31 Reasons to Hire a Digital Marketing Consultant

Online competition is more fierce than ever, and if you’re not doing digital marketing correctly, your competitors will! Digital marketing might seem like a pain but it doesn’t have to be complicated.

A digital marketing consultant can help you realize your online goals effectively and cost-efficiently. It may be tempting to try the DIY approach, but with so many emerging trends and disruptive technologies, pretty much only digital marketing experts are able to handle their own marketing without help!

Below we’ll examine all the main reasons why working with a digital marketing consultant might be a good idea for you and your business. Let’s begin!

1) Define your Strategy

Digital marketing is all about effectively defining a strategic marketing approach and executing it. That is exactly as complicated and ambitious as it sounds, and no small or medium sized business can hope to achieve it without significant investment. A successful strategy will weigh budget, goals, and growth to achieve an optimal outcome.

2) Efficiency and Overcoming Technical Barriers

An experienced marketing consultant will be well-versed in search engine marketing, and all other forms of online marketing, including tools and services you might ignore or be unable to use due to technical limitations.

Unless you’re an IT expert with a background in marketing, you won’t be able to achieve the same level of efficiency a digital marketing consultant will offer you.

3) Enhanced Visibility for all Your Online Assets

With social media, search engine, and mobile marketing all working together and growing fast, there exists a vast, untapped potential for more visibility. A marketing expert will be able to tap into these sources and have your business found through all possible venues. The more traffic your site receives, the more customers you will have. It’s that simple, but it’s not always easy to achieve.

A cleverly designed marketing campaign will cover multiple traffic streams and ensure that your products or services reach the people they are supposed to, improving your inbound traffic, as well as your search engine rankings.

4) Customer Engagement

It’s one thing to increase traffic, as we’ve seen above, and another to get your visitors engaged and eventually convert into buyers. A digital marketing expert will help you find ways to keep your visitors interested and keep your pages relevant and fresh.

Customer engagement is a science in itself, with measurable benefits and a specific return on investment ratios. It involves long-term content strategy and social media presence.

5) Brand Image

You may think you have a clear image of what your business does, but if that image isn’t communicated through your branding, then you’re losing customers. Branding is all about your visual identity. From logos to special fonts and color schemes, your branding approach will define how the public sees you and your offerings. Branding also encompasses catchphrases and signature statements that showcase your business vision.

It’s impossible to go very far without efficient branding, and even global corporation have lost momentum due to inefficient branding.

6) Matching and Surpassing Competition

You can’t expect to run your business and your marketing at the same time. If your competitor trusts a digital marketer to lead their marketing efforts, you will fall behind. On the flip side, if you work with a marketing consultant while your competitor fumbles about, it’s mathematically certain that you will have an advantage!

7) Analytics and Giving You Control

Digital marketing professionals thrive in numbers, and your consultant can help you make sense of stats from Google Analytics and other tools that, if used correctly, can empower you with full control over your marketing and branding destiny.

8) Online Reputation Management

Digital marketing is not just Facebook ads. Online reputation management is crucial both on a personal, as well as a business level. It can be done honestly and positively, but your competitors might try to affect your reputation negatively, and you’ll need the help of a professional to counter that.

9) Perspective to Evolve and Diversify

It’s easy to pigeonhole yourself in one way of doing business, especially if it seems the most profitable right now, but the world of online businesses changes daily, and it pays to hedge your bets and keep evolving. Your consultant can help you get a fresh perspective, consider new approaches, and find good business opportunities.

10) Professional Website

Your official website is the HQ of your digital marketing efforts. It’s where you want to funnel your traffic and where you should sell most of your products and services. A digital marketing consultant will give you pointers and present you with effective solutions to make the most out of your website.

11) PPC Advertising

Few methods get you traffic faster than pay per click advertising. If SEO is a marathon, pay per click is a sprint, and an online marketer is your coach to victory. There are countless guides on how to do PPC the right way, but an expert does PPC on a whole other level.

12) Traditional SEO

Even if you think you’ve automated your conventional digital marketing campaigns, a good marketer can optimize them in various ways you might not even know exist. As two thirds of all online searches happen through Google, it’s imperative that your business is visible there.

13) Content Strategy

Even if you’re a prolific writer, or have a strong creative department, your content will achieve little if it’s not consistent and developed through a specific content strategy. Depending on how you go about it, content marketing can be the foundation of a powerful campaign, or a huge money sink.

14) Curated Content

Cost-effective to the max, leveraging the power of curated content as part of your content strategy will supercharge your traffic and make sure your site and blog keep up to date with recent developments. This is NOT cutting and pasting other articles, but respectfully sharing relevant news and ideas in your business vertical.

15) Blogging

Closely related to your content strategy, your official blog will define the image of your company and be the foundation of your content image. Keep in mind that successful blogging is time-consuming and needs to be carefully planned.

