We have an excess of brands and businesses trying to make their names known and advertise their products and services. To achieve this efficiently, most organizations are looking for the best digital Marketing consulting services or Digital Marketing Consultants who have done the best digital marketing course and have good experience in the field.
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Now, there are two ways to go about being a Digital Marketing Consultant: Working as a Digital Marketing Consultant for an agency or becoming a freelance Digital Marketing Consultant. Let’s talk about the various aspects of this career in this blog:
Check out this Digital Marketing Course video on YouTube now:
What is a Digital Marketing Consultant?
A Digital Marketer and a Digital Marketing Consultant are essentially the same roles. Once you gather enough experience as a Digital Marketer, you can act as a consultant who is directly and indirectly responsible for the advertising, promotion, and marketing of products and services of brands and businesses. A Digital Marketing Consultant maps out the Digital Marketing strategy and ensures its correct execution all the way through.
Difference Between a Digital Marketing Consultant, Digital Marketing Specialist, and Digital Marketing Manager
As previously discussed, a Digital Marketing Consultant is an experienced Digital Marketer. A consultant usually operates independently and works from the outside of an organization.
A Digital Marketing Specialist, on the other hand, works as a member of the Digital Marketing team of the organization, while a Digital Marketing Manager is the leader of the team and manages the marketing team’s day-to-day activities and decides the agenda. The Digital Marketing Manager is also responsible for communicating relevant information to the stakeholders of the products or services.
Steps to Become a Digital Marketing Consultant
Let’s now discuss the skills that are required for working on Digital Marketing:
- Search engine optimization
- Affiliate marketing
- Email marketing
- Video marketing
- Social media marketing
- Conversion optimization
- Marketing analytics and reporting
- Business management
Search Engine Optimization
Google, Bing, and Yahoo are examples of web search engines. Search Engine Optimization is the process of optimizing your web content (the readable text in your blogs, website content, and posts) in such a way that your content appears among the topmost search results when a particular keyword is searched for on search engines.
This helps in improving the exposure of the brand or company that you are working for. For instance, when a person searches for a laptop, he usually types in something like ‘best laptop under 50000’. So, by including the aforementioned keyphrase on your product page, you can make your page rank higher on the SERP and increase the likelihood of it being clicked on in such a scenario. There are also various SEO tools that can help you with this.
This creates a self-sustaining effect: The more people click on your search result, the more relevant that search result becomes in the search engine’s eyes. So, by including SEO words having a good Content Marketing strategy, and making sure the content is good, you are maximizing the chances of your website getting a lot of clicks.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is the process of partnering up with various brands and promoting or advertising their products. Payment is dependent on the fulfillment of certain criteria drawn out by the brand. These criteria include pay-per-click, pay-per-signup, or pay-per-purchase.
To become successful in this area, you need to build quality content to serve as a platform for you to advertise products from these businesses. This is a tough digital marketing skill to obtain, but it serves as an excellent point on your resume as a Digital Marketing Consultant, because it ensures that you know what it takes to build a following and how to market yourself.
Email Marketing
In email marketing strategy, the process includes targeting a section of the audience that may be interested in your product, collecting their emails, creating a list out of them, and using that list to promote or advertise your product. It may seem straightforward, but a successful Email Marketer does extensive analysis of the target segment and creates well-written emails that are innovative and do not seem like spam or direct promotions.
It is important to understand that people value their time and check their emails for important messages and alerts. So, the skill of an Email Marketer lies in being smart about how to plug the ad into the email.
Video Marketing
In the era of platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, videos have become commonplace content and are shared rapidly. They are one of the best ways of advertising your product. A video can help demonstrate a product in its use case, convey something abstract more clearly through animation or in general, and visually entice the user to view your content.
Studies have very clearly shown that most people find reading boring when compared to watching something. There is no better way to communicate something to someone than showing it to them through a video format. However, the primary draw lies in the production quality, clarity of sound, direction of the video, and the narrative/story that it is trying to convey.
Creating the social media presence of a brand is very important these days. We recognize a lot of popular logos instantly just because we have seen those logos repeatedly on social media. When people recognize a logo, it means that they automatically begin to trust it more than something they have not seen before.
When it comes to building a brand from the ground up or expanding an existing brand to increase its appeal and reach, social media marketing is, without a doubt, the most important Digital Marketing skill to have in a Digital Marketer. Social media websites also allow ads that you can run on them through paid means.
Conversion Optimization
Conversion is the metric that pertains to the number of people who actually make a business transaction with the brand out of all the people who have seen or interacted with the ad. A Conversion Optimization Specialist ensures that this ratio increases, i.e., the traffic remains the same but the number of converted customers increases.
Defining Your Domain
From the skills discussed, it is up to you to select a domain as a Digital Marketing Consultant and start working on it, making it your area of expertise. The main goal is to create and run successful marketing campaigns. Marketing is a result-driven profession, and the best way to make yourself a viable candidate is to have experience added to your resume, displaying how you have benefited the business cases of your client companies. You can take examples of email, video, or Social Media Marketing campaigns and ideas that you have implemented. The same is applicable to your SEO and SEM work as well.
