Marketing Consulting Services

Defining the Marketing Consultant’s Role and Importance

Given the era in which we live, where answers to any question we could ask are at our fingertips via search engines and social media, many organizations incorrectly deem the skills of a marketing consultant defunct. After all, why pay a marketing consultant for answers to your marketing questions and problems when Google offers similar information for ‘free’?

Because skilled marketing consultants offer superior judgment to these technologies, including more customized advice specific to a brand’s marketing initiatives. 

What Does a Marketing Consultant Do?

The easiest way to understand the scope and role of marketing consultants is to define their roles in relation to comparable marketing positions: e.g., marketing specialists, managers, directors, VPs, and fractional CMOs. Generally speaking, the marketing consultant governs behind the scenes for an existing marketing department, and works closely with the department’s leadership on implementing new strategies and pinpointing the most immediate fixes that need to take place to hit the company’s sales targets. 

The Marketing Consultant as a ‘Behind-the-Scenes’ Brain

Great, but isn’t that the responsibility of whoever is in charge of the marketing department? No, not exactly. Given the fact that marketing has become too important and all-encompassing of a business function to leave solely to the marketing department, outside perspectives with expertise in modern marketing tools and best practices can change the entire trajectory of a company for the better, and in the right direction with a single, subtle shift. 

A corollary goal of every business that has ever been formed is to be in business forever, which makes for a long journey, and shifting the compass a single degree in the wrong direction at the beginning of that journey is the difference between sinking in the ocean and making it ashore after 10,000 miles into the voyage.

If that sounds like too little work to justify hiring an additional marketing employee in the form of a consultant, consider the Pareto Principle outlined below. 

The Pareto Principle in the Marketing Context: 20% of Marketing Labor Generates 80% of Results

While the Pareto Principle was coined to describe economic conditions, the concept also applies to organizations. Proven many times over in a variety of managerial contexts, the Pareto Principle demonstrates how traditional measures of productivity (like hours worked) mean nothing if a leader steers his or her department in the wrong direction, which wastes hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Hiring a marketing consultant shows that an organization is willing to subordinate the clock to the compass and focus only on what will drive results. Additionally, while we’re on the topic of principles that start with the letter P, we may as well mention the equally relevant Peter Principle, which states that employees are employed and sometimes promoted to the level of their individual incompetence.

This Peter Principle process oftentimes signifies a) fixation on problems in which CMOs and marketing directors become stuck without a fresh pair of eyes from an external source, such as a marketing consultant. Much like Stephen Covey states in his landmark work, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, truly successful leaders focus on what’s important, not what’s urgent or time-wasting. This concept is what skews the Pareto Principle from a 20-80% to a 5-95%, freeing up more time to double down on the effect.