16) Guest Blogging

Blood brothers with blogging, guest blogging can help your company be more visible and drive relevant, highly targeted traffic at your official site. This is basically the posting of relevant blog posts in other websites, through which readers will be directed to your own site and offerings.

17) Content Creation

Digital marketers often have partnerships with trustworthy and skilled writers, video developers, photographers and other professional content creators. By partnering with them, you can obtain premium content at very low prices, especially compared to hiring an in-house content creation specialist.

18) Promoting that Awesome Content

OK, you have blog posts, guest posts and curated content. Now what? A good digital marketing consultant will lead efficient content promotion efforts that are tied to your social media and digital marketing campaigns. This content promotion will make sure your content is seen by those that addresses and has maximum impact.

19) Keeping Content Relevant

Some of your content will become obsolete in time, while some of it will remain ‘evergreen’ and keep on giving for years to come. Your marketing consultant will make sure your content is fresh, and lead re-purposing initiatives if it begins to go stale. An unattended blog might eventually become a liability, with older posts being accused of being misleading. You don’t want that.

20)  Infographics

So, content goes beyond just articles. Infographics are an inexpensive and impactful way to get viral content and expand your brand influence. What’s your industry? Can you produce a compelling, informative and perhaps funny infographic? If yes, your digital marketer will help turn your idea into reality.

21) Video Marketing

Powerful and potentially viral, marketing videos can be an amazing way to reach millions if done right. They can be as expensive or as cheap as you want, because a simple YouTube video has the potential to go viral as much as a fancy CGI panorama.

22) Podcasts

Do you have something interesting to say? Are you looking to become a voice in your industry? Then podcasting will help you establish yourself as a thought leader in your field, and your marketing consultant will make it happen.

Podcasts are broadcasted once live, but then you get to keep the recording and offer it on demand to your visitors, adding long-lasting value.

23) Presentations

Highly valued in the business world, presentations can add value and prestige to your marketing campaign. Presentations, especially when combined with white papers or other authoritative sources, can help establish your business as a leader in its field, and you personally as an expert.

24) Webinars

More interactive than presentations, webinars help you connect with your audience, give TONS of value and, again, establish you as a thought leader in your industry. Webinars can be costly and time-consuming, but they are modular (meaning you can keep on adding more) and scalable.

25) Apps, Flash Media, and Other Interactive Content

Interactive content offers MAX engagement, especially with younger audiences. Flash games, free apps, lighthearted quizzes and ‘silly’ tests are all part of popular culture. You can leverage the power of interactive content without breaking the bank with browser-based interactive content that’s often less expensive to make than ‘traditional’ articles.

26) Email Marketing

One of the most scalable and affordable methods of mass marketing, email marketing can be brilliant if done right, and obnoxious if overdone. With strong email campaigns, you can reach thousands of highly qualified clients, build a relevant mailing list and get your readers to follow your business developments.

Moreover, mailing lists will help promote your content marketing efforts and work synergistically with virtually any other marketing plan.

27) Automation

Online automation, and particularly marketing automation,has the potential to save your employees thousands of hours annually, which can then be put into actually growing your business.

Several of the benefits discussed above, including: content curation, SEO, email marketing and others, can be largely automated, saving you time and money. However, automation has a dark side that can lead to spamming if overdone. A qualified marketer will be able to strike that perfect balance and stay clear of the spam threshold.

28) E-commerce Management

If you’re running an online store, your marketing needs suddenly become a lot more complex and challenging. Each individual product can be a landing page, and your store as a whole can be used for marketing and social media promotion purposes.

Your store will also need protection from negative reviews and a tailor-made SEO campaign, as store pages are valued and ranked differently than regular pages in search engine results.

29) Training

One of the least understood benefits of working with a digital marketing consultant is they can actually help train you and your staff into becoming more efficient, even in non-marketing tasks. Your marketing partner will not only give you invaluable insight, but also point you to the right experts that will help train your team in the subjects they need to master in order to be successful.

Such training may include IT, marketing webinars, content creation guides, and working directly with other specialists in realizing training milestones.

30) Cost-effectiveness

We’ve mentioned cost throughout the article because it’s important to realize that working with a top-tier marketing consultant firm and SEO agency is affordable and VERY cost-effective. To understand the tremendous value, just consider hiring all the individual experts in-house and building all the infrastructure needed for effective SEO and digital marketing management internally. It’s just prohibitively expensive unless you’re already a huge corporation. So, working with a digital marketing consultant instead is a no-brainer, given the low cost and spectacular return on investment.

31) Building a Lasting Partnership

Finally, working with a trustworthy digital marketing agency can result in a long-lasting business relationship that will empower you and provide you insight into the growth of your business. It’s encouraging to have someone you trust to talk business with, and your marketing consultant will eventually get to know and care about your business as much as you do!