What exactly does a digital consultant do? At Cronust Digital, we highlight the diverse responsibilities and skills that define this multifaceted profession. From developing digital strategies to enhancing user experiences, digital consultants wear many hats and guide businesses through their online journey. Additionally, we outline key questions that digital consultants should consider when executing projects, providing a valuable framework for both consultants and those looking to hire them. Let’s dive in!
A combination of various disciplines
A digital consultant is a professional who addresses a business’s various digital needs, navigating the complex online landscape of email, social media, search, and advertising. When you power up your computer, you’re entering a world of binary code, and a digital consultant must be well-versed in all aspects of this environment. While they may not be teachers, they need to demonstrate a high level of competence across diverse digital disciplines. Their extensive training equips them to understand and lead various roles within the digital space effectively. In this article, we’ll explore the essential questions and contributions a digital consultant should consider when initiating any project.
The questions that a digital consultant has to be able to answer
Next, we are going to propose a series of questions that will help you understand what is going through the mind of a digital consultant:
Where do I begin?
- Who am I addressing? What is my buyer persona?
- What do you do in your day to day?
- What is your customer journey?
- How are we going to make them choose us?
- What objectives do we have?
Before launching any project, it’s crucial to understand the motivations of your target or buyer persona. This involves recognizing their concerns, the social networks they engage with, and envisioning their daily routines to identify key contact points, known as touchpoints. Equally important is grasping the steps potential clients take during their customer journey, which typically includes several stages:
- Awareness: the user identifies a need or problem but isn’t sure how to address it.
- Consideration: the user actively seeks solutions, consulting friends, family, and various information sources.
- Decision: here, the user evaluates different options and makes a choice, relying on content marketing, paid campaigns, and the sales team to guide them.
- Retention: this stage shifts focus from users to clients, emphasizing customer satisfaction and the desire to encourage repeat purchases.
How will we measure it?
We must be able to see the results for each euro invested, whether in means of payment or effort over time. We always have to know how we are performing with respect to the marketing objectives. Therefore, we must ask ourselves:
- How am I going to measure my results?
- Where are they going to be viewed?
- Do I need a specific dashboard?
Digital consultants typically utilize a general dashboard to report strategic and sales data to the CEO or C-level executives. Additionally, it’s essential to maintain specific dashboards for each department or discipline involved in the project, ensuring they are dynamic and readily accessible. Based on our experience, we recommend Google Data Studio as an excellent visualization tool, as it enables seamless integration of various data sources in an intuitive and user-friendly manner.
What about digital assets?
Every element of your technological stack should align with clear business objectives, particularly when it comes to your website. Consider what you want to achieve: Are you aiming to capture leads, drive sales, or both? While you don’t need to be a web designer to guide the design process, understanding the role is crucial since your website is often the most visible representation of your business online. User experience (UX) is paramount; a solid digital strategy prioritizes UX, which also plays a significant role in SEO, throughout the design process.
For global businesses, the website may be the primary point of contact for many users. To build a website with minimal resources, WordPress is a strong choice, whether you develop it yourself or enlist a WordPress consultant. Remember that a mobile-first approach is essential, given that most users browse from smartphones, particularly when engaging with paid media campaigns. Web design should be intuitive and purposeful, guiding users toward what they need and driving conversions.
There should be a clear visual path for users to follow, with obvious next steps; otherwise, the investment in driving traffic may be wasted. Additionally, considerations such as e-commerce management and securing personal information are critical and can impact a company’s success, highlighting the need for constant communication between the digital consultant and the web designer.
What are we going to talk about in our digital assets?
In today’s digital landscape, connecting with potential clients has become essential, making it crucial to develop a content strategy that is entirely consumer-focused. This approach requires us to ask important questions: What products do we offer, and which ones do we want to highlight? What functional and emotional benefits do our products provide? What interests our potential customers, and what keywords do we need to rank for? By addressing these questions, we can tailor our content to better resonate with our audience and meet their needs.
Consider the discovery phase of the customer journey, where clients actively seek solutions to their problems. By offering valuable insights through blog posts, we can position ourselves as relevant and helpful resources. When users find solutions to their issues on our platforms, we not only gain their trust but also become their top-of-mind choice when they consider a purchase. Adding a commercial tag at the end of these posts can serve as a gentle reminder that our products are available to address their specific needs, effectively closing the loop and encouraging potential sales.
Ultimately, our content strategy should be centered around the interests of our clients, guiding them toward our products. Conducting a thorough analysis of keywords allows us to identify search volumes and pinpoint areas of interest for our customers. This insight helps us discover potential niches that competitors may not be addressing, giving us a competitive edge in attracting and engaging our target audience.
What about my clients?
Here, it is very important to pay close attention. We talked about that in the payment campaigns, we can get to making 3 euros for every euro invested.
How much does it cost us for a client to repeat a transaction? Usually, much much less, that is if it goes hand in hand with a good strategy. We have to think about the following:
- Can I continue adding value?
- Can we get recommendations from the member? Get members to work for us?
- Is there a way to cross-sell or up-sell?
- Can I automate interactions? Marketing automation
This section has plenty to talk about, and in fact, we have articles dedicated exclusively to this topic. Here are some examples:
- Introduction to Marketing Automation
- Discovering Lead Scoring, what it is and how it works
- Discovering Lead nurturing, what it is and how it works
- Mistakes to avoid in marketing automation
Finally, we get to the last step, which is more of a methodology than a step
What can I do better? Digital analytics and CRO
Hence the importance of being able to measure everything, and see if we are aligned with these objectives. This way can we ask ourselves:
- Have we met the objectives?
- How can we improve?
- Can we launch experiments?
- What is more significant
At a more strategic level, the digital consultant must see what objectives have been met and which have not. In both situations, it is necessary to try to design initiatives in the short, medium, and long term in order to achieve the objectives. Here, the role of the consultant is fundamental since it has to transfer to the C-level, what is going to be done and how we are going to achieve it, making sure that everyone executes the corresponding actions.
We really like to bring up how we can improve what we have done to date, and here, the CRO plays a fundamental role. This allows us to conduct experiments and make decisions based on data, not on intuitions. If you are interested, you can visit our CRO page or read the following posts:
- Beginner’s guide to A/B and CRO test
- Is CRO bad for SEO?
- 4 common errors when working with CRO
- 101 techniques to increase the CRO conversion
