What does an Online Marketing Consultant do?

Are your sales targets not being met?

It’s time for a digital marketing consultant to be hired if your answer is “yes.”

Businesses struggle to attract customers in today’s digitally complex environment. Marketing yourself effectively to get more customers and leads would be a good idea.

Small business owners have it even more difficult because they already have many hats to wear to grow and sustain their businesses.

This blog post will explain how a digital marketing consultant could help you reach more customers and close more deals.

Because not all online marketing consultants will be created equally, I’ll tell you what to look for in a consultant before you hire one.

An external advisor who is an online marketing consultant. He uses online marketing channels to generate leads and increase sales conversions.

Depending on your requirements, the services of digital marketing experts can vary. Some consultants will handle only specific marketing campaigns, while others will manage your entire marketing strategy.

No matter what service you select, an online marketing specialist is responsible for ensuring that you get suitable campaigns to achieve your goals.

A digital marketing consultant can help you choose the proper marketing channels for your product and target audience. This will allow you to increase awareness and generate qualified leads, and convert more sales.

Most top digital marketing professionals have a background in advertising, marketing, and data analytics.

They are also skilled in public relations, copywriting, and visual communication. They keep abreast of the latest trends and best practices in online marketing.

They are also familiar with psychology and consumer behavior. This knowledge is essential for your business to launch marketing campaigns that will motivate your target audience without being pushy.

Small Business Marketing Consultant

A digital marketing specialist develops, implements, and monitors a business’s organic and paid online marketing strategies.

Hiring a digital marketing consultant is excellent when you don’t have the following skills.

• Learn the fundamentals of marketing to grow your business.
• I understand your target customers.
• Resources that focus on marketing initiatives.
• Learn how to recognize your competitors’ differences by understanding consumer behavior.

On the other hand, a small business marketing consultant is focused on developing and executing marketing strategies for small and medium-sized businesses.

Small business marketing consultants can also use online strategies such as content marketing, email marketing, and PPC advertising to reach more customers in your local community.

What does an online marketing consultant do?

Marketing Strategy

A strategy is a blueprint for all your campaigns and will ensure your company succeeds online.

This includes your business goals, resources, analysis timeline, results, and marketing channels.

This strategy also outlines the key messages that will be used and the target audience segments, as well as the channels and tactics that will be used to reach them.

Your digital marketing consultant will take care of the following depending on your arrangement:

• Your company’s strategy is determined by your industry, target audience, and digital marketing activities.
• Your company’s priority goals were identified (e.g., getting more traffic, generating leads, and increasing conversions).
• We are exploring some online marketing channels and platforms (e.g., Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, and SEO).
• Regularly review data analytics to identify results relevant to your company’s priorities and suggest the next steps.
• They update online campaigns to retarget and optimize leads for increased conversions.

Branding

Branding extends beyond your logo, tagline, and slogan to include website design, color schemes, fonts, and site design.

Your brand identity is also essential. Your unique selling proposition, personality, and feelings about your products and services are all part of your brand identity.

A digital marketing consultant works to enhance the brand’s image through creative online marketing campaigns. These campaigns can lead to conversions and leads.

This is what you and your digital marketing professional should do:

• Your brand purpose: You know your products, and they’re ‘why.’
• Target audience Identify your customer and learn about their digital footprints and behaviors.
• Market landscape and competitor: Identify the key players in your industry and determine what they do differently. Then, figure out how you can angle your approach.
• Unique selling point: Learn what makes your product, brand, or service stand out.
• Your brand voice: Learn how to best communicate with your target audience using consistent and coherent voices so that your brand is seen the same across all platforms.
• Recognition of your brand: Digitally engage with customers in many ways. Be consistent in what you say to them.

The following points should accompany a compelling digital brand strategy. Your company will experience an increase in brand awareness and loyalty.

Content Planning

The digital marketing consultant prepares a content calendar that documents and guides efforts, and it is based on the company’s overall content marketing strategy.

This calendar gives you direction and focuses for content creation in your company that will be valuable as you grow.

You can look at various content calendar templates, including Trello, Asana, and Airtable. Or you can use an Excel file.

