If you’re looking for a marketing consultant for your small business, there are a lot of common traps and pitfalls which you can fall into, so be wary of these common mistakes when looking for a marketing consultant to grow your business to new heights.
1. Choosing someone who doesn’t understand your business
You should ideally be looking for a marketing consultant who has experience in your business’s niche sector, especially if you’re a company which is a little off the beaten path, per se. For example, if you’re a company selling hypoallergenic dog shampoo and you hire a marketing consultant who has mostly worked with restaurants, they’re probably not going to have a great sense of your customer base or how to market your company effectively.
2. Choosing someone who doesn’t understand your audience
Perhaps you’re in a crowded industry, but you’re trying your very best to stand out and appeal to a niche audience within that industry. If you work with a marketer who is used to treating your industry as a catch-all field, they’re probably going to have a hard time identifying with your niche audience and coming up with a marketing strategy which really appeals to their cares and interests. Marketing a vegan café is incredibly different from marketing a steakhouse, even though they’re both in the food and drink industry.
3. Going with someone who is out of your price range
Although you want to ensure that you get the best advice possible when looking for a marketing consultant, you don’t want to make yourself broke in the process either. Marketing is important, but other business expenses will inevitably crop up, so don’t spread your budget too thin while hoping for a marketing-related miracle which may never come.
4. Not knowing what you want
The first thing that most consultants will ask you is “what do you want to get out of me?” Even though this can put you on the spot at first, it is indeed a very fair question. Yes, you’re looking for a marketing consultant because you need help in attracting an audience, but how many more people do you want to attract? What lengths are you willing to go to? How much are you trying to grow your company? You don’t need to come up with the Magna Carta, but you should have some vague idea about what you want your business to get out of the marketing consultant.
5. Not being prepared to follow through
Be honest with yourself – if a marketing consultant walks in, assesses your business, and tells you that you can grow your business but you need to spend $20,000 in order to do it, are you going to follow through with it? You can have a bunch of marketing consultants give you all the best advice in the world, but if you don’t have the confidence or resources to take action and “walk the walk”, then you’re wasting your time and money by being too reluctant to take risks and make significant changes, even if they will drive forward your bottom line.
Hopefully you’ll be able to avoid these 5 common mistakes that businesses make when looking for a marketing consultant, working with someone who can help you to grow your company to levels you never previously imagined!
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