Almost 4 billion people use the Internet and roughly one-third use at least one social media platform.
With so many people going online and participating on social platforms, the Internet holds powerful potential for businesses—to get publicity for their brands and to advertise their product or service to prospective clients.
And, on top of that, the online playing field is level—anyone can tweet on Twitter, write and publish blog posts, and actively engage with their target audience.
The conundrum business owners find themselves in is the time needed to do these things, and what digital strategy to use.
This is where hiring a digital consultant becomes beneficial, as you can leverage their expertise in these fields, saving you time and increasing your return on investment (ROI).
We will go through these specific ways more in depth throughout this post.
1. Identify your target audience
A crucial aspect of a marketing strategy is identifying your target audience.
Qualified digital consultants will not just outline your target audience, but provide specific research on who they are and how they can be reached via a digital strategy.
They will leverage large-scale and small-scale quantitative surveys, create a buyer persona, diligently study your competitors, and study your current interaction between your target audience and the product or service you are providing.
Plus, it also helps to have an outsider’s perspective, as your view of your target audience may be based on assumptions versus hard fact. Consultants can then challenge these assumptions, potentially increasing your reach.
2. A digital consultant helps level the playing field
As mentioned in the beginning, the Internet is available to anyone and everyone, meaning that small business owners have the same available digital marketing opportunities as large corporations.
Consultants can leverage this by providing a sound digital marketing strategy to make the most of this opportunity.
3. More cost effective than traditional marketing
A digital consultant will help you earn a higher ROI through means such as content writing, search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click advertisement (PPC), and social media.
These stats show you how:
At least 62% of those who invest a minimum of six hours per week in social media marketing saw improvements in search engine rankings.
47% of buyers read three to five pieces of content on the seller’s website before contacting a sales representative.
And 90% say that their social media efforts have generated more exposure for their business.
Using these statistics, it is evident that there are multiple digital avenues that individually increase a business’s positive ROI.
Since there are little to no initial costs in digital marketing versus traditional marketing, this is a more cost effective route, with the potential of gaining a greater return.
Utilizing a number of these strategies should help your business generate more revenue.
4. Digital consultants will help you reach mobile consumers
Mobile commerce makes up approximately 30% of all United States e-commerce sales.
That and nearly half (48%) of people begin their search engine research on a mobile phone.
This information tells us that mobile friendliness is critical to your marketing strategy.
Digital consultants can cater to your mobile consumers by making your site mobile friendly. This means increasing the image widths to 100%, using standard fonts, utilizing mobile plugins, and converting your site to a mobile responsive design.
5. Build and increase brand representation
Brand is everything.
Think of it this way, people will pay serious money on a cotton t-shirt with their preferred brand on it (Nike, Adidas…). They’re not paying for the shirt per se, but the brand.
A digital consultant will help your business increase brand representation by creating a strong and consistent social media presence, providing relevant, informative, and consistent blog posts to improve credibility, among a slew of other marketing strategies.
6. An integral SEO package that yields results
Since Google generates around 1 billion searches per month, creating an integral SEO strategy is necessary.
To show you how important this is, here is an example (utilizing real world statistics).
Roughly 96% of viewers who come to your website will not purchase the product or service that is offered.
On the bright side, this does mean that about 4% of viewers will.
Doing the math, if 100 people come to your business website, statistically four of them will purchase your product or service.
1,000 visitors means approximately 40 sales.
10,000 visitors, 400 sales.
100,000 visitors, 4,000 sales…
The more people who come to your website, the greater chance you have of increasing your sales.
An effective SEO strategy results in your website being ranked higher on Google, bringing in more potential customers to your site, and increasing the possibility of hitting (or exceeding) your sales goals.
A digital consultant can do this by leveraging your target audience by focusing and tracking keywords that pertain to them.
They can then embed these keywords in informative, niche-related content on a regular basis, creating more landing pages, hence more pages for search engines to index and rank.
In addition, he or she may edit and format your homepage and other web pages, embedding the focus keyword(s) in them.
7. Provides content marketing services
Digital consultants wear many different hats, copywriters and copy editors being one of them.
They may personally write your marketing content or assign it to a qualified team member.
Providing regular and relevant content is important: 64% of people think customer experience is more important than price.
Content can be in the form of a blog post, guest blog, and curated content, with content promotion following all of these.
It is recommended to utilize all three.
While curated content typically takes an hour to create, original content for guest blogging and your own blog can take up to eight to ten hours to produce.
With a company to run, this may interfere with other important day-to-day activities.
It may be best to hire a digital consultant and his or her team to do it for you.
That way you can direct your time towards other important matters, while still reaping the content marketing benefits.
Did this help? Let me know by providing a comment in the comment section.
Also, contact me should you have any questions or would like to use my expertise to boost your business.|!