Marketing Eye : What makes for a great marketing consultant?

With so many marketers finding themselves unemployed due to the current economic environment, the freelance world of marketing consultants is becoming more and more flooded.

What makes one marketing consultant better than another is simple; strategy, execution, structure and follow-through.

The holy grail is “analytics”. If you marry all of these skills, then you are almost there.

When I say almost, I am really meaning al-most. Without soft skills like:

• Communication: Confident, articulate, personable, clear.
• Teamwork: Ability to lead a team to focus on common goals.
• Adaptability: Skills in reading the market and adapting accordingly (think COVID-19)
• Problem-solving: When obstacles come up, ability to find solutions is essential.
• Creativity: If we all marketed the same way, we would all get the same result and it would not be positive.
• Interpersonal skills: How you interact with others on your team and leadership.
• Time management: Ability to manage your time efficiently and effectively.
• Work ethic: Strong work ethic with a ‘no mucking around’ policy.

Leaders expect marketing consultants to be professional, smart, knowledgeable and a little ‘outside the box'. If you only draw inside the lines, you might not meet the expectations of a marketing consultant within a firm.

There are many ways to get yourself in the position to be a marketing consultant, namely climbing the ladder in a consulting firm or agency, but do remember, you will need ‘x’ factor. Most companies expect their marketing consultants to be high skilled, cerebral marketers with an ability to read any situation.

Marketing consultants have some fairly simple marketing skills:

• Ability to create a detailed marketing strategy.
• Determine a company’s key messages and unique value proposition.
• Identity the marketing mix that will form part of the implementation of the marketing plan.
• Monitoring results with data analytics.

Of course, there are technologies now that do this all for you. Smart marketing consultants use their time efficiently and know that by using artificial intelligence and big data, they are able to fast-track their clients’ ability to go to market with a more targeted marketing strategy capable of reaching business and sales goals.

As a marketing agency, we use Robotic Marketer and while there is no other platform in the world today doing what this technology does, we will find a quantum leap how we use technology as marketing consultants to catapult our clients’ ability to realize goals.

When you have a foot in the door as a marketing consultant, it’s important to:

Establish trust

As a marketing consultant, your ability to establish trust not just with leadership, but also with your team is paramount.

Build your reputation

This is harder to do than you will imagine. It is imperative that you build your reputation by being a marketing consultant that is reliable and focused on results. If you are always getting results for clients, your reputation will proceed you.

Educate yourself

A marketing consultant is expected to be smarter, faster, and more capable than the average marketing manager. This means that you need to be across the entire marketing mix, industry, data analytics and technology suite that is required to do your job. Continued education is a must!

Structure

The difference between a marketing consultant and a marketing manager is often the way they work. A marketing manager is usually managing 100 things at once and can sometimes look like they are out of control, whereas a marketing consultant is required to work under a structured approach, cool and calm at all times, with all the right answers.

Language

There is an expectation that marketing consultants are smarter and higher up the ranking order than their marketing counterparts with exception to CMO’s. This means that the way they talk is articulate, knowledgeable and with conviction. There can be no second guessing your strategic direction because you can’t put two words together.

About Marketing Eye

Marketing Eye is an outsourced marketing agency that provides small to medium sized businesses with a professional marketing consultant and team to implement results driven marketing strategies.