Danielle MacInnis – Marketing Blog for Small Businesses

The most successful marketers measure what they do and they know how the marketing activities are impacting the revenue. They not only get leads into the funnel, they  nurture them through the journey to become a customer and advocate. Great marketers technologically savvy, creative, analytical and obsessed with tools to better manage inquiries and nurture leads by providing insights into prospects digital footprint.

Here are a list of key competencies you should look for when hiring a marketing consultant:

1. Are they tactical or have a strategic skill-set. Having a sound understanding of how to implement marketing campaigns is an important tactical skill but this skill can be picked up quickly or outsourced easily. Setting up a sound marketing strategy and an active marketing plan is a skill that is more difficult to acquire. Having a marketer that can build a strategy to attract leads and envision how you are going to interact in a digital way with prospects is vital in todays’ landscape. At the end of the day, it is all about attracting and converting leads into profitable customers and every business needs a plan to do this effectively.

2. Do they have business analyst skills? Today marketers needs to have very good business analysis skills. Knowing how to uses tools like – CRM, google analytics, Facebook, lead scoring, social media tools amongst others to drive to a revenue result is critical.  Understanding trends, tweaking campaigns and trying new things is a must and such activities are based on sound measurement and analytic skills.

3. Marketing Technologist – Are they a power user of technology? -  If they are they will look at new ways to do business by optimising your use of technology. Using the marketing automation system, lead scoring, profiling you database. Marketing is going through this incredible transformation. Marketers need to use multi-technologies to run successful campaigns. They need to be able to leverage the technology to meet the needs of your business. Marketing automation systems are powerful and in order to get the most out of them you need to have a technical skill-set. You need to have HTML, CRM skills to mention just two technologies.

4. Are they a nurture specialist? Nurture specialists are obsessed with creating a intimate digital dialog at all phases of the buying cycle and providing qualified leads to the sales team.This role focuses on the long-term digital relationship with prospects and customers and must effectively work with all team members to pull campaigns together.

5. Are they Content Specialist? Content specialist  means they are responsible for all the content associated with a campaign marketing is the fuel for nurture marketing. The key here is using the smallest piece of content that will create an exchange of value that gives the opportunity for the prospect to show behaviour that can be tracked and scored as an intent or level of interest.

Content specialists know that the right message at the right time will keep prospects and customers engaged. They think about the buying cycle and personna types and how will interact in each channel.

6. Are they a creative specialist? Creative specialists want to know how effective is the demand generation. What will perform best. Testing what works. They drive and enhance the communications from the customers’ point of view.

7. Are they brand experts? Branding is all about creating a feeling between the company and the customer. A marketer that is interested in building a brand personna that is consistent and represents value consistently in all its touch points is a very great asset to any team. Someone to hold you accountable for the brand attributes is vital to keeping a brand real.

Questions to ask when interviewing them:

1. Are they recognised by an official Marketing organisation – In Australia that would be Certified Practicing Marketer by the Australian Marketing Institute

2. Do they use a marketing dashboard to measure the results for each client; leads generated, conversions, and cost per lead per program, etc Do they talk about the demand generation as a pipeline?

3. Have they got a good social media profile: LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+, u-tube, quota etc

4. What marketing tools do they use for their own marketing: CRM, Blog, Content Management System, advertising, SEO, branding, podcast, articles, tools and resources.

5. Do they have good customer success stories and testimonials? If they do do they talk about real results, leads generated and covered to customers.

The pedowitzgroup have a good video explaining the difference between the traditional marketer and that of a demand generation system marketer or as they call the revenue marketer. You can also listen to a an interview on Rain today about core competencies to look for in a marketer today.

If you have I would love for you to fill out my survey and I will collate the results.

Laura Lake marketing guru had a great post inviting small businesses to share their stories about how they started their businesses. Thought it was a really good idea.

Here is mine. Why not share your ideas?

cidesign.com.au

It has come to my attention that in small business there is a misconception about what a marketing consultant actually does? Maybe this is in part because many people believe marketing is just advertising and creating brochures. Well, I can’t speak for other marketing consultants but I can help you understand what I believe the role of a marketing consultant is.

In my practice the main role I provide is to help your business understand the problem you solve for your customer. How does your product or service make their life easier, faster, more efficient, more enjoyable.  In understanding how you can meet their needs you can serve them better and provide better value. This is the best marketing you can do for your business. Happy customers are likely to refer others and thus the business grows. This role of customer insight is a critical role for an effective marketing consultant.  To have a real empathy for customers isn’t something you can fake, you either have it or you don’t.

The other role that I play is to help you uncover what your customers think of you. This insight helps you choose the right marketing strategies to grow your business. Give them more of what they want. This is often about creating some sort of customer insight process be it survey, customer feedback box, ringing key customers every month for a chat or providing another way for them to connect with you, perhaps online forum.

Sometimes I help you identify who you should be targeting with your product or service and who you shouldn’t. This process helps you identify the best spend and get the best return. Rather than trying to be all things to all people, you can focus your attention on your ideal customers. This clarity of  focus, can make a real different to your marketing activities.

Consulting often means looking at your strategies to grow and building a marketing and sales model that will support your growth. Basically, I help you generate more enquiries from your ideal customer group. Once you have their attention, it is then all about showing them why they should buy from you and ensuring that the experience is a good one. A good place to start is building some insight about your customers (using a database) understanding and mapping out their buying cycle and building an integrated sales and marketing approach to each target customer group.

Most small businesses don’t have a documented plan. What they are trying to achieve with their business (their vision) and how they are going to get their (the execution). I help provide a strategic sound board to get this down on paper (not in your head) so we can track and measure how we are going and ensure that we learn from our mistakes.

I also focus the attention of the small business owner to work on their business rather than in it. Marketing is all about viewing the business from the customer perspective and you need the time and space to get into this mindset. Insights and brainstorming that come from this sort of head space can often lead to inspirational thoughts and processes that can have a dramatic effect on the business and how it responds to customer needs.

So as you can see marketing consulting is more than choosing the right communication approach for a campaign. It is a strategic partnership with a business owner that is all about nurturing the customers they have and creating more similar customers for the future.