Here are thirty-five exciting things, tips, and quirks about running a marketing consultancy business.
The expected increase for marketing consultants is 8% from 2018 to 2028. This number is higher than average, and it shows an increasing demand for marketing consultants.
With the surge of new businesses in the world daily, there is an endless number of enterprise owners who need assistance in their marketing to outdo their competition. Marketers are scuffling on the internet to hook these individuals to their solutions as it is a profitable business.
There are a myriad of advantages and benefits for these professionals. However, there are many crucial things to consider and there are skills to be learned when planning to become one.
Use this article as a checklist and red-flag spotter in preparation for becoming a professional marketing consultant.
Here are thirty-five facts that are essential to keep in mind in marketing consultancy.
- Anybody can be one.
Any person, black, white, Latino, Asian, Indian, European, Muslim, Christian, male, female, LGBTQ, or anybody, can be a marketing consultant as long as the needed skills, work ethic, and professionalism for marketing consultancy are acquired.
One of the best ways to start is by earning a degree in business marketing, commerce, or any business-related course. Another method for novices is to undergo online training in marketing schools.
However, the most significant knowledge will always come from experiencing actual projects in the field.
2. The job is in demand.
With each year opening an average of 627,000 businesses, there is a high demand for the services primarily online.
Companies today are in a faster race because of digital capabilities, and many new businesses are looking out to be on top of the competition.
The faster they grow their business, the bigger their chance for success; hence, there is a need to set-up excellent marketing plans and implement them as quickly as possible.
To do that, many businesses opt to outsource the expertise of business growth services as it is faster than starting from scratch.
Many entrepreneurs are more product-specialized and have little to no experience in the technicalities of marketing. They are the most in need of help.
3. It is a high earning business.
According to ibisworld.com, the marketing consultancy in the US has a market size of $55bn, with 218,657 businesses offering the service.
Those who have one to four years of experience in their early careers can earn around $55,000. The compensation can rise to $82,000 in their 10th to 19th-years.
Payscale statistics provide that the range is $37,000 – $104,000, with an average salary of $59,000.
The profit declines to $80,000 for those in their late careers. This turnover is a result of businesses finding more appeal towards fresher talent and innovation.
4. Adults thrive more.
While age does not matter as much as experience, some demographics have the most active clientele.
The buying class provides the most valuable consumers. Some of them are young enough to have the capacity to influence trends and purchase decisions of other generations while having the money to spend. Most are purchase-capable trend followers.
Businesses that attempt to appeal to the spending demographics often require consultation with experts who have experience with the target.
What fuels this phenomenon more is that adult consultants tend to be the ones in their prime. They are the ones who possibly have 20 years or more of experience, use valid technologies, and have operational capabilities.
5. Every day is a new day.
The field continually changes every day. New trends come about, technological innovations in SaaS, SEO, CRO, and others are released, and more businesses are opening or closing all the time.
Also, more consultants are joining the competition daily, and they are utilizing everything to get clients.
The job is not for weak hearts and unstable minds, and it can be highly demanding, especially in the entry levels.
However, with patience and perseverance, the right tools and tactics will naturally show up, and these things can be dependable for surviving, thriving, and, eventually, succeeding.
6. There are fun networking activities.
A career in marketing can be glamorous.
One fun thing is networking events, which are often semi-formal and suit-required, where marketers meet big names in different industries.
Another is the small meetings that can happen over coffee at a Starbucks. There are also lunch briefings over at resorts or functions and dinner appointments over at starred restaurants.
Out-of-town networking events are another enjoyable thing to look forward to.
There are a lot of great things that come with the job, and they are never low-class. There are travel, parties, and other social gatherings that one can enjoy.
7. The job can bring you to a wide variety of clients.
At the end of a marketer’s career, one will find how much has been learned from the variety of knowledge sets experienced.
Consultants have the opportunity to work with a diverse range of clients in all sizes and industries.
There is no end to what kind of business needs consultation.
A variegated clientele generates new ideas and solutions for different situations. These learnings add up to an essential problem-solving bank vital for a consultant to have.
8. A consultant can go international.
The internet can bring services from one country to another.
It is not hard to serve an overseas client, especially if the specific goals are purely digital.
This is especially true to CRO services, email automation providers, SEO, and other digital marketing needs.
9. It is an intellect-heavy job.
It is required that a marketer is already smart enough and continually becomes more intelligent.
Problem-solving is one of the most significant areas of expertise in the job. Commerce and markets involve plenty of economics and mathematics that require a high intellectual capability.
The job also requires an excellent general knowledge bank. Marketers have to deal with different topics, and well-read ones win more.
