Working with a marketing consultant first involves discussing your goals or why you’re seeking their services. During this initial session, the marketing consultant will typically ask you specific questions to accurately understand your business needs and wants.
If you choose to move forward with formally hiring the marketing consultant and agree to their terms of work, they will start developing in-depth, tailored strategies based on what they learned in the initial session. The marketing consultant will then propose these strategies to you and, upon your approval, put them into action.
When implementing strategies, the marketing consultant will usually also set up tracking so that they can (with your approval) adjust these strategies based on real-time results.
A marketing consultant is a highly experienced professional who develops customised marketing strategies for a variety of clients. Since they’re external to your business, a consultant can provide a fresh perspective to your marketing approach and methods. The goal of a marketing consultant is to ensure your marketing efforts are on the right track (i.e., working towards valuable success that meets core business objectives).
A digital marketing consultant is almost the same as a marketing consultant, but with the added focus on digital marketing. For example, if most of your business is from traditional marketing, but you’re struggling to adapt to or integrate digital marketing, then you may consider hiring a digital marketing consultant rather than a marketing consultant. However, given that a majority of consumers are active online, most marketing consultants nowadays are actually digital marketing consultants.
What a marketing consultant does can differ for each professional or client. But generally all marketing consultants will provide all their clients with marketing strategies at the very least. Some marketing consultants let go during the implementation of their proposed strategies. Other marketing consultants, like Sagar Sethi, continue to work with the client throughout the implementation phase and even after, such as when measuring results. Of course, each client will require different services and marketing consultants adjust their tasks accordingly.
There are many reasons to hire a marketing consultant. The most compelling one is that it’s cost-effective to do so. Hiring a marketer to work as an in-house, full-time employee requires you to offer them training and benefits, increasing the cost of hiring them. A marketing consultant is essentially a freelancer that you hire on a contract basis, which means that you get more flexibility in choosing whether or not you want to continue working with them.
Like with all other roles, there are many ways to hire a marketing consultant. Usually, you’ll want to start with your LinkedIn network. Finding a marketing consultant that you’re familiar with through their LinkedIn or that someone in your LinkedIn network is familiar with will likely have better results than just hiring a stranger.
But if you’re not active on LinkedIn, another way to hire a marketing consultant is to do a Google search. While this may seem obvious, showing up in the Google search results for keywords relevant to their profession is a clear sign that the marketing consultant knows what they’re doing (at least, in terms of SEO).
Similar to the cost of other specialised services, the exact cost of hiring a marketing consultant depends on the professional, their qualifications, the quality of work they provide, the difficulty level of the specific services needed, and many other factors. In 2024, a Melbourne-based marketing consultant will typically cost you around AU$100 per hour.