This is an example of content planning with Trello:

This document makes it easier to identify the type of content you want to create, subtopics and topics to be covered, and when they should be published. It also allows for a more manageable selection of channels and publishing schedules.

Your digital marketing consultant should manage the workflow and answer these questions about your content strategy:

• Who is your target audience?
• How can your content solve the specific problems of your target audience?
• What should you highlight to distinguish your products and services from competitors?
• What content types are most effective for reaching your digital marketing goals?
• What are marketing channels best for your content?
• How can you better manage and allocate human resources to meet all content planning requirements?

Project Management

Project management combines skills, techniques, and knowledge to complete tasks and requirements.

Whether the digital marketing consultant you hire will work with your staff, they must have this skill to launch your marketing campaigns on time.

Storytelling

Building an emotional connection with your customer builds trust by connecting with them.

Consumers listen to brands tell stories.

Ask yourself:

Would it be interesting to read about a customer’s experience with a product?

There are many formats and types of storytelling. A digital marketing consultant is trained to focus on these aspects to tell a compelling brand story.

• Identify the brand’s core identity and develop a narrative or signature story.
• Clarify the “Why” of your company.
• Understand your target audience and identify their motivations.
• Maximize the impact of various content formats, types, and styles.
• Use the strengths of other online platforms to create specific content formats.
• Create consistency for your content’s look and feel.

SEO

The latest SEO trends and best practices are kept up to date by digital marketing professionals.

Search engine optimization is more critical than ever, with around 3.5 billion searches made daily on Google.

Search engine optimization (or SEO) is an online marketing strategy aiming to increase your site’s quality traffic through organic search results.

Your rank in search engine results for your targeted audience will be higher if your content is optimized.

SEO takes patience to see results. Your digital marketing consultant should help you to get the results you desire.

Here are some ways your digital marketing consultant could do this:

• Publish relevant content that is true to your brand’s story and provides industry news to update your audience.
• This is creating an SEO strategy around relevant topics to your company and industry and then editing it regularly.
• You’re trying to find high-traffic keywords for your SEO.
• Link building across your content to share it.
• You know how the ranking algorithm works. Maximize click-through rates (CTR) with titles, URLs, and descriptions.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising

Digital marketing consultants need to be knowledgeable about PPC advertising programs on Google and other social media channels. They must also be able to optimize their advertising spend to promote your products and services to your target audience.

PPC advertising can be used in a variety of industries. You can also use it to increase traffic to your website faster through Google AdWords and Facebook.

Analytics and Evaluation

A digital marketing consultant can analyze your data analytics and determine which topics and content bring more traffic to your website and social media accounts.

A digital market consultant can also use data analysis to understand the preferences and behavior of your target audience.

These insights can build trusting customer relationships, generate leads and sell more products.

How to Hire an Online Marketing Specialist

Every business will encounter situations where a digital marketing consultant is needed.

Having clear business goals and a brand’s purpose is vital to assess your willingness and ability to hire a digital marketing consultant to grow your business.

However, some indicators indicate that you might need a digital marketing consultant. These are:

• Even if you have tried different marketing strategies, your sales and leads are not improving.
• Your team is already stretched beyond its limits.
• Your team lacks the expertise and knowledge to create online and offline marketing campaigns.

What to expect when hiring an online marketing consultant

You now know the basics of digital marketing and why you should hire one. But, you may be wondering how it will feel about working with one.

Through these points, you’ll see a glimpse of the business-owner-digital-marketing-consultant working relationship:

Get projections and estimates.

Digital marketing is a complex area that involves many unknowns and continually changing paradigms.

The Digital marketing experts will provide accurate forecasts and estimates based on the best practices and tested techniques.

Telling your consultant to keep the speculation separate from the actual numbers is one way to help reduce overestimation.

A partnership between the consultant and you

It would help if you established expectations about the role of the consultant in your business goals and objectives. Set clear expectations.

You must also be available to provide feedback. You are always welcome to give feedback as it helps them better gauge the challenging areas and how you approach them.

Constant communication and updates on roadblocks and successes are crucial to identifying tactics that work and those that don’t. Transparency is essential for a partnership to avoid any doubts or guesses.

These will assist both parties in resolving issues and show professionalism and adaptability to your needs.

This is NOT a temporary commitment.

