Date: March 2020 - Page 2

Marketing consultants vary from one to another, just like any other profession, however there is a cadence that all marketing consultants should follow.

Formally, I’ve been a marketing consultant for 21 years working in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, New York and Atlanta. During that time, I have had the opportunity to not only consult to hundreds of small and medium-sized businesses but also Fortune 100 companies, and surprisingly there is a lot of similarities.

What can you expect from a competent marketing consultant:

Ability to create a marketing strategy aligned to your business goals

If a marketing consultant is coming into your business and their only discussion is one or two areas of marketing, you must consider that perhaps they don’t have enough experience in marketing to understand that an omnichannel approach is the only way to build a sustainable marketing strategy.

A strong marketing consultant would have at least 10 years’ experience in marketing with successes and failures under their belt.

Whether they do marketing strategies the old fashion way or they use Robotic Marketer, it is important that they understand all the different facets of the marketing mix, and how they relate to connecting your brand with your audience.

Branding is a strength

Many marketing consultants fail to truly understand the value of brand leaving this side of the “business” to their advertising counterparts. To do marketing, you really need to understand the company’s brand; personality, values, voice, attributes, benefits and so on.

Branding is very important to differentiating your company from your competitors. At Marketing Eye, we focus on being an outsourced marketing department. Our brand personality is professional, inquisitive, forward thinking and reliable. Our voice is authoritive, knowledgeable, visionary and global.

To understand your brand is important to how you communicate your value proposition and connect with your audience.

A marketing consultant needs to know how to strengthen your brand in the market and ensure that you are consistent with all brand messaging and placement.

Technology-savvy

Reaching your customers and prospects is hard when you are doing it manually. By automating this process you will be able to reach more customers, more often with less effort in a way that they want to be communicated with. Having the right technology suite is imperative and ensuring that it is integrated, providing you with the right data to feed your sales team, will change your outcomes.

Always start with:

CRM: We use Salesforce but there are many CRM tools that are effective. Salesforce is the most commonly utilised CRM tool in the world, but not necessarily the best. It’s a bit old fashion in many ways and clunky, so find one that is easy for you to use. Other suggested CRM technologies include Insightly, ZohoCRM, SAP CRM, Oracle Sales Cloud (SMB), Netsuite CRM, Base CRM, Hubspot.

Email marketing platform: We use Mailchimp, Constant Contact and FutureMail, however there may be email marketing platforms that are integrated into your CRM or Marketing Automation software that is more effective for your business.

Scheduling Tools: We schedule all social media through Hootsuite and Buffer. Most scheduling tools do the same thing and are usually free to use.

Google Analytics: Key to understanding the traffic on your website and how to improve your search engine optimisation, Google Analytics is very important to any company with a website. If your marketing consultant cannot read Google Analytics, then fire them fast!

SEO Tools: There are so many to use with our preferred SEO Tool deriving from Robotic Marketer technology, but others that are awesome include SEMrush, SpyFu, Screaming Frog, MOZ, Yoast and Alexa.

For the past 16 years, Christina Kortesis has been a marketing consultant with Marketing Eye Melbourne. She epitomizes the way marketing consultants should interact with their clients.

Regular communications

Each week Christina contacts or meets with her clients and talks through the marketing activities for that week, analytics and deliverables. It gives the marketing consultant an opportunity to discuss freely all marketing activities and how they align to the company’s business plan. It also gives the client an ability to update the marketing consultant on the business and how the marketing efforts are affecting sales.

Weekly reporting

Reporting on marketing activities with analytics is essential to any marketing campaign. Marketing Eye’s marketing consultants use our own in-house data analytics program as well as Google Analytics and Alexa.

Sharing of ideas and campaigns

Just because someone else did it doesn’t mean that you can’t do it too! Part of Marketing Eye’s process is to constantly encourage marketers to keep up-to-date with the latest marketing campaigns. Sharing successful campaigns undertaken by other agencies inspires ideas.

Feedback

Clients are everything. Without them, marketing consultants don’t have a job. Ensuring that the door is always open for feedback is essential to creating great relationships but also better marketing results.

Being a marketing consultant means that you have accomplished enough to be able to provide expert advice to your clients. You also know what tools you have access to that enables a better outcome.

Every company needs a marketing strategy to plan for the future. A strategy works as a sort of road map for all of your marketing activations throughout time. But what exactly goes into these strategies? For a lot of companies 2020, automation and personalization of content is going to be the next big step in marketing tactics. Trends change every year, and companies need to understand the next big step. We reached out to a few friends to weigh in on what every marketing strategy needs in 2020.

Coming from an era where women were, well, women, and watching both the world around me and myself evolve into where we are today, comes with a lot of transformation. Ideas, how we live, what we think, the way we behave and our overall mindset.

Erasing the way we were brought up to be able to navigate a new way of thinking is hard if everyone else around you is stuck in the past, and even more difficult if they are stuck too far in the future. Living in the here, the now – is an unsure place for many, me included.

There is a plethora of different types of marketing firms in the world; marketing consulting, marketing agency, advertising agency, public relations firm, digital marketing firm and more. They come with different disciplines, all of which compete at some level with every other agency.

It is hard to distinguish one from the other – I know this, because this has been my business for more than 20 years.