Do not worry. We will try to explain the concept to you in this article. You have to look at it from a positive point of view.
This is a great opportunity to find out what exactly a digital consultant does. Apart from explaining the role, we are also going to ask the questions that a digital consultant should ask when executing any project.
In fact, this article can be used to conduct interviews with potential candidates. Without further delay, let’s dive in!
Digital marketing consultant, a combination of various disciplines
A digital consultant is a wearer of many hats. The title itself is a wild card for all the digital needs of a business.
Once you turn on your computer, you are immersed in the binary world of 1s and 0s. You are in the online world of email, social media, search, advertising and everything else that can be accessed by touch screen, keyboard, or mouse.
That is the world of the digital consultant. To some extent, the digital consultant has to be knowledgeable about all digital trades. He or she might not be a teacher, but at the very least, he or she must be very competent in these areas.
The digital consultant must have extensive training in all the relevant disciplines of the digital space. He or she must know all the positions well enough to lead them.
We would like to provide you with the basic questions and contributions that a digital consultant should ask when starting 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? Digital strategy
- Who am I addressing? What is the 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 starting, we must understand what are the motivations of our target or buyer persona? Know what concerns you have, if you use one social network or another. Try to picture what you do in your day to day. This allows you to find contact points called touchpoints.
It is essential to understand the steps our potential client goes through, their customer journey. That is the stages through which our client is going through. These are usually:
- Awareness -> when the user has a need or problem but does not know how to solve it
- Consideration -> The user intends to find out how he or she can solve the problem. Discuss with friends and family, also consult sources of information
- Decision -> when evaluating different solutions, this is the step when the user decides on one. The role of content marketing, payment campaigns and the sales team to achieve this traction is very important
- Retention -> we no longer speak of the user, we speak of a client. Here the degree of customer satisfaction is evaluated in order to have them buy from you again, time and time again
Through this analysis, the digital consultant must be able to understand all the phases very well in order to determine what business objectives we want to set ourselves within each phase.
How will we measure it? Dashboard and data visualization
A lot of stress can step from this process. We must be able to see the results for each euro invested, whether in means of payment or effort over time.
Always, always, 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 you need a specific dashboard?
The digital consultant usually has a general dashboard that is used to report to the CEO or the C-level exec with more strategy and sales data.
Then, in order to follow up, you must have one per department or discipline that interacts. The dashboard must be alive and always be accessible.
From our modest experience, we recommend Google Data Studio, as the main source of visualization since it allows the integration of various sources in an easy and intuitive way.
What digital assets? Web design and development
Our technological stack of responding to clear business objectives must all have a purpose. For example, in the case of a website:
- Do I want to capture leads?
- Do I want to sell?
- Do I want to do both?
Again, you don’t need to be a web designer to direct the company’s design efforts. You have to know what that job implies since the most visible manifestation of your business in digital form is your website.
The most important aspect here is the user experience. A good digital strategy will keep the UX (which by the way is also part of SEO) front and center during any web design process.
If you have a global business, your website is probably the only manifestation that most people will see.
- To start a website with minimum resources, the best option is WordPress. You can develop the website yourself or hire a WordPress consultant to help you through the process.
- Mobile-first is no longer an option. It is proven that most users browse from their smartphone and even more with Paid Media campaigns.
- Web design must be intuitive and purposeful. The design must accompany the user to find what he is looking for and generate conversion.
- There must be a clear path for your eyes to follow, and an obvious next step to take. Otherwise, there is little point in paying to bring traffic to your website.
- There are other, more system considerations such as: how e-commerce will be managed, and how to collect and secure personal information.
These are not minor issues. And many companies do not succeed. That is why the digital consultant and your web designer need to be in constant communication.
What are we going to talk about in our digital assets? Content marketing
Today, it is essential to connect with our potential clients. Hence, the importance of creating a content strategy focused 100% on the consumer. Given this, we have to ask ourselves:
- ¿What products do we have? which of them do we want to highlight more?
- What functional and emotional benefits do our products provide?
- What interests our potential customers?
- What keywords do we need to rank for?
Let’s think for a moment, aboutthe discovery phase that we discussed about the customer journey. A client looks for how to solve a certain problem.
