Marketing Consultants Should Be Connecting the Dots
When Jessica reached out to see if her company should hire me as a marketing and brand strategist, we had a long conversation about her challenges, marketplace, and constraints.
As the call ended, Jessica asked, how will I have evidence that your strategic marketing advice is working?
I told Jessica that once we agreed to work together, we would create a list of progress signs that we were going in the right direction. These weren’