CAN A MARKETING STRATEGY CONSULTANT CREATE YOUR GROWTH ENGINE?
Your sales team isn’t going to sell anything if they don’t have the right tools to do so. Marketing strategy is foundational to the long-term success of any business or company. A marketing strategy consultant can help your business create a marketing plan that will get you there.?
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Why Hire a Marketing Strategy Consultant?
Part of good consulting is to develop a strategy that will take into consideration:
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A marketing strategy consultant or a Fractional CMO will use that information to determine a marketing strategy that will work best for your business.?That marketing strategy is the roadmap for tactical execution.?That is to say, how will you implement and deploy the strategy?
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Sometimes businesses and entrepreneurs hire a consultant to help create this marketing plan. The consultant may also assist the company in the execution of the strategy, depending upon the terms of the consulting contract.
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Strategy is great, but your business has to actually implement the strategy to make progress.?So before your company hires a marketing strategy consultant, make sure to understand the Scope Of Work and the consultant’s areas of expertise.?As an example, are their skills best suited for marketing sales, brand, digital, data and/or holistic strategy? If they are not going to perform each step of the implementation, what additional resources might you need?
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Fractional CMO vs. Marketing Strategy Consultant
Bear in mind, there are typically some differences between a strategic marketing consultant and a Fractional CMO.?If you have a small or medium size business and you need an overarching marketing strategy or a holistic approach, a marketing strategy consultant may be just the thing.?
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At a larger business or companies, a marketing strategy consultant will likely be hired to fix a specific problem. Consultants might be hired to strategize a company’s digital media outreach exclusively. Consultants might be hired to strategize the upcoming annual holiday season PPC campaign that didn’t do so well last year.?Perhaps a business wants to focus part of a campaign on a specific set of services. In each of those cases, the role of the consultant will be focused on those specific problems and the strategies needed to solve them.
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A Fractional CMO can provide all those services and more. Besides the creation of the strategy, they are typically much more involved with ensuring the plan is executed successfully.?Each team member knows their clearly defined role, milestones and deadlines. The devil is in the details.?
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Niche Expertise
Regardless of who you choose to hire, it might make sense to lean more favorably towards candidates with previous experience in your niche industry. Are you e-commerce? Do you have a marketplace business? Do you have a software as a service product??Is it a service based business? Each industry, market and niche has its own unique challenges. Your strategy should be as unique as your business.
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Team & Resource Planning
A marketing strategy consultant can outline a plan for the deployment of the marketing strategy they provide.?This may include new hires, a different set of outsourced vendors and some new agency relationships.?They might also brainstorm how to better stretch the existing resources of a business. This will help shift your business into high revenue mode without wasting time.
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Customer Journeys
Part of that consulting process includes analyzing the customer journey and looking for places to optimize conversion rates (micro conversions).?They can also help a client determine the proper place in the funnel to ascend the relationship (upsell).?How can you create ongoing referral loops? How can you further delight the customer after service has been delivered?
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Marketing Agency vs. Independent Consultant
I think it goes without saying, if you find the right independent consultant, you’ll get a lot more value for the money compared to a consulting firm or a marketing agency.?There are some legitimate reasons why.
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Strategy agnostic
A marketing strategy agency has a lot of staff, like a big hungry machine that has to be fed. Forces within that machine will direct your strategy towards answers that happen to feed the big hungry machine. That means utilizing in-house resources they already know they have, for which they can bill hourly.?Independent consultants have an opportunity to be a bit more strategy and channel agnostic and do what’s best for the client. They don’t have 6 departments of overhead waiting for work.
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Understandably, marketing agencies also typically want to stay in their comfort zone.?So companies that tend to do more SEO will probably tell you SEO is the answer. Companies that have a track record of advising clients to do PPC will probably tell you you need to do PPC. If you use a big agency that has a stellar track record in every channel of marketing known to man, you’re gonna be paying for the overhead of a lot of resources your company doesn’t need.
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Which brings us back to independent consultants.
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The right team
Rather than solutions that serve the financial needs of your consulting firm, independent consultants focus making your business an even bigger success! Hiring an outside marketing strategy consultant will give you fresh and unbiased insight. Why??Independent consultants are not going to be influenced by external relationships from big money partners (like agencies have).?They are not going to be influenced by the internal relationships and agendas of 6 departments of overhead.?It’s better to find the right team to execute the strategy than to force a strategy on the a team with the wrong skills.?Get the strategy right first, then choose the team players. Don’t choose the team players based on what you happen to have already in-house.
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Intellectual property
It’s been a growing trend that the campaigns developed by an agency are the intellectual property of the agency, not the business for whom it was developed. Any concepts or methods you develop collaboratively with that agency might even be used with other clients of the agency.?They may be willing to sign favorable agreements on intellectual property and non-competes.?Maybe.?But you definitely need to check into it.?Obviously, this is not such a problem with independent consultants.