When To Get a Marketing Consultant or hire a Marketing Professional So You Can Focus On Your Business
With an uncertain future, are you left wondering whether your business is confidently operating with skilled marketing consultants or professional/s in the right roles working for or inside your business?
“Nobody can really guarantee the future. The best we can do is size up the chances, calculate the risks involved, estimate our ability to deal with them and then make our plans with confidence”[1]Previously we discussed the reasons why you may wish to recruit a marketing professional as opposed to or as well as contracting; there may be a need to do so particularly for roles related to consolidating intellectual property within product development and also for efficiency within distribution and technical roles. Beyond this lies the more creative and strategic realm most suited to advertising and marketing consultants.
“The future belongs to the competent. It belongs to those who are very, very good at what they do. It does not belong to the well-meaning.”[2]With the help of external consultants, you can pick and choose from a pool of highly skilled marketing professionals to meet the specific needs of your business.
Product and services branding, for example, stems from your existing branding strategy and forms part of your product development processes, this function traditionally falls within the ambit of an internal Marketing Strategist or Product and Brand Manager capturing your brand identity, values and personality. However many small business simply don’t have these specialists in house due to lack of resources, hence making an external marketing consultant the most cost effective answer.
Captivate Your Audience
Brand communication, however, is a reflection of branding strategy and an external brand communication specialist who works closely with you foresees every vantage point where consumers encounter your brand and ensures every brand touchpoint builds your brand by being a memorable, positive experience. Using an external source for this task greatly increases the likelihood that this individual has worked across more and/or diverse branding portfolios and provides incomparable insight on customer perception.
Considering you already have a good understanding of your target market it would be useful to ‘hire a marketing contractor’ for promotion. A skilled marketing consultant or advertising professional will be able to captivate your audience with the correct mix of messaging and media and convince them to take action through a well-planned communication campaign, clearly differentiating your brand.
Consumers overdose daily on information relating to products and services through a myriad of marketing channels – television ads, blogs, websites and e-mail mailing lists, to name a few! These are all locations where clarity and consistency of your marketing content is critical.
Since media is increasingly fragmented, communications programs are more complicated and it is impossible to be an expert media strategist, social media expert; copywriter and so on! Using an external source such as a marketing consultant to assist with the production of these marketing materials you can select an expert in every field, with years of experience or simply hire a marketing agency with all of the required services under one roof.
If you’re still unsure about what to recruit for in-house and what to outsource, we are as willing as we are skilled in helping you to determine your best course of action.
[1] Henry Ford 2nd
[2] Brian Tracy
