Christmas is rapidly approaching, and the last-minute scramble for gifts has begun.
Some of you work in marketing. Some of you have businesses you need to promote. And some of you just enjoy reading marketing blogs for the fun of it. That’s not weird at all.
If you’re one of the first two types of people, I have an amazing gift idea that will make you and your business a lot happier – mainly because this gift, this wonderful creation, will help bring in more money so you can buy even better presents for your family when you finally decide to stop procrastinating and order them last-minute off Amazon (using Prime so you can hopefully get next-day shipping right before the holidays. Good luck with that.).
This gift of which I speak is something every business – even those with marketing departments – can use: digital marketing consulting.
What Is Digital Marketing Consulting, Anyway?
That’s a great question. I’m glad I asked it on your behalf.
Digital marketing consulting is basically learning how to do marketing better – how to squeeze every ounce of potential out of your marketing strategy.
Digital marketing consultants (i.e. us) sit down with you and your team and analyze everything from your marketing strategy to the specific tactics you are using to promote your company. It can be anything from looking at your social media platforms to reviewing Google AdWord ads, reading over blogs, examining organic search analytics, and gossiping about the latest scandal in the office. (Just kidding. We charge extra for that last part.)
We are trying to answer a few key questions:
- Are you targeting the right people?
- How well are you reaching and connecting with your target audience?
- Is the language you’re using to promote yourself effective or persuasive?
- Is your budget allocated properly?
- What channels should you be using that you’re not? Which should you not use?
- Are your processes streamlined and efficient, or could they be improved?
- Is your organic website traffic sufficient?
- Are you converting a high-enough percentage of your visitors?
- Does your ROI justify your methods?
- What, exactly, is the big deal about pumpkin spice?
The process we use tries to find answers to all of those questions (except for the last one; the nation’s obsession with pumpkin spice will forever be a mystery). The ultimate outcome is a leaner, meaner marketing machine that provides better ROI for your budget.
Here Are 3 Reasons to Consult
So, what are the outcomes of working with a digital marketing consultant? Why would you want to invite a stranger into your business to take a peek under the hood and see what’s what with your marketing strategy?
Again, I’m glad I’m asking these questions for you. They’re great questions. The best questions.
There are three reasons:
Optimizing Your Channels
Within digital marketing, there are many, many different channels you can use to promote your business. To name just a few, there’s social media marketing (and within that, approximately eight billion different platforms), email marketing, several different forms of pay-per-click advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), local SEO, and others. Each of these channels has its own advantages and disadvantages. Each has reasons you’d want to use them.
Because there are so many options available, it can be difficult for a marketing team to make full use of all of them – or even lock in on the ones that will be the most useful.
What a digital consultant can do is help you pick out the best channels and platforms across the entire wide, wide world of digital marketing and incorporate them into your strategy. Also, consultants can help you connect the channels to your objectives – the only way they can really work.
Saving Thousands of Dollars
The goal of marketing is to make more money. Your marketing team wants to help the business make more money. We want you to make more money. Money money money.
Sometimes, you can make more money without actually bringing in new customers. Sometimes, you can get more profit by reducing your expenses – and that means finding ways to potentially save thousands of dollars a year.
For example, one thing we do is audit a business’s Google AdWords campaign. We use a variety of tools to pinpoint ways to save money. AdWords is a complex auction system in which you bid against hundreds of other competitors for limited ad space. There are a lot of factors that go into how much you pay for ads per click in this process. If you’re not careful, you can waste a ton of money – hence the reason we examine the campaigns, the ads, the bids, and everything else to save money and lower your costs.
If you’re targeting the wrong people – or using the wrong parameters – you’re potentially wasting money. If you’re spending a lot of money to drive traffic but aren’t converting it, you’re potentially wasting money. If your quality scores are low for AdWords or Facebook advertising or any other advertising platform, you’re spending too much – and are potentially wasting money.
People hate wasting money. It’s like buying a great gift – a really sweet Star Wars: The Force Awakens LEGO set complete with tiny little Finn and Rey figures – for your four-year-old nephew, only to have him eat and/or lose every piece. (Lesson learned: never buy four-year-olds LEGO sets. They don’t appreciate them.)
Working with a digital marketing consultant can improve your profit margin and ROI by finding ways to save potentially thousands of dollars a year.
Measuring and Proving Results
Finally, a consultant can help you with something virtually all businesses struggle with: measuring and proving results.
Back in the early days of the 20th Century, famed business pioneer John Wanamaker (who created, among other things, the price tag), once said “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half – especially when it comes to Facebook.” Historical records show that he was enormously skeptical about Facebook before he died in 1922.
Wanamaker’s point was this: it has always been really, really hard to actually prove the effectiveness of most marketing and advertising methods. Of course, digital marketing is many times easier to track and measure than traditional advertising, and the industry as a whole has developed sophisticated methods of tracking ROI.
Digital marketing consultants can help you create a data-driven system of tracking what you spend and how it translates into dollars earned. This is a godsend to marketing professionals because it allows you to do something amazing: prove to your bosses that what you’re doing is actually working.
And if you’re a business owner, you get to see that for every dollar you spend in marketing, you are getting something back in return.
The thing is, proving ROI, even with digital methods, can be very technical and tricky. It helps to have people who have experience in creating analytical systems and processes that can link expenditures to bottom-line results.
Give the Gift that Keeps On Giving!
As we’ve discussed, digital marketing consulting is perhaps the greatest gift anyone can ever receive.*
*Besides children, health, friendships, love, salvation, good fortune, peace for all mankind, a sweet Star Wars: The Force Awakens LEGO set, and the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series.
