As a Marketing Consultant, What Services Should I be Providing?

It's about creating "Lead Valves" for business owners. A highly responsive website, optimization, a lead capture system, social marketing presence, video marketing, email marketing, mobile marketing, ppc. Offer them a variety of methods to expose their brand and generate new business leads.

What would seperate you from just another marketing consultant,seo guy is the fact that your work isn't done once you have the clients ranking for their terms or having their flyers printed.

Your there to make sure they make money, in return you make money basically in it for the long haul not compared to these craigslist folks who just are there for a few bucks.

You can also sell leads as it is. You don't really need to explain to them that you use SEO, PPC, etc... Just sell them the leads itself. That way you sell results and not promises.

I don't mean to come across like a dick if it does that in this post.

Have you done offline marketing before? Have a solid grasp on it or are you someone who got over IM and wants to try offline?

I wouldnt go selling services until you know the services you should be providing (if you do not know what an offline consultant does you should not do offline consulting) - It is simply a matter of time before someone asks for your credentials and it gets around you're faking it till you make it, which is bad.

Things you could offer;

- Marketing plan creation (full of various info and analysis)
- Advertisement campagnes (looking at the ROI of various streams)
- Clients from acquisition to retention (How much it costs the company - is there better ways?)

Then you go to the hybrid online/offline things such as SEO, local integration SOCM etc.

Good luck with the venture

-JB

It is going to depend heavily on what you can do now, balanced with what you're willing to invest with learning.

I'm not a big SEO guy (I'd like to be, so I"m working a little on it as well) but I can tell you it seems most people are missing out on...marketing.

There are a lot of skill sets you can bring to the table as a consultant or marketer. But first, you must look at each individual business and find the spots where they are weak.

For instance, could you have them raise their prices? Even a few percent? How strong of a relationship do they have with existing customers?

Could you reconnect their relationship with their past customers that haven't been active or come in for a while? Do they even have methods for doing so?

How are their print promotions? Do they track? Study each piece? Do they know their metrics? (Do they know where their customers come from, how much they spend with them and what their value to the business is in their lifetime?)

Does the business have a rewards program? Upsells? Cross-sells? Scripts for the people taking orders/ringing up?

One of the main jobs of a business like this is to keep current customers returning and widen the funnel of new ones as well.

It's a numbers game. YOU create methods and means to widen the inflow, THEY worry about infrastructure to handle it all. More or less I gather. And you don't have to be reinvent the wheel. The methods and education for doing so already exist.

If nothing else, model companies that are doing it right or pick up a few books. I only say this assuming you're familiar with SEO and getting online stuff going - as you should I suppose.

But there are lots more you can do to be someone they can't live without (there are a thousand SEO guys out there including the YP peeps now) to give you incredible leverage and power, making the relationship very profitable for both of you.

But you have to identify a few big areas that are (usually) immediately improvable, and noticeable so from the beginning.

Anyway...a few thoughts.

Best,
Nathan

Developing the strategy that ties together all the tactical level marketing and sales activities in furthering the high level business goals and objectives.

Thus, placing you in the most optimal position within an account to influence every aspect of marketing and sales within your client.

Thanks. I'm just the crabby ba$tard who poo poos the magical fantasies of starry-eyed marketing dreamers - hence my Roddy Piper avatar.

We have to look to a military analogy to understand the difference between tactical and strategic. That's really where those terms originated, and we can understand the differences when we read great military leaders like Sun Tzu.

In a military campaign, at the very top we have high level goals and objectives: we're going to take this peninsula, or we're going to invade this island, etc...

At the very top, we also have high level goals and objectives for a business: we're going to launch this new product in this existing customer segment, we're going to acquire and hold 40% of the market share in this geographic region, etc...

STRATEGY is the actual plan or the overall approach in achieving those objectives.

In our military strategy this could be to flank enemy positions on each side of the peninsula with naval assets, and use air power to force them to retreat across the isthmus to the mainland where multiple artillery and mechanized infantry units are prepared to engage them as they move into the open.

In business, our strategy could be to use a product launch formula strategy to build pre-sales demand for the product. Or to acquire multiple existing distribution channels to control the access of the end user of the product to gain and control marketshare.

Tactics are, of course, the actual actions or activities that you would engage in within the strategy (or in most cases in business and marketing... WITHOUT the strategy... randomness...)

In the military analogy, the tactics would be:

1) move naval assets into position
2) move infantry assets into position on mainland
3) commence air assault by flying sortee missions, with supporting long gun fire from naval assets
4) etc...

Same for the business product launch... use sequence of product launch tactics as detailed in Product Launch Formula, etc...

Or, secure investors and leverage existing capital with target acquisition assets to arrange an acquisition plan. Then pump product through distribution channels.

These are still really high level concepts, but you get the idea.

The strategy is the mortar that ties the tactical operations to the high level objectives.

You also can see how the guy who helps engineer the strategy gets to be involved in the decisionmaking for the tactical implementation.

The difficulty is in knowing the difference, and then how to position and sell a client on that difference - particularly because marketing STRATEGY isn't as easily quantifiable. People can see the tactical level stuff like "implementing an autoresponder" or "getting your site to #1 in Google".

It also requires a broader understanding of business (finance, management) because you cannot just create a strategy in a vacuum without taking the limitations and abilities of the client into consideration.

Marketing is, at its highest level, entrepreneurism and business itself. Everything else is administrative support and service delivery operations.

If you're interested, send me an IM and I'll shoot you a link to preview my inaugural episode of my forthcoming marketing strategy podcast which covers all of this.

Fix their pain and get them new clients.

l

Follow the money...anything online can be outsourced.

Website
Video
Email Marketing,
Seo
Hosting
Banners/Graphics
Flyers
Social Media

I'm more of an all around guy because of my background but since you probably jumped ship from IM....you already know about alot about IM....stick with the online services to start out if this is your background.

Success to you,

Chris Negro

Go with what you know best. Clients will respond to you if they feel you are an expert who can help them solve a problem they have (lack of customers?).

In my experience, clients do not want SEO, front page of Google, high rankings, etc...they want more customers. My business completely changed when I started looking at it like that. And I learned this the hard way. The fact is, brick & mortar people aren't like us. They aren't online, they could give a crap about "the google," they rarely check email, etc.

Leads/customers are what they want. If you can strike up a deal for them to pay for leads, you can sit back and go about it how you want to.

The question isn't "What services should I provide?"

The question should be "What PROBLEMS do I know I can provide SOLUTIONS for?"

That's where the money will be, and that's what clients will be looking to pay you BIG money to do!

Cheers,

~Dexx