Selecting a marketing consultant

What to look for and what to watch out for

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Considering bringing on a marketing consultant? They’re not all the same. You might be asking yourself: isn’t there an inherent bias by having RocLogic write this article? Yes, there is. However, I do still believe you’ll find some valid and useful insights here.

Just like there are bad / good / great engineers and developers, bad / good / great doctors, there are bad / good / great marketing consultants. Much of this is based on the items we’ll dive into below.

Perhaps more importantly, a marketing consultant that knows about one area well (e.g. engineering services), may know very little about another (e.g. selling lipstick). They may utilize a lot of similar tools, but that’s looking at the problem from the wrong end. A mechanic and an electrician both use screw drivers, but you wouldn’t want to substitute one for the other. I’m using hyperbole to make a point. In marketing, creating content for a custom industrial equipment builder requires a pretty different approach than creating content for a new line of clothing.

These thoughts are most relevant if you want a marketing consultant because you want help with one or more of these:

  1. Trying to generate more or better sales-ready leads
  2. Working with sales to improve the marketing-sales continuum
  3. Supporting strategic business direction

This article is also more focused on B2B services companies.

Here’s what you should be thinking about….

What to look for when selecting a marketing consultant

  1. Domain knowledge
  2. Empathy
  3. Analytical skills
  4. Focus on outputs as goals
  5. Patience

That’s the core of it.

Of course, the basics such as interpersonal skills, reliability, and attitude also apply, but you essentially want those things for anyone you work with, right?

Let’s dive into the key areas to look for when doing business with a marketing consultant.

Domain Knowledge

I don’t mean “are they up to date on the latest marketing tools?”.

I mean, how well can they understand:

  • your business,
  • your employees,
  • your buyers,
  • and what you sell.

Your business

Marketing for the fashion world is different from the tech world. Marketing for a restaurant is not the same as marketing for an engineering services company or marketing for a software development company. You’ll want to get a sense of whether or not the background the marketing consultant has lends itself to the type of business you’re in.

Your employees

Your employees have different personalities from other companies’ employees. This impacts how your marketing consultant should engage with your people. Think about your key players that the consultant will need to interact with most. Are they more serious? More playful? How do you see them getting along?

Your buyers

Your buyers will have their own set of personalities, pain points, motivators, and risks (personas). This impacts what information should be conveyed in your marketing, as well as how, when, and where it should be conveyed.

What you sell

What you sell drives how you go about marketing. The methods applied aren’t universally applicable. If you sell clothing, you might get someone excited enough to decide to buy a funny t-shirt from you when they had no plans to buy one prior to seeing your Facebook post. If you sell industrial automation equipment, you’re not going to convince someone to buy that $200k piece of custom equipment by getting them excited on Facebook. However, if you show the industrial equipment buyer that they can cut their production time in half, you may have something. The approaches are different.

Domain knowledge matters more in some domains than others. If your business is complex or technical, and on the B2B side, you’re going to care more about domain knowledge than if your business sells ice cream or paper cups.

Empathy

One of the most critical jobs of your marketing consultant is to put themselves in the shoes and mindset of your potential customers. The marketing consultant should:

  • feel your customer’s pain
  • understand their motivations / trigger events for needing you
  • identify road blocks in the UX and buyer’s journey

Analytical skills

Marketing is much more data-driven than it used to be. I actually don’t like the term “data-driven” because it implies that data should drive the decisions. I think data-informed or data-influenced are more reasonable terms.

You want a marketing consultant that can not only analyze complex human behaviors based on sparse, limited, partially-observable data, but also has a good sense of when not to trust the data. A decent understanding of how to balance setting up “good enough” experiments is key, since you don’t want to blow your budget all in one shot or wait 4 years to make your next decision.

Focus on outputs as goals

If your marketing consultant isn’t laser focused on making progress, you’re dead in the water.

When it comes to goals, you want them focused on outputs, not inputs. Inputs are activities (e.g. social media posts, case study creation, …). Outputs are things like sales-ready leads or leading indicators of such.

The land of marketing is full of unknowns and uncertainties, so don’t bother trying to predict what’s going to happen and when.

If you do, it’ll be wrong.

There are too many unknowns, partially-observable variables, and factors out of your control in play.

If you want ideas of leading indicators to use as a starting point, feel free to reach out and I’ll give you my thoughts for your scenario.

If a marketing consultant is more focused on activities as goals, like how many social media posts they publish, how many articles or case studies they help you generate, or how many hours they’ll work in a month, they’re focused on the wrong side of the equation IMO.

Patience

You might say “doesn’t everyone need patience?”.

Not like this they don’t.

A marketing consultant needs more patience than the average person.

Why?

Three reasons:

  1. Marketing experiments can take many months to run just to get to an initial decision point.
  2. Trying to show up in google for your topics of interest can take months or years.
  3. Many people at your company that a marketing consultant will need to interact with (e.g., SMEs, leadership) tend to spend the majority of their time inside the company, not directly in front of customers (sales people not included). This means that the marketing consultant will have to spend a lot of time teasing out the outward-focused aspects of what you do.

What to watch out for when selecting a marketing consultant

  1. Claims of being able to do it all.
  2. Fluff.
  3. Silver bullet claims.
  4. Focus on utilization of tools.
  5. Ego.

Claims of being able to do it all

Not likely. I think it’s fair to say that no marketer can do all things marketing across all different types of businesses. There’s just too much knowledge to gain, and too many differences across businesses.

If someone claims to be awesome at all things marketing, ask them these questions to understand what they’re likely actually pretty good at:

  1. What types of companies do you think your best-suited to help, and why?
  2. What aspects of marketing are you best at?

Fluff

I hate fluff. Fluff is basically what puts a bad taste in your mouth about marketing. It’s ego-centric blabbing. It’s tricks to try to get you to buy something you don’t need. It’s failed attempts at humor. It’s thinking the core of what you are is stock photos and logos.

If you sense fluff from your potential marketing consultant, be careful. They could lead you down an unsustainable path.

Silver bullet claims

This one drives me nuts. There are none. Doing marketing well takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears. If someone claims to have a silver bullet, question it hard.

Even if there were something someone calls a silver bullet, it’ll generally be short-lived because when it’s easy, everyone will do it soon, and now the playing field will be re-leveled.

Focus on utilization of tools

Tools are great. They’re enablers. Why is this a concern then? It’s only a concern when the marketing consultant starts using the tool as a crutch to prop them up. This tends to show itself around popular tools like HubSpot and Google Ads. These tools can be great. But the tools don’t make the marketing great. Tools are necessary but insufficient conditions.

Ego

Too much or too little ego can be a problem in marketing.

Marketing lives in the land of low probabilities. If the marketing consultant’s ego is too small, it’ll get squashed in this world. Failure is going to happen much more often than success.

When testing different methods, it’s utterly important that the marketer doesn’t care whose idea is the best, only that what appears to be the best idea moves forward. Too big of an ego can cause a problem.

Next Steps

Need a tech marketing consultant for your services-based company? Learn more about RocLogic and reach out if you’d like to chat.

Yes, let’s chat

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