I recently was asked the question ‘why do you need a marketing consultant when you can do marketing yourself’? This is a great question. There are some aspects of marketing that you definitely can and in fact must do yourself. There are other areas that you can do yourself however will benefit greatly from getting help from a marketing expert.
In a nutshell, getting strategic marketing or expert marketing assistance fast tracks your success. A skilled and qualified marketing consultant bring skills, knowledge and experience to enable you to identify what marketing will bring results for your business sooner. It’s like playing golf, you can play a round of golf each week and over time you may improve. Or if you are wanting to fast track your golfing success, you may get a couple of lessons from an expert and pick up some tips you didn’t even know about and suddenly your golf game has improved. Likewise when utilising experts in your business your business operates better more quickly.
DIY Marketing – What You Must Do Yourself
Here are the key elements of marketing that every business must take responsibility for.
- Keeping a customer database and sales records
- Maintaining a website
- Providing excellent customer service
- Answering customer enquiries and providing information to gain a sale
- Deliver the product or service
- Keep advertising listings up to date
- Manage customer complaints, refunds and returns
Where a Marketing Consultant Offers High Value
- Pricing
- Strategy
- Branding
- Marketing Messaging
- Competitor and Customer Research
Examples of How a Marketing Consultant Can Provide Immediate Value
If you are spending money trying to get customers or sales this is where you will benefit most from getting some help from a marketing consultant. Here are some of the big spend areas that businesses undertake and let’s look at how a marketing consultant can help them get a better return on their investment.
Renting a shop
- A marketing consultant can assist you get the best location that works for the customer increasing your chance of sales. By identifying what’s important to the customer in terms of location and features within the premises through demographic and target market research.
- Assist you with making the most of your location by identifying signage opportunities and helping you stand out within what you can legally do including visual merchandising.
- Getting the right words for your signage and ensure that it stands out and can been seen. There’s nothing worse that getting a sign done and missing off the website address.
Manufacturing a product
- Assist you with getting the right sizing, quantities, colours, which features to include, pricing, branding, logo
- Type of packaging and what words to put on your packaging.You save money on getting it right the first time or before a big production run.
Spending Money on Advertising
- Knowing where to advertise, how many times to advertise, when an advertisement is working.
- Where to go to get help with facebook or google ads.
- A marketing consultant can advise when you should use paid online or offline advertising as opposed to other forms of promotion e.g. networking or public relations. A marketing consultant knows what will be the most effective form of promotion for your product or service at a particular time and for particular results.
Pricing Products or Services
- Marketing Consultants can help you set the price that a customer will pay that is at the optimum which is the most profitable price possible.
- Where the customer sees value. Which features they care about which ones they don’t. This is all gained through customer research and can help you achieve maximum value perception.
Great Return on Investment with Sales Staff
- Paying sales staff wages can be a big expense for a business so you want to get a good return on business. Marketing is like the science behind the sales.
- A Marketing Consultant can work with a sales team to help accurately identify potential customers and effective ways on how to reach them.
- Ensuring that customers have all the information they need to make a decision.
- Develop sales tools for the team that generate high sales conversion rates.
- Set up a system to stay in touch with prospects so you are front of mind when they are ready to buy.
Marketing Consultants can also work with you as a Marketing Coach to build your marketing skills quicker.
Whether you use a marketing consultant or not really comes down to how much success you want in business and how quickly you are looking for it.
If you are unsure how a marketing consultant may help your business reach out via email or book a time to speak to Ailsa directly.