After selecting your skill(s) and your area of expertise, you need to choose what category of product or brand you want to specialize in. If you have an idea about event organization, then you can get into event marketing. If you feel that you have a grasp of the cosmetic market space, you can try making that your niche. On a junior level, this might not be as important, but you’ll certainly need to have a greater idea about the target audience and the product you are marketing. You need to have demonstrable experience in the same if you plan to become a consultant or get a higher position.
Marketing Yourself
Building your own brand, as a Digital Marketer, is extremely important if you want to reach the level of a Digital Marketing Consultant who has a high value in the market. It is important to let your brand or name speak for you when businesses are looking for consultants for their product launches and promotions.
If you are heading a team, then make sure that you hire employees who are street-smart and have practical experience in the marketing domain. Remember that oftentimes, you will be trusting them with a lot of the work. A bad team or a poorly managed team will produce low quality yield and can become detrimental to your brand reputation. It is helpful to note that once you are successfully able to achieve satisfactory results for a client, that client may refer other clients to you. So, maintaining quality also counts.
You can market yourself through:
- Blogging
- Publishing quality content on popular websites
- Creating great presentations during marketing pitches
- Working heavily on your own website to make it as professional-looking as possible
Building Digital Marketing Teams
There are two ways in which you can work as a Digital Marketing Consultant:
- As an outside consultant who will guide organizations’ in-house team
- As an outside firm that will handle all the marketing work of companies from start to finish
If you are going with the latter, you will require a team that must include the following domain experts:
- SEO Specialist
- Web Developer/App Developer
- PPC Expert
- Content Writer
- Social Media Account Manager
Pricing
The Digital Marketing Consultant salary or pay structure (if an independent organization) can be accounted for in three ways:
- Hourly
- Monthly
- Per project
Hourly: This standard is recommended for pure consultations that are only intended for guidelines.
Monthly: This pay structure can be used for larger campaigns.
Project-based: Per-project pricing includes understanding the business case and mapping out an estimate based on the time and resources that would be required to execute the proposed campaign.
There are certain tools and services available that can prove to be of great help when working as a Digital Marketing Consultant. Let’s talk about some of them here.
Google Services: You can use the collaborative Google documentation environment that includes Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Forms, and Google Slides for organizing and executing your plan. You can opt for a paid G Suite subscription as well if you need larger cloud storage and an organization-exclusive network.
Mailchimp: You can use Mailchimp for efficient email marketing.
YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram: These are the popular social media platforms that can aid social media and video marketing.
OptinMonster: It is a SaaS platform for popup management, increasing mailing lists, and improving conversion rates.
Building Your Network
Being proactive is very important in marketing. Unlike a lot of other professions out there, marketing is one wherein you will need to build a lot of relationships and contacts. You can attend webinars, seminars, and meets, be in touch with as many people as possible, and exchange contact details with them. Linkedin is an extremely good platform to do this in the comfort of your own home. You need to talk to other Digital Marketing Consultants and build good connections with them. If they ever come across a client that they cannot assist for any reason, they can simply refer that client to you. Such networks essentially help marketers build their brand name. You can create your profiles on Twitter and Facebook as well.
Second, make sure to be extremely competent when dealing with your clients and customers. Your entire reputation in the marketing business depends mostly on how well your clients review you or rate you in front of other potential clients. Continuous satisfactory service delivery will result in your brand being shared through word of mouth. Also, don’t be shy in casually asking your clients to recommend your services to people whom they know.
How to Secure Clients
Getting started with Digital Marketing is the hardest part because you need to secure a client to gain your first experience. This is also applicable for established marketers, securing a client is no easy task. Let’s go through the ways in which you can do this:
- Through previous clients’ recommendations
- By delivering quality content and proven results
- Consistent blogging
- Advertising your services
Digital Marketing Consultant Roles and Responsibilities – Job Description
Entry-Level Digital Marketing Consultant Job Description:
Senior Digital Marketing Consultant Job Description:
The roles and responsibilities of a Digital Marketing Consultant include:
- Preparing marketing material for the marketing team.
- Creating and maintaining a marketing schedule to ensure team coordination and collaboration.
- Conducting timely meetings and discussing marketing agenda points, even discussing ideas with your team and taking their feedback and suggestions.
- Emphasis on communication with your team.
- Assigning responsibilities.
- Communicating with clients and stakeholders and communicating their directives and targets to the team.
- Leading and supervising the team.
- Taking responsibility for the team and helping them out.
Digital Marketing Consultant Salary
On average, an experienced Digital Marketing Consultant in the United States can earn anywhere between US$60k and US$100k. Obviously, to pass that threshold, you need to keep gathering experience and momentum.
How to Become a Certified Digital Marketing Consultant
Although Digital Marketing looks like a pretty straightforward career path, there is a very organized process associated with it. It is imperative that aspirants understand the fundamentals of Digital Marketing and then move on to Digital Marketing.
There are two ways to go about learning Digital Marketing: You can opt to learn everything through online materials, videos, and search results. The problem with this method is that the study materials could be disjointed, and you might not be able to learn the topics in a pattern.
The second option is to go for a good online certification. Here, you will get the subject matter provided to you in an organized and structured manner. The syllabus will be cohesive and cover the necessary case studies required for mastering the marketing domain. In this method, there will be less wastage of time and better results.