However, consultants are often associated with larger companies or government departments. While this is true (as many consultants charge significant sums of money for their services), it does not always have to be the case.
In this article, I’ll endeavour to explain what a marketing-focused consultant can help with, and will also explain how these services could still be of benefit to small businesses and how we have provided them in numerous projects over the years.
You just might be surprised.
A small business marketing consultant can play a crucial role in helping small businesses develop and implement effective marketing strategies to attract and retain customers. It’s not a cut-and-paste job, as it needs to be customised for each individual client, but the following provides a rough overview of the areas that we tend to focus on when helping clients maximise their marketing and brand-building activities.
Areas that a marketing consultant can focus on and help with can include;
Market Research and Analysis:
- Conducting thorough market research to understand the business’s industry, target audience, competition, and market trends.
- Analyzing data to identify opportunities, strengths, weaknesses, threats, and market gaps.
- For a smaller project, this does not have to be expensive. By conducting several interviews with customers, observation, and desktop research, you will be amazed by how much information can be scrapped from the internet and how much can be learned. The rise of AI has also made the collection of marketing intelligence significantly more effective (actually, AI is bloody fantastic for this!).
- For large clients, we team up with one of Adelaide’s best market research companies to create bespoke analyses.
Strategy Development:
- Creating a comprehensive marketing plan tailored to the business’s goals and budget.
- Defining the business’s value proposition and unique selling points (USPs).
- This can be simple or highly detailed, depending on the client’s requirements. However, we have developed a collection of tools that allow us to create a superior strategy from the generic “fill in the boxes” exercise.
Brand Development:
- Developing a brand strategy for clients is one of our core areas of focus. It can include assisting in developing or refining the brand’s identity, including logo, tagline, and overall visual and verbal branding.
- Ensuring consistent brand messaging across all marketing channels.
- We help clients develop a range of critical touchpoints and understand the key category entry points. Based on this, the brand identity and advertising activities can be tailored to maximise the opportunity to gain exposure to new customers.
Digital Marketing:
- Planning and executing digital marketing campaigns, including social media marketing, email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
- Managing and optimising the business’s website for better user experience and higher conversion rates.
- Brainier Brands is a master at website development and SEO, so this is one area that we can help clients excel in.
Content Marketing:
- Developing content strategies that include blogs, videos, infographics, and other types of content to engage and educate the target audience.
- Creating and distributing valuable, relevant content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience.
Social Media Management:
- Establishing and maintaining a presence on relevant social media platforms.
- Engaging with followers, responding to comments, and creating shareable content to increase brand awareness.
- While we can offer social media marketing activities, we spend much of our time trying to educate clients that this is not an effective area to spend money and resources—it is simply not particularly effective.
Traditional Marketing:
- Advising on and creating traditional marketing materials such as brochures, business cards, flyers, and print ads.
- We plan and execute offline marketing campaigns, such as out-of-home, radio, and TV. We love traditional brand-building activities and can help put together a strategy to truly grow a business’s brand equity—in a way that digital marketing struggles to achieve.
Product Development and New Sales Channels
- We can help clients explore new products (including services) to help build a competitive advantage over other clients or reach new clients and broaden their sales base.
- This area ties in extensively with the initial market research. If we look at optimising advertising activities as getting some quick wins on the board for a client, then the product development area is the long tail that can help set a business up for long-term success.
Metrics and Analysis:
- Setting up and monitoring key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of marketing efforts.
- Analyzing campaign performance and providing regular reports with insights and recommendations for improvement.
- For all our clients, we offer a convenient KPI dashboard that allows them to view their digital marketing activities 24/7.
Consultation and Training:
- Providing ongoing advice and support to business owners and their teams.
- Conducting training sessions to equip staff with marketing knowledge and skills.
Overall, a small business marketing consultant helps businesses maximize their marketing efforts, ensuring they reach the right audience with the right message, ultimately driving growth and profitability.
What we have done at Brainier is design a way of doing this efficiently for smaller clients, as small business marketing is our core focus. We still follow the same process but scale back the depth of analysis. Reportings are simpler. We spend several days on each section instead of weeks. The results can be a marketing consultation that only costs several thousand dollars, is distilled down to a range of key recommendations and is designed to be practical for small business owners.
If you would like to know more, simply reach out and contact us.
