What is Marketing Consulting?
As a nonprofit, getting your message out to the world means competing for attention against enterprise brands with big-budget marketing divisions. This can often make nonprofit marketing feel like shouting at a crowded street from the top of a tall building.
That’s where marketing consultants can help.
A marketing consultant can provide your nonprofit with a number of strategies and tools to reach new audiences and maximize your organization’s marketing spend. In other words, marketing consulting offers you a megaphone and powerful messages that compel.
So, what is marketing consulting, exactly?
What Do Marketing Consultants Do
Marketing consultants offer services that range from market research to strategy development to measuring analytics—all of which can further propel your cause to new heights.
These consultants are often industry experts who work as outside advisors to organizations, crafting a detailed marketing plan by determining the intended message and the target audience. This is not to be confused with a marketing team or agency, which focuses on the implementation and execution of that strategy.
What’s the difference between the consultants and marketing agencies?
Consultants help nonprofits build the roadmap. Marketing teams drive you from point A to point Z.
Marketing Consultant vs Business Consultancy
Another term that is often confused with marketing consulting is business consultancy. Put simply, while business consultants can offer marketing advice, they’re generally more attuned to overall business practices and models.
Marketing Consultant Services
The primary objective of marketing consultants is to help define and shape your organization’s brand—that is, its identifying characteristics and principles—then amplify that message across websites, blogs, and social media platforms. How consultants can help often depends on your current state.
If you don’t have a clearly defined brand, that’s where consultants will start.
Think of your brand like a siren’s call. It’s a compelling voice that drifts through the technological ether, beckoning in potential donors and supporters from far and wide. (Although, when it comes to your nonprofit, there will be no shipwrecked sailors.)
Once the pillars of your organization are established, then it’s time to identify where you need assistance. Typical marketing consultant services include:
- Market research – In the world of marketing, you’re always competing for eyeballs. To shape the most effective and compelling messaging, you’ll have to know what your competition is doing and how to target your demographic.
- Brand auditing – Next, it’s time to optimize your own platform and square up against your competitors. By auditing your brand, consultants can determine whether you need more compelling images, CTAs (calls-to-action), or a full website redesign.
- Marketing strategy – Once you know what you’re up against and where you sit within the marketplace, it’s time to strategize. Your marketing strategy will include which social media channels to utilize, how often you should post, what other avenues your campaign can approach, and benchmarks you aim to achieve.
- Campaign analytics – At the end of each marketing campaign, you should analyze the results in order to find ways to optimize future campaigns. This is where campaign analytics come in. Understand ROI, what channels performed best, and more by crunching the numbers.
Once you have all this information at the ready, the last step is to execute the strategy, and await the data to analyze. But what if you don’t have the time or resources needed?
Management vs Consulting: What’s the Difference?
As noted above, consultants are the coaches that can lead your team to success. If you want a full-stacked lineup of players, that’s where you’ll need a marketing management team.
Marketing management teams perform each of the managerial functions in the field of marketing, including following through with the marketing strategy. This may involve realizing social media campaigns, posting photo content, or engaging with community members through live video chats, question and answer sessions, or polls.
Marketing managers will also analyze data analytics received from website hosts and social media platforms in order to assess the effectiveness of a marketing strategy and identify possible solutions to any hiccups or engagement issues.
Marketing teams also concern themselves with the efficiency of marketing operations by measuring the performance of a marketing campaign. The management team will then compare the results to the strategy’s intended goals, which were previously set by the marketing strategists and consultants during the planning phase.
Put simply, marketing teams and consultants offer many of the same services—teams are just more hands-on.
How to Choose the Best Marketing Option for Your Nonprofit
A marketing consultant is ideal for new or startup organizations with a small budget, as they provide cost-effective marketing expertise and hyper-specialized marketing strategies.
Marketing consultants are typically more collaborative, allowing for more flexibility in the realm of content customization and problem-solving. Conversely, a marketing management team is the best choice for larger organizations that desire a marketing strategy and the resources to implement.
Consult the Experts in Nonprofit Marketing—Puzzle Pieces
A nonprofit’s marketing budget is often seen as the determining factor in how large of a campaign it can pull off. But do you know how far your budget can be stretched?
Consultants are generally the more affordable option—developing strategies and offering tools for success while leaving you to execute the plan. Full-scale marketing teams offer turnkey solutions, driving forth your campaign from research and strategy to post-campaign analytics. Yet these teams eat up your budget, forcing nonprofits to settle for less than what their cause deserves.
But there is a third option.
Here at Puzzle Pieces Marketing, we specialize in nonprofit marketing consulting and low-cost marketing services. As a nonprofit-centric marketing agency, we cultivate brands through moving stories that inspire action.
When you’re here, it’s like all the pieces fit perfectly together.
Reach out today to see how we can help your marketing efforts.
Sources:
Economics Discussion. What is Marketing Management? https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/marketing-management/what-is-marketing-management/31788