The mind has to be fed continuously with trends and innovations, and its capacity must be maximized.
Consultancy requires fast and effective thinking and excellent cognition that can be hard for many.
10. Being a consultant requires a healthy lifestyle.
One way to keep your mind on tip shape is by having a generally healthy body. The brain is part of the body, and its quality of work will highly depend on nutrition.
Because of the digital nature of many facets of the job, consultants tend to sit all day and chug plenty of coffee.
Sitting all day can be counterbalanced with regular exercise. It is good to have a healthy routine.
The coffee can be replaced with tea to reduce jitters.
A sexy marketer can be more appealing to a client. Physique and looks are sometimes as necessary as a capability but never more significant.
What’s important is health.
11. It can be draining.
Consultants regularly communicate with team members, secretaries, clients, and more. The job requires listening to complaints, explanations, goals, pain points, and others.
There are countless emails to respond to, pages to create, automation to perfect, phone calls to answer, and constant software pings to check.
It can be draining, but with perseverance, an extraordinary amount of sleep, and a healthy lifestyle, it will be all worth it.
12. The competition is heavy.
In the US, there are 218,657 companies offering marketing consultation. Some freelancers are also in the competition.
When it comes to direct competition, the field is highly saturated, and there is a need for consultants to stand out to get clients.
One fact about the competition is that agencies always have a bigger advantage over freelancers. These companies can afford to use expensive and more effective tools to serve more clients.
For an agency to gain more customers, it needs an SEO-fortified website and a solid meta-marketing strategy.
13. Social media influence can affect your popularity.
One vital part of a CRO-perfect site is about us page. It gives the website more credibility by showing what kind of professionals are behind the service.
With this comes personal reputation management. Consultants are fully out there, and care must be taken into account when posting lifestyle, political views, social commentary, and philosophy.
Words that don’t sound unsure should be better kept than said.
14. There are different options with different benefits.
A marketing agency allows consultants to work with various clients simultaneously, most often in different industries. It presents the opportunity of engagement in multiple projects, which provides a well-rounded experience and a wide-ranged knowledge base.
Working in-house for a single company makes a marketer specialized with the employer’s brand, products, and goals.
15. A consultant can specialize.
Today’s hottest specialization is digital marketing, which spans SEO, CRO, Cx, email automation, eCommerce, and more. A consultant can specialize in any of those.
Also, there exist more industries that provide opportunities for other specialists. There are experts in marketing in the food industry, immigration law firms, social media marketing, and more.
The longer a marketer works with the same genre of brands, the more in-depth the knowledge on that topic will be. That marketer will be highly-specialized.
16. It is a constant practice.
The more a consultant works, the more skills are honed and acquired.
There will always be new knowledge and tactics to discover along the way that will make a marketer better every day.
17. The job requires excellent communication.
A marketing consultant should be an excellent communicator.
Communication with team members is vital and there has to be no underlying adverse barriers.
The job entails professional communication skills, especially when meeting with clients.
Excellent communication is needed in all phone calls, emails, instructions, and compliments.
18. It requires forecasting.
Consultation work entails the prediction of trends, ideas, schemes, economics, and financial climates.
It also requires the ability to calculate probable sales, savings, and business expansion.
A small view of the future allows pre-made solutions for expected problems.
19. It promises flexible work hours.
Another perk for consultants is that they can work on their schedule. This entails that they can tactically arrange their work, rest, and recreation at will.
They can choose whether to spend time on a hobby, with family, or in acquiring more education.
The work can be taxing, and leisure can depressurize a stressed-out marketer.
20. There is available time for romance.
Since the work hours are flexible, no matter how busy a professional is, there will always be time for vital love life.
Make time for these matters, for they are helpful in mental and emotional health. After all, what is life if lived only for work?
21. There is a need to plan vacations.
Even though the hours are flexible, there is always work to finish. The list of to-dos seems never to end.
Travel is an excellent destresser and source of inspiration.
The best way of doing this is by planning trips around work. There will always be an opportunity to go on a working vacation.
In addition, there is a need to prepare the team for a vacation situation. To-dos and deadlines must be appropriately in place beforehand, and assignments have to be clarified.
22. Consultants are always in a good position for excellent investment opportunities.
Some clients offer shares in place of paying fees.
With the right eye on the company’s forecast, a consultant can choose which one to engage in an investment with
Its a risky but decent way to earn from the job, and it can provide the highest profits when the company does succeed.
23. The team is king.
Especially for a marketing consultancy agency, the core team is the most vital source of service.
