Hiring a marketing consultant to help your struggling business is like trying to fix a car with a faulty transmission by filling up the engine.
If your business isn’t connecting to your customers, you might think it’s a simple marketing issue. People often mistake marketing as a quick-fix method to get more customers -Throw money at your marketing strategy and the problem will be resolved right?
Well, that’s not a sustainable way to conduct business. If you want a poor return on investment, and you want to repeat the expensive process every few months, then by all means, hire a marketing consultant to boost your traffic short term.
However, for most businesses, the best solution is more holistic. If you want a healthy business that listens and responds to its customers, develops lasting relationships, and marketing strategies that work in harmony with the rest of your organization, there are better options than hiring a marketing consultant.
What does a marketing consultant do?
The role of a marketing consultant varies depending on the industry and the company they work for, but generally, marketing consultants…
- Review their clients’ current marketing efforts and suggest improvements.
- Devise a content strategy and train marketers (generally internal employees) to implement them.
- Draw up a social media content calendar and train social media executives on how to implement their plans.
- Devise other marketing campaigns (ad, email marketing, partnerships)
- Use tracking tools to measure the success of their strategies.
What a marketing consultant doesn’t know…
1. The rest of your business
Marketing is just one part of your business. It’s a very important part, but it isn’t the only factor that determines your business’ success.
Marketing consultants are hired to sort out marketing (no surprises there) but they’re not invested in the rest of your business. Would a marketing consultant let you know that your resources would be better spent on product innovation or your sales team? No.
2. Team intercommunication
How does your marketing fit within the rest of your business processes? In our previous article “Why we don’t give a sh*t about smarketing” we discussed how most businesses view sales and marketing as things that happen at the end of a linear process. However, the best method is to treat all elements of your business as interconnected – like an intricate machine or a living, responsive organism.
For that to work, you can’t have one department calling all the shots, you need a system that keeps all departments connected and communicating.
3. The true value of your products and services
Not every marketing consultant is interested in what you actually offer. They rely on you telling them about your existing brand strategy and basing their strategies off on what they’ve been told.
While some marketing consultants also offer branding services, it’s not a given that your marketing consultant will take the time to assess the true value of your business and apply that to your marketing strategy and reshape your branding at the same time.
A better way
At jdp we lift the hood of your business to diagnose the opportunities and challenges that affect your business the most, and handcraft solutions specifically tailored to your needs.
We focus on the undervalued analysis phase to understand your business from the inside out and create truly authentic strategies to optimize your business for success.
It could be content marketing that you need, it could be a new website, it could be that you need to optimize your internal systems to improve efficiency in your product line. We won’t make any assumptions about where your next investment will be best placed until we’ve conducted a full and thorough analysis ourselves.
Get in touch for a free consultation and we’ll get to the bottom of what’s really affecting your business.