It takes time for digital marketing to produce the desired results.

Don’t expect to immediately see an increase in sales or engagement when you post a new piece of content.

Although it isn’t a complicated or quick rule, you will see results in at least six months.

Organic campaigns are more difficult to produce results than paid advertising. Organic campaigns require a significant investment in time ).

If nothing is happening after all your time and effort, it’s worth investigating why.

What to Consider When Hiring an Online Marketing Consultant

It is a significant investment to hire a digital marketing consultant. Hire the right digital marketing consultant for your business based on your goals and needs.

What are your Business Needs and Goals

It is essential to understand what you need or want.

Setting SMART goals for your digital marketing consultant will help you get more direction, and you can send it to your digital marketing consultant.

• I want to double my business’ sales in the next 12 months.
• I am looking for a 30% increase in website traffic using organic strategies within 5-6 months.
• Paid advertising is possible, but I only accept a monthly budget of $1,000. This will allow you to increase your online sales by 35% within three months.

The cases above will help you think about concrete ways to make your digital marketing consultants more effective.

This article will explain how it works. It contains a few shortened versions of case studies in which digital marketers have helped real businesses.

As a digital marketing consultant, SMART goals will help you choose the right tools and channels to reach your audience.

What Tools Are You Using

It would be best if you made sure that your digital marketing consultant is familiar with the software, whether you are using a spreadsheet or full-blown CRM software to manage your email marketing. This will simplify the onboarding process.

Expertise in Matching Industry and Business Needs

Digital marketing experts serve only specific industries.

Ensure the digital marketing consultant you select has extensive experience in your field. This will ensure that they can meet your needs.

The following benefits come with hiring a digital marketing consultant who has industry knowledge and experience:

• Gain a deeper understanding of your target consumers.
• Get more information about industry trends.
• Increase awareness of best practices in promoting products.

Your Budget

Hiring a digital marketing consultant doesn’t come cheap.

An hourly rate of $140 for digital marketing consultants is the average worldwide. This is based on years and experience, the extent of the service, and your knowledge of digital marketing trends and specific industries.

Digital marketing consultants are not cheap, as you can see. You want to ensure you get the results you expect when hiring a digital market consultant.

Many businesses use the value-based pricing model to pay their digital marketing consultants.

This model allows you to pay your digital marketing consultant a portion of your marketing campaign revenue.

If the target was not met, you could place a minimum payment agreement based on actual results, and it could be a fixed fee or a lower percentage.

This pricing model will motivate your digital marketing consultant to work harder, as better results equal higher earnings.

You must set your budget well. These are some ways to allocate your budget.

• Review your marketing budget to see if you can refocus it. You will need to focus on digital marketing.
• Match your company’s budget to its size.
• Determine the complexity of your strategy to concentrate on specific digital marketing tools (e.g., SEO, PPC content, social media).
• Use to match your digital marketing goals with the experience of the consultant.

Case studies and testimonials

Consider a digital marketing consultant’s track record when deciding who to hire.

Digital marketing consultants might feature case studies on their websites.

These provide details about a marketing campaign they created for one of their clients. This section will overview how the digital marketing consultant developed and implemented the campaign, and you’ll also see their results.

You can also see their marketing strategies and decide if they match yours.

Be sure to check out their testimonials.

Testimonials are social proof that can instill trust in potential clients by proving they can deliver what they promise.

Get feedback from past clients on their skills and knowledge.

Talk to your clients.

This will allow you to understand better the experience of the digital marketing consultant that you are considering. You’ll also gain more insight into their work relationship.

You can ask questions about the previous clients of the consultant at

• What did [consultant] do to improve your company’s Google ranking over the past six months? How has this affected your business?
• Could you give examples of the process that [ consultant ] used to reach their organic online marketing goals?
• How did [consultant name] ‘s expertise as a digital marketing consultant fit your business needs?
• Did you encounter any roadblocks? What were the steps taken to overcome them?
• Techniques were passed to you during your time as a digital marketing consultant at your company.

Hiring a digital marketing consultant can help your business grow.

Our digital marketing experts can help you plan, launch and manage your marketing campaigns more efficiently and effectively.

Hire a digital marketing specialist who understands your industry and can deliver results.