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What it Takes to be a Marketing Consultant

By Jacqueline Drew
START Marketing Inc.
www.startmarketing.com

Everybody thinks they know what marketing is, but they don't. Try working as a consultant where your job is to take any random business, in any given industry, and figure out a way to boost their sales and make them money. So… I thought I'd give you some insight on how it's done!

Now, most businesses are a long way off from figuring out what they want to be when they “grow up.” But if you don't nail that down at the beginning, they are too scared to change. They might think your ideas are too grand too expensive to even consider….so its best to see what sort of vision they're comfortable with in the first place.

After you've got a vision figured out, you can immediately see where your client's products and services aren't really setting the bar high enough to reach that vision. So without fine tuning the products and services, and making them as effective as they can be, you're sort of spinning your wheels to market them as they are.

Next, you look at how they're pricing things. They might be using some old price list from 5 years ago, that was based on a competitor's price that was 5 years old. So when you check around, you could easily discover there's already room to move the price up, sometimes a lot…and especially if you've just found a way to make their product offerings better in the previous step.

So then you've got better products, and better pricing, and it's now a matter of saying, “who could we sell this to?” That's where you can encourage your client to go after targets they never tried before, or ones that rejected them before, because now they've got better offerings, and a respectable price.

So that's when you get to the last part – the part most people think of as “marketing”….figuring out how to reach those target markets, through advertising, the web, selling, enhancing their image, and then actually making a sale. And by the way, if your client needs sales training – you better find a way to do that too, because without it, a sale may never happen!

In the end, if you've done everything right, then your client does make the sales, and they make a load of money. But could you just jump in at that “marketing” step and make the client money? It's never worked for me. That's why to get the sales, good marketing means all the pieces of the puzzle must work together. Otherwise, marketing is just called “ advertising” or “communications”.