Once you’ve made the choice to grow your business through digital marketing, the next decision is: are you going to take on the project yourself, or hire a Digital Marketing Consultant to manage the process for you?
A digital marketing consultant is a wearer of many hats, a jack of all digital trades and a master of, well, all of them.
Though, it's not often that one person can do all of the jobs under the umbrella of digital marketing. So you should think of the consultant as the Directeur Sportif/Head Coach of your digital team. He or she must know all of the positions well enough to direct them.
Here are some of the things he or she is ultimately responsible for:
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is no longer just a digital market option. It’s a necessity. With billions of websites online, SEO can help you drive free, targeted traffic to your site.
A digital marketing consultant can help you to audit your existing site and help you to put together a strategy to target keywords that will drive high-quality users to your website. Those search engine optimisation strategies include, but are not limited to:
Creating a list of relevant, high-reward keywords
Inserting high-quality, relevant content on your website
Ensuring appropriate back-linking
Managing Social media mentions
Setting up Google Analytics and Webmaster tools
Editing your title tags and meta descriptions
Managing your SEO is an important job that can make or break all your digital efforts.
Digital Advertising
A consultant can help to get your product/service in front of the right people, at the right time, and Digital Advertising is one of the most effective ways of achieving this.
Digital advertising is the practice of delivering promotional content to users through various online and digital channels. It leverages mediums such as social media, email, search engines, mobile apps, affiliate programs and websites to show advertisements and messages to audiences.
Digital advertising often requires a lot of specialised knowledge, and a Digital Marketing Consultant can manage the whole process from writing, designing and split testing your adverts to improve results.
Social Media
When it comes to business, social media can be complicated but can be very beneficial if used successfully. And that's why it shouldn't be pawned off to the intern. Social media for business requires strategy, understanding of new trends and rules, analytics and how it will help to ultimately grow your business.
A Digital Marketing Consultant can help you shape a plan to reach the right customers for your business by identifying which types of platforms work for you.
Web Design
Now it's unlikely that your Digital Marketing Consultant is going to be directly coding websites. But, you don’t need to be a web designer to direct the web design efforts of a company. Though having a working knowledge of how a website is put together is imperative, since a website is usually the most visible digital manifestation of a business.
Any good digital strategy will keep the User Experience (which by the way is also part of SEO) front and centre during any web design. Making sure it is intuitive, purposeful and that people aren't greeted with a confusing wall of text, images, and ads.
A digital marketing consultant often does so much more than meets the eye. They may specialise in only one of these areas. But they have to be conversant in all of them. Despite the many hats they wear, their main job is to make you successful online!
Want to learn more? Get in touch today. I’ll be happy to walk you through whatever you need to know.