And why do I need a consultant?
The term “marketing” has many definitions and subsets, but broadly speaking marketing is anything you do to persuade people to buy your product or use your service. It is all of the activities and tools you use to connect your target audience with your special sauce.
No matter what your industry is – if you manufacture widgets, serve food, provide professional services or human services – you have a special sauce, something about your organization that distinguishes it from all of its competitors. You could be objectively producing the greatest sauce the world has ever known but it isn’t going to do you any good if no one else has ever tasted it and no one wants to buy it. You need marketing to find out who your potential customers are and to convince them to engage with your product and support your business. Paid advertising, printed materials, branded swag, earned media coverage, public events and social media posts are all examples of marketing tools you might choose to promote your special sauce to the sauce-lovers in your community. Marketing communications is using those tools to tell your story and to build relationships that will allow your business to succeed.
Large companies and nonprofits have big marketing and communications teams on staff to create and implement marketing plans and to monitor and analyze their activities. They may also employ full-service marketing firms to do all or some of this work for them. According to The CMO Survey (https://cmosurvey.org/) released in August 2019 US companies allocate between 7.1 percent and 11.1 percent of their budget to marketing.
That is all fine and well for multi-million-dollar corporations, but what about the rest of us? If your budget is closer to $500,000 a year you probably can’t afford to hire a marketing team or a contract with Epsilon (https://us.epsilon.com/). If you are not a marketing pro and 7 to 11 percent of your budget is not enough to support a full-time or part-time salary plus marketing expenses it probably makes sense for you to consider working with a smaller marketing consultant.
Working with a consultant means you get all of the benefits of a marketing professional but only pay for what you need when you need it. You do not need to worry about hiring and training staff or investing in marketing tools that might not end up working the way you expected. You might want to have a consultant create a marketing plan for your organization and provide coaching to your existing staff to help you implement it on your own. You can work with a consultant to identify which aspects of your marketing plan are feasible for you to do on your own and have the consultant focus on the elements that you can’t do yourself. Or you can have a consultant do most of your marketing tasks so you can focus on the rest of your organization.
JTE Communications would love to schedule a free 30-minute consultation with you to learn about your special sauce and see how we can help you persuade more people to try it, to buy it, and to tell their friends to do the same. Click here to get started.
