketing consultant cost?

The cost varies dramatically from industry to industry and the scope of work. On average, you can expect to pay anywhere between $50 to $500 per hour in the US. 

What is a digital marketing consultant?

A digital marketing consultant is a subset of the overall consultancy paradigm. They focus on the digital space only instead of holistic marketing.