You can be the best in the world at what you do, a leader in your industry and an acknowledged expert in your field, but without customers, you’re just another company struggling to stay afloat. Marketing is the critical factor in raising awareness of your offering, communicating with your target audience, and promoting your products or services as a solution to their problems.

Why Not Do Your Own Marketing?

Unless you’re a marketing expert AND a multitasker extraordinaire, you simply can’t (and shouldn’t) do it all yourself. Many business people have a limited understanding of what marketing is and how crucial its role in building a business is over the long-term. In fact, marketing is the primary force behind the type of growth that secures investment funding, generation and nurturing of leads and establishing a company that survives for years to come.

Consider Your Options

Assuming you realize the importance and value of marketing, if you can’t do it personally, you’re left with one of two fundamental options:

• Outsourcing to a marketing consultant or agency, or
• Employing a full- or part-time marketing officer and a team of marketing specialists to implement their strategies.

Both of these choices have pros and cons, but the second comes with a lot more disadvantages than the first. These include having to supervise and manage the person, the costs associated with additional staff members, such as sick leave, employee benefits, and temporary replacement during vacations and the risk that the marketers you can afford do not have the specialized expertise you need.

Benefits of Hiring a Marketing Consultant

This leaves you with the other option: outsourcing your marketing to a consultant (or consultancy/agency). Whatever the semantics, there’s a strong case for taking this route.

#1: Get Specialized Knowledge

When the going is tough, you want the best. That’s difficult to afford on a full-time basis, but when you work with a marketing consultant, you only pay for a portion of his or her time. For smaller companies, that makes the entire concept more affordable. Not only do you get just the services you need, but you also get the specialized skill set of professionals—at a fraction of the cost. Look for a marketer with expertise in a particular type of marketing that’s important to your business, such as demand or lead generation.

#2: Enjoy Access to Software

Marketing is almost completely digital these days, and there are thousands of software tools available for processes such as online advertising, lead generation, email marketing, social media management, website content management, and nurturing of prospective buyers. Hiring a consultant enables you to spend your time managing your business instead of trying to figure out which programs to use. Marketing consultancies use tried-and-tested software they’ve purchased already. These are often available to their clients, which saves you having to buy the programs.

#3: Stay on Top of Trends

One of the hardest things to do for a business owner is keeping up with trends. When you have your own industry as well as marketing to monitor, it can become downright hectic. Marketing consultants need to follow the latest and best strategies to stay abreast of developments. They attend conferences and events, read marketing publications, and follow the latest trends—all at their own expense—and bring this information to the table for use in your plan execution. Ad buying and paid search, for example, are constantly-changing areas, and it’s important to know how to choose the right bidding strategies for your business.

#4: Put in the Hours

Much of digital marketing is either “free” or inexpensive, but there’s one factor that pushes up the cost: your time. How much money will you lose by spending an hour a day monitoring your online advertising channels or writing articles to showcase your thought leadership on your blog? And if you (or your in-house marketers) slip up, it’s potentially a lost opportunity to reach a customer who might be ready to purchase.

Marketing consultants, however, have resources they can tap to take over time-consuming daily tasks like updating Instagram, producing a new post for your blog, or checking the bidding on your programmatic ad buys.

Whether you’re unsure about developing a comprehensive marketing strategy for your company or about choosing technology, lack knowledge of trends or the effective use of social media, a marketing consultant is an answer. If you need a little push to start promoting your business and getting customers, or require an extra pair of hands to get your marketing done, a consultant may be an ideal solution.

If intrigued, contact me, Paul Mosenson, today.