It will help if a team is filled in by excellent writers, SEO strategists, web designers, marketers, managers, secretaries, PROs, and other people that have skills vital to marketing consultancy.
They have to be equipped with proper tools, paid fair or high wages, empowered with crucial information, communicated to constantly, and kept healthy and motivated.
24. Consultants can hire team members from across the globe.
While the proximity of team members from one location can give the advantage of direct contact, technology has now eliminated the slow communication between people across countries.
Most agencies hire workers from different countries.
The benefit of having a global team is that there can be a group of people working while other members are asleep.
An agency with an international team that is well spread across the globe has the advantage of 24/7 working days.
25. A therapist is crucial for the team.
Marketing consultancy teams are extremely busy, and people should take the time to improve their personal lives.
Most agencies hire a counselor to improve everyone’s emotional life, mental health, and overall productivity.
26. It is heavily reliant on technology.
All consultants are tech-savvy – some more than others, and they are succeeding better.
SaaS (Software as a Service), IaaS (Infra as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and CaaS (Communication as a service) are all critical in the marketing industry.
Some SaaS are Google Apps, Dropbox, Salesforce, Cisco WebEx, Concur, and GoToMeeting.
Some IaaS are DigitalOcean, Linode, Rackspace, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco Metapod, Microsoft Azure, and Google Compute Engine (GCE).
Some PaaS are AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Windows Azure, Heroku, Force.com, Google App Engine, Apache Stratos, and OpenShift.
Some CaaS are Google Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Rackspace Carina, Apache Mesos, and OpenStack’s nova-docker.
27. Video conferencing is a staple.
Most consultancy agencies employ international people in their team. Also, pandemics and other physical, social disconnectors limit people’s mobility.
Fortunately, technology provides communication capabilities that make things easy for a team to collaborate.
Many teams gather regularly in video calls, and it will become a staple for years.
Consultants also talk to clients in this manner, especially in the first meetings that will be succeeded by more email-based communication.
28. You will not use fully automated emails.
Not all businesses take full advantage of fully automated emails, and that includes this job.
Most agencies tackle 10 – 20 active clients, and reports to them are not a massive hassle of repetitive work that needs to be given to a robot.
The more clients an agency has, the more people it needs in its team.
Consultancy must aim for quality over quantity. It is not an online store that has a linear service.
29. Clients lookout for integrity.
A consultant’s results must match what was offered.
Hence, capabilities and goals must be made clear so that there is no confusion and blaming at the end of a project.
30. Reputation can make or break a consultant.
A bad reputation can come from lousy service, average results, unsatisfied clients, and unwanted external factors, including haters, enemies, offended or betrayed people, and others.
Also, some entities are out there to expose the competition so that clients turn to them.
It is wise to avoid the possibility of having those factors by working excellently and being careful with society in general.
31. Some marketing consultants offer free service.
This is true for professionals trying to penetrate a new territory.
Some consultants try to penetrate a new market, country, or city by serving a company for free as evidence of being effective.
That company, when successfully served, will become excellent social proof for other business owners who will be attracted to subscribing to a paid service.
32. The job requires impeccable taste.
Marketing is a highly visual method. It uses words, designs, videos, posters, billboards, and more.
People are attracted to aesthetics and narratives that are pleasing and stir emotions.
This requires a consultant to have a step forward in design trends for different niches
It would help to continually be exposed to pop culture, fashion, music, and architecture as these factor in the general beat of the current tastes.
33. It has hifalutin marketing jargon.
People who do not have a foot in the marketing world will be confused with jargon like B2B, scaling, PPC, native ads, copy, backlinks, SEO, CTA, CTR, qualified leads, lead nurturing, funnels, and more words that confuse regular people.
Some novice business owners have minimal to no knowledge of these words and their meanings.
While using the words at a scale can make one appear smarter, it is wise to talk to clients like them in layman’s terms when explaining services. Use English, not market-talk.
34. The job is confusing to parents.
Just like newbies in marketing, a marketer’s family most probably do not understand fully what the job is, mainly when it is explained to them in a “smart” sounding manner with jargon.
However, it wouldn’t be a problem as long as they see the benefits and earnings from the job.
35. It is an excellent career!
Not many careers require a person to keep the mind and body active, give travel opportunities, make people smarter every day, support a higher-class social life, have a diverse workforce, and a high earning potential than marketing consultancy.
Author BIO:
Kas Andz is an e-commerce marketing expert and influencer. Packing a punch with a team of over 35+ years of experience, $100 Million+ sales generated and booked meetings with the likes of Twitter, VMWare & A Princess! When he’s not working, he’s running marathons, gulping herbal tea or playing with his dog Sushi.