If we put the solution to this problem through a post on our blog, we will be more relevant to the user. In other words, we will be your top of mind, facing a possible sale, since we have added value.
If we also decorate this post with a commercial tag in the end, it is a good way to try to close the circle and suggest that our product is the right one to solve your problem.
Hence, the strategy of creating content has to focus on what interests our clients and push them to our products.
The analysis of keywords helps us to see the search volumes of the things that may interest the clients and find possible niches of words that the competition is not covering
Bring traffic? SEO is “free”
It is true and we put free in quotes, because there is no related direct payment, but a lot of time and dedication. And as it is known, SEO is something that is reflected in the medium to long term. But for this reason, we must not underestimate it.
We must try to focus to make sure that the content that one generates, is of quality and is well structured. Here are some questions:
- I create quality content? does the customer value it?
- Is my content well structured?
- How do you rank my content vs. the competition?
- Do I have a consistent architecture?
One of the most recognizable jobs of a digital consultant is search engine optimization (SEO). SEO homework is a full-time job by itself.
This is one of those situations where the digital consultant may not be doing the day to day of SEO. But he or she has to be on top of it to the point that they are probably the ones doing the SEO audits.
Search engine optimization includes, but is not limited to the following:
- Insert high-quality and relevant content on your website
- Ensuring a proper backlink
- Compliance with Google guidelines
- Reputation management
- Social media mentions
- Keyword analysis
- Proper labeling
- Comment management
SEO management is a great job that can make or break all your digital efforts. And it’s just one of the hats that the digital consultant wears.
What if I pay for traffic? Launching campaigns
They are not a remedy, but they are essential in order to work all the parts of the conversion funnel.
There is a saying that for every euro invested, the return should be between two or three times.
You have to think about it in the following way. It is as if we had a commercial that would bill us double or triple what it costs us with all-inclusive, social security salary, and others …
To reach this optimum point, you have to ask yourself the following:
- Who am I addressing?
- What platforms do you use?
- What message do we project?
- Do we have good ROAS?
- Do we do A / B tests to improve the CTR?
Digital advertising is another one of those full-time jobs overseen by the digital consultant. The responsibilities of advertising include knowing where to invest in advertising for traffic generation, to bring the lead, buy, and repeat.
- How about buying ads on podcasts? There is a reason why the same 4 or 5 companies dominate the podcast world.
- Are banner ads worth it considering how prevalent banner blindness is?
- Is there more to social media marketing (SMM) than buying an ad on Facebook?
- How much of the budget should be spent on buying search ads on Google compared to other PPC campaigns?
- Digital advertising requires a lot of specialized knowledge, not only about advertising in general but also about the digital space where modern advertising takes place.
If you want to know the basics of how to launch campaigns, we leave you this post that will help you here
Management of social networks
Depending on the companies, social networks carry a fundamental weight, because their target audience spends most of their time there, especially in B2C businesses.
In any case, the YouTube channel for b2b should not be underestimated, as it has more and more weight since the consumer of both business models consults and needs visual support to make certain decisions.
Trying to be a little more practical, we give you questions that can serve as a reference
- Is it necessary?
- Do I have a good line of sight on my networks?
- Do my followers interact with my content?
- Do I receive traffic to my website?
- How many social networks can you name outside of Facebook and Twitter? When counting, have you considered which social networks are popular in other countries? If your business is global, you should.
- Hashtag? Social media management requires the proper use of hashtags.
- Tweets receive 21% more engagement if they have only 1 or 2 hashtags compared to those with more than 2.
- There’s a fine balance between getting people to engage with you on social media and being a bother.
- Facebook is preparing to experiment with autoplay videos with sound. People are already annoyed by the silent autoplay videos. Do you really want to be the first talker in your stream?
- Nothing about managing social media is easy. But it is an integral part of what a digital consultant does on a daily basis.
What about my clients? What do I do? Loyalty
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
Summary
A digital consultant does much more than meets the eye. They may specialize in only one of these areas, but they have to be familiar with all of them, including:
- Digital strategy
- Dashboard and data visualization
- Web design and development
- Content marketing
- SEO
- Advertising or Launch campaigns
- Web design
- Management of social networks
Despite the many disciplines they cover, their main job is to make your business successful on the internet. I hope you enjoyed our article.
