What It Takes To Be An Online Marketing Consultant

These days it’s pretty easy to tag the word consultant onto the end of anything and charge a premium for whatever subject it is that you are “consulting” on. The way I see it, as time goes on the word “Consultant” continues to lose it’s value, most probably for the reason mentioned above. My field of expertise happens to be online marketing and so this got me thinking about what it actually takes to be an online marketing consultant.

Firstly I think it’s safe to say that there are many different types of marketing consultant – strategic thinkers, day-to-day project managers, general doers or specialists and each come with very different price tags but what gives them the right to call themselves a consultant?

I became a marketing consultant off the back of the 100’s of online projects where I have been at the forefront of the decision-making. If I was looking to hire a consultant for any purpose, I would expect that person to have seen and solved similar issues to my problem in a variety of companies time and time again almost to the point that where it’s now so easy for them that it bores them, wouldn’t you?

An internet marketing consultant needs to have experienced variety. I’ve been lucky enough to work with clients that have large budgets, and believe me, when you walk into one of these companies the strategies that you set in motion are very different to when you’re working on a shoestring budget with a startup. Working with both types of companies requires quick thinking drawing on skills such as strategic thinking right through to a detailed understanding of internet marketing skills such as PPC, SEO, Media Buying and Funnel conversion analysis.

These are the types of skills that an online marketing consultant can draw from working within an agency for a number of years but the difference between working an agency model and consultancy is that with the consultancy you’re actually inside the business. Agencies are often single discipline like SEO or PPC. When my clients hire me as an online marketing consultant, they get my experience, variety and my project management team which allows me, as the consultant, to see the bigger picture. Nothing pleases me more than when I witness the penny-drop – the moment the company owner or Managing Director really understands where the marketing fits in their business model.

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