Do you have a media start-up? Are you an entrepreneur looking to enhance your retail business? Do you own an e-commerce platform? Most of the businesses today take the digital way to create a positive impression in the market.
It is mandatory to hire an expert Digital Marketing Consultant who would implement strategies to strengthen your brand presence. There are more aspects to consider on this matter. Read on.
Why a professional consultant is important?
The answer to the question is guessable – the consultant knows the market and makes your business more competitive. The digital space is rapidly changing, so is the technique of branding. Only a top, experienced consultant keeps a tab of the changes.
He knows about the new avenues. He is aware of the special ‘digital hacks’ that pull more traffic. The expert applies innovative solutions to improve the engagement rate of potential buyers. There are lots of other things he can do in favor of the business.
Skills you should look for
Before you take the final decision to hire a Digital Marketing Consultant, check out a crisp list of essential skills the expert should possess.
- Strategic planning: The consultant should have ample experience in setting clear digital strategies to make the brand more visible.
- SEO: He should be well-versed in implementing accurate Search Engine Optimization techniques favoring the brand’s growth.
- SMM: The consultant should also have deep knowledge about various aspects of social media marketing, across different platforms.
- PPC: The professional you hire must display an extensive capability of designing, monitoring and optimizing the Pay-per-Click campaigns. It includes social media advertising.
- Data Analysis: It is crucial to hire an expert who is skillful in correctly analyzing social media and search engine data. Accordingly, he must be able to extract valuable insights.
- E-mail Marketing: Improving the conversion via e-mail marketing should also be in the repertoire of the consultant’s skills.
- Basic designing: It is important, too, for the professional to have some basic designing skills. It helps in improving purely visual aspects of branding.
- Creativity: Creativity is one of the most desirable qualities you should look for. A creative consultant would experiment with innovative solutions to build more value for the brand.
- Storytelling: Storytelling is yet another high-end skill of a top Digital Marketing Consultant. He clearly conveys the message and agendas in form of a lucid storyline, when needed.
- Intelligently Persuasive: The expert should be a good salesperson. But he should not appear pushy. Persuasion skills are important. Asking potential buyers intelligently, to try out a service or product, helps in improving sales.
- Excellent Adaptability: The consultant should not find it difficult to smartly adapt to new technologies, policies, frameworks and regulations. He must be ready with a full-proof plan. Also, he should be good at productive improvisation.
- Project Leadership: It is beyond doubt that the professional you hire must have tremendous level of leadership qualities. He must be capable of taking the brand forward, competitively.
How digital marketing experts add value to your brand / business
It is practically essential to remain clear about how a digital marketing professional can add concrete value to your brand / business. There are multiple ways he does it.
- Making your brand more visible: The brand gets more recognition on the social media platform. Likewise, it has a fan following in the long run.
- Improving conversion rate: It goes without saying! The conversion rate of your business improves significantly. More importantly, it is measurable.
- Enhancing customer support: Customers are core to any business. Hence, customer support should be the major focus. The consultant does it for you.
- Increasing engagement: When the audience is positively engaged with your services more and more, it leads to better business. The expert improves it creatively.
- Making your brand more trustable: Trust is the key factor to love any brand. The consultant ensures your target audience is glued confidently to the brand’s charm.
- Improving ROI: A great way the consultant improves the value for your business is increasing the returns on investment, especially in the long run.
- Expanding scope: The scope of earning more revenues increases in favor of your brand when an expert consultant manages the digital marketing.
- Making the brand trendier: No great brand is stuck at the same place. The digital marketer wisely applies unique solutions that make your brand more contemporary.
Audit of Web Presence
Auditing the web presence of your official site is a hugely important task, conducted by a top-notch Digital Marketing Consultant. Before diving deeper, it is crucial to know what it is all about.
Audit means to know the strength of your business, digitally. Also, it concerns the brand’s prospects in the competitive market.
A consultant has to primarily oversee some broad elements of web audit of your site, which includes:
- A thorough SEO analysis (on-page and off-page)
- Checking the content quality, structure and other attributes
- Getting an overview of the analytics and creating periodic reports
- Performance levels of digital marketing campaigns
- Social media profiles (business pages)
- Registration to local directories (to capture local market demand)
- Going through the Review Sites
- Integrating the website with GMB (Google My Business) Listing
He provides you with complete information about the audit process. You can stress on the major findings. Accordingly, it becomes easier for you to design new strategies. You can improvise on the existent strategies, too.
Focusing on a robust digital marketing plan
Without a feature-rich digital marketing plan, it is not possible to move your business forward. There are several aspects you need to consider under the plan.
A Digital Marketing Consultant prepares a multi-faceted plan that takes into account every possible (and relevant) social media platform to design and implement the plan. The expert takes care of the technical elements of the plan with a professional approach.
Some essential factors the consultant integrates within the plan are:
- A clear content calendar that tells about the scheduling of posts across social media avenues
- Competitor analysis that keeps watch on the performance of your rivals in similar environment and/or domain
- Deep data analysis concerning the performance of your business pages and brand
- Campaign strategies and templates
- An exclusive roadmap for video content
- Platform-specific content distribution
- Reputation management
- Customer-specific digital support
- Cost-benefit analysis considering resources utilized for enhancing business and the returns
- Detailed and regular reporting on the effectiveness of the plan
Budgeting
It is obvious that you cannot progress without a coherent idea about the marketing budget, especially in the digital arena. You should be aware of the expenses you need to bear to not only hire the professional, but also to implement specific digital strategies.
You have to discuss the business objectives at length with the consultant you have hired or plan to recruit. There should be exchange of views and opinions. Also, the discussions should lead to a consensus.
It is intelligent to perform a comparative study of the service rates offered in the market. You can choose the rates that support your budget planning. But also keep in mind about the service quality.
Remember about availing discounts, if any. It is very crucial to check out whether customization feature is available or not. It is a nice way to keep the digital marketing budget under control.
Designing a Brand Strategy
By now, you might have clearly understood that the core attention of the Digital Marketing Consultant is to prepare (and implement) a reliable strategy for your brand. A reliable strategy means it brings you the results you desire. It should be smart, trendy, and effective.
The brand strategy should be extensive. The digital expert tries to prepare a strategy that takes into account the full potential of your brand. He takes a creative approach within the professional framework. The aim remains to increase the visibility of your brand. Constant value addition is the main priority.
Keeping the brand in limelight continuously is an art. A top consultant does it in a cost-effective way. He always wants to sustain a positive buzz about your brand in the digital space.
Keep in mind that the parameters associated with the brand strategy should be measurable. You can leverage the power of data to build a stronger brand.
Building an SEO Strategy
SEO stands for search engine optimization. In simple words, if you business page and / or website has good SEO features, then the platform becomes more searchable in the web. It ranks higher. The result is more traffic. More traffic means more business, resulting in more revenues.
You can create an SEO plan for your website and social media business pages. But it is highly recommended to hire an expert. An SEO expert would make the work easier for you. He usually builds and implements an extensive SEO strategy for your business.
SEO policy of Google changes continuously. It is not fixed. There are frequent updates. The algorithms of the search engine become more advanced with each passing day. There have been some major updates a few weeks ago. The following bullet points explain the essence.
- Quality and relevance of a content is supreme
- Meaningful sub-heads can improve search engine ranks
- No paragraph in an article should be more than 3 to 4 lines
- List articles rule the search engine results
- Algorithms now give less importance to keywords and key phrases
- Express major portions of a content in bullet points (as done in this blog!)
- No sentence should be more than 20 words
- The last 25% of long-form content has zero reading focus
- Backlink from a reliable source with a high domain authority is hugely important
- Stop words are not redundant
Creating and implementing Social Media Strategy
A solid social media strategy should blend two dimensions:
- Traditional ways that still work
- Contemporary techniques that edge you ahead of your rivals
You can shoulder the responsibility without any external support. On the other hand, there is no harm in hiring an experienced SMM professional for the task.
Keep in mind that a comprehensive social media strategy considers all types of social media platforms. The list is long – Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn and so on. Each platform is unique. Accordingly, the strategy changes its flavor.
Determining the optimal balance of various content forms is the key. Live videos, curated videos, images, texts, GIFs, Reels, Stories, etc. are various tools you need to experiment with. Daily monitoring of content performance is very important. You must display a capacity to continuously improvise, if needed, on your social media strategy.
Implementing an PPC Strategy
PPC stands for Pay-per-Click. You advertise your business online, say, on Google or Facebook. When a potential customer clicks the link, you have to pay the platform.
PPC campaign is a strongly technical aspect that is best left to the expert. You must hire an experienced PPC consultant for the task. He would understand the business objective at first. Accordingly, he would create the campaign for you.
Better campaigns give higher ranks to your advertising links. They become more visible to your target audience. PPC strategy is particularly important in capturing the local market. If you are looking for an expert, then you can conveniently hire a top consultant. Hire Consultant.
Before implementing the strategy, the consultant discusses with you its core technical aspects. You can suggest changes. Fine tune the strategy if it is viable. Implement it when you are confident.
What is the right time to hire a consultant?
There is no definite answer to the above question. A subjective approach is a wiser thing to do. Hiring a Digital Marketing Consultant can take place right at the time when you have opened a business. In this case, you want strong branding right from the word ‘go’.
Hiring the consultant can also take place when you want o provide an impetus to your business. You want to make the brand more competitive. You want to snatch a chunk of market share from your nearest rival. A top consultant will help you in this case.
The key of hiring good is patience and good research. All the best for your digital marketing initiatives!
