You could be looking to grow your business with various marketing tools, improve your company's marketing plan or branding, or are an entrepreneur swamped with work—who wants help with their goals, all of which a marketing consultant can do.
This is why, at MentorCruise, we understand the importance of having a qualified marketing consultant assist your marketing and sales team in meeting their targets and improving the marketing strategy of your company.
Read on if you’re ready for your company to achieve marketing success!
In this article, we’ll cover the following topics;
What is a marketing advisor?
What qualifications must a marketing advisor have?
Why You Should Hire a Marketing Consultant
How to find the right marketing advisor for your company
What is a Marketing Advisor?
Marketing advisors are professionals that help companies set practical marketing goals and plans to understand their customers and reach a broader, unfamiliar audience.
The role of a marketing advisor is to identify and create marketing campaigns that aid companies in organically reaching their target audience while recognizing their past shortcomings. In addition, these advisors guide companies on how to best connect with their customers, both online and offline.
With rising career opportunities in digital marketing, the marketing consultancy is an industry worth $250 Billion. Research by Credo shows that marketing consultants, on average, earn $147.67 per hour, with the rates rising depending on experience.
Responsibilities of a Marketing Advisor
Some of the responsibilities of a marketing advisor include:
Understand the marketing needs of a company by studying its company profile.
Develop an effective marketing plan while keeping the company objectives and budget in mind.
Guide the company on how to improve its positioning, branding, and communication.
Conduct marketing research and analyze current industry trends.
Write reports that provide new ideas while suggesting improvements.
Most companies follow a similar pattern when posting a job online for a specific role. In all marketing consultant role descriptions, you’ll find a job overview, a list of responsibilities—like the ones we have posted above—and the required qualifications.
Here is a template of a job description for a marketing advisor posted by Glassdoor.
What Qualifications Does a Marketing Advisor Need?
Marketing consultancy is a field that, in recent years, has become incredibly saturated. As a result, most consultants diversify their portfolios or specialize in specific niches to land clients.
For any budding marketing advisor to stand out from the crowd and have a successful marketing management consulting career, they need a recognized certification, work experience, and a killer resume.
Other than that, here’s a checklist of things that’ll help in the industry;
The right education. You need to have a bachelor's in business, journalism, marketing, media, or communications at a minimum. To really boost your chances, an MBA or a master’s degree in marketing would be ideal.
The portfolio should speak for itself. Having a portfolio that demonstrates relevant experience and skills is ideal. You can talk a big game, but in this industry, experience and a good clientele is everything.
Digital Marketing is everything in this field. Experience with digital marketing strategies and technologies is what most companies are looking for nowadays. According to Marketing Hiring Trends, demand for digital marketers is more significant than ever, with demand for marketers overtaking the supply!
Either be an expert or diversify. Either become an expert in a specific niche or diversify yourself by working in numerous industries.
Must-have qualities. In this industry, excellent copywriting and interpersonal skills are a requirement.
Hard skills. Most companies require marketing consultants to be proficient in Microsoft Office, Google Suite, and Salesforce.
Some soft skills to have. A sign of a good marketing specialist is one that can effectively market themself. This can be done by developing leadership skills and working on your creativity, adaptability, and confidence.
Why You Should Hire a Marketing Consultant
Now that we have gone over the role and responsibilities of a marketing advisor, let’s discuss how your company would benefit from a marketing advisor.
How a marketing consultant can benefit a small business
There are essentially many ways in which a marketing advisor can help small businesses: they can help you devise your marketing strategy, help you scale marketing growth especially if you’re a founder without much marketing experience, or provide suggestions on how your team can move forward and be more effective.
By having a wealth of knowledge, they’re sure to charge you a fair bit. Still, if you consider the long-term advantages, such as providing a shortcut to boosting growth, improving your social media engagement, increasing organic reach, and building better connections with loyal customers, this seems like a fair trade. This way, you can focus on other aspects of the business without worrying about the marketing side.
Or, you can hire a marketing advisor to train your employees. As such, your marketing, sales, and customer success teams will be capable of handling all marketing responsibilities as the business grows.
How a marketing consultant can benefit large businesses
Like small businesses, most large companies hire marketing consultancies to either train their marketing team or evaluate their company profiles to pinpoint the shortcomings in the current marketing plan and to create and implement a more effective plan that delivers marketing success while being aligned with the company goals.
By investing in skilled marketing consultancies, firms won’t have to spend thousands of dollars to partake in marketing campaigns destined for failure as they are outdated or are not considering customer needs. Consultancies also offer a fresh perspective to the marketing team, which is used to doing tasks in a preset way.
As mentioned in the job requirements of sales marketing consultants above, marketing advisors perform many roles and can aid your business in the following way:
According to Small Business Trends, the top 5 digital marketing goals for most mid to large-size firms are increase in sales/revenue, improving brand awareness, converting leads, boosting website traffic, and being better than the competitors. With a marketing consultant, you won’t have to stick to one goal, you can accomplish all of these.
In this day and age, most users prefer to obtain information about products and services online. Research even suggests that 81% of the internet users prefer online resources over traditional advertisements. A marketing consultant specializing in digital marketing can develop and implement a strategic digital marketing campaign that would help your business with this.
A marketing consultant can also guide you on advertising, website design, SEO, social media marketing, promotions, etc.
The best reason to hire a marketing specialist is, well, for their knowledge. They’re the most informed about different outlets and platforms, and would know which would work the best to improve your business’ visibility and engage customers.
How to find the right marketing advisor for your company
Whether you’re a small business owner or part of a large organization, hiring the right marketing consultant is a must. The keyword here is ‘right’. You don’t want to end up spending a pretty sum on consultancies that do not consider your requirements, and you end up pulling the plug on a half-baked marketing campaign that does more bad than good.
Consider the following factors before you hire a sales and marketing consultant.
Research the marketing consultancies that are located within your area. Consider all the top marketing consultancies operating in your city/locality; read reviews, talk to local business owners about them, or you can even post an ad and have the consultancies reach out to you instead.
Consider their experience. When you’ve found a few consultancies that fit your needs, go through the results of their previous projects and cross-check their references to ensure they can deliver what they’re selling.
Conduct interviews. After you’ve selected the consultancy you like the most or have shortlisted a few, interview them. Prepare the questions in advance like you would when hiring a new employee. Prepare questions that will help the consultancies develop a marketing strategy.
Pay attention to both soft and hard skills. While it’s necessary for a marketing advisor or a consultancy to be proficient in digital marketing, understand consumer behavior, and be able to offer marketing software solutions, having strong interpersonal skills and excellent communication abilities is also a must.
Over to You
Many people are under the assumption that marketing advisors only develop marketing plans or provide guidance, but they do a lot more than that. They assist with the execution of the marketing plan, analyze its performance, and optimize it as it develops further.
This guide should now have cleared all your doubts about the importance of a marketing advisor, the benefits of hiring one, and how to hire a marketing specialist that will help your business deliver on its targets and goals.
Now that you know all there is about a professional marketing expert, it’s time to start hunting one for your business. In case you still have any doubts or are unsure about how to start, you can get in touch with our team for any career and business-related support.