The Ultimate Guide to Hiring a Small Business Marketing Consulting Firm or Consultant

If you are like many small business owners, you are wearing many hats: CEO, VP of Sales, CMO, COO, Customer Service, and CFO just to name a few. With all this on your plate, are you doing it all well? Are you doing the job that led you to go into business for yourself?

Marketing is the engine that moves your business forward. If you do it successfully, you will have more resources to further invest in the other areas of your business such as hiring, technology, service partners, and equipment. But do it poorly, and you will have to scratch and claw for survival. 

So that’s why we’ve created the last guide you’ll ever need to help you find and hire a small business marketing consultant or consulting firm you can trust to take some work off of your plate.

When is the right time to hire a small business marketing consultant or consulting firm?

Before I get into the right time to hire, let me start off with when it’s the wrong time to hire a small business marketing consultant or consulting firm.

Consulting firms and consultants aren’t one trick magicians, we are amplifiers of success so here are the 3 moments when it’s the wrong time to hire us:

1. It's the wrong time to hire a marketing consultant or consulting firm to fix your marketing when your product or service or business doesn’t make sense. 
2. It's the wrong time to hire a marketing consultant or consulting firm to swoop in and get you more prospective clients when you don’t have a way of doing business that allows you to be the obvious choice. 
3. It's the wrong time to hire  a marketing consultant or consulting firm when you want to remove yourself from the all-important role of marketing and give total control to a “guru or expert.”

No need to worry about the wrong time when you are speaking with a really good marketing consultant or consulting firm because they won’t take your money unless they believe they can truly help you, no matter what you think your burning marketing need or challenge is.

The right time to hire a marketing consultant or consulting firm to help you is when the following five areas are present:

1. Lack of a real marketing strategy. Good marketing consultants or consulting firms will demand that you spend time building a solid marketing foundation based on a diagnosis before proposing a series of prescriptions aimed at increasing sales, leads and website traffic. Until you find a way to change how your ideal customer view what you do and make the competition irrelevant, you’ll find that your marketing efforts never seem to build long-term momentum.
2. Too many marketing objectives. Good marketing consultants or consulting firms will help you zero in on your highest payoff activities and your top objectives based on where you want to be in 90 days, 1 year, in 3 years, in 5 years but not next tomorrow. And, a good marketing consultant or consulting firm will make sure that the number of objectives at any given time stays very, very small.
3. Resource gaps are present. In the “DIY” world of small business owners and CEOs it’s difficult to spot the projects, campaigns and activities that require external help. You may be able to set up your newsletter, add graphics to your website and create posts for social media profiles but it's robbing you from higher payoff work. Sure, those things above might need to be attended to, but good marketing consultants or consulting firms will help you stop doing the things that are better handled by others. In fact, they might just help you become the CEO again!
4. Lead conversion issues. This might be my favorite. Too many business owners, and sadly some marketing consultants or consulting firms, focus on traffic and lead generation when the highest priority should be conversion of that traffic and leads. Figure out how to get prospects to respond to your sales process to buy, can quickly build your business.
5. Can’t stay focused on main objectives. One of the dirty secrets of consulting is that a part of you simply needs someone to hold you accountable – someone to help you document your goals and objectives and then bring you back to reality when you wander off into new ideas, because staying focused seems way too boring.

A part of this is accomplished through nagging and set appointments, but the greatest gains are achieved when your focus starts to produce results. Good marketing consultants or consulting firms will demand metrics tied to objectives and help you process and understand the overarching value you’ll derive by hitting your goals.

What does a marketing consultant or consulting firm do?

Small business marketing consultants or consulting firms specialize in the marketing needs of small business owners. These needs may involve educating you about how to develop and operate a marketing process that is tailored to your business, or it may involve a turn-key approach where a consultant functions as your fractional CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) on a part-time basis. This latter approach allows your marketing needs to be met in the most efficient manner possible. A key outcome of engaging the services of a small business marketing consultant or consulting firm is that you will have a Marketing Process developed uniquely for you and your business.

A marketing consultant or consulting firm will bring a holistic approach to your marketing. It’s important to realize from the get-go that hiring a marketing consultant or consulting firm is a long-term investment, not a quick fix. They will bring value to your business, but a good one will do this in a process way and organically over time.

Good marketing consultants or consulting firms will have a strategic and consistent approach from the start. They will strategically align your social media, website, SEO, email marketing and content so that they work together to create a cohesive online presence.

Why you need a marketing process?

Which column describes your business?  Given the two alternatives on each row, in which mode would you rather be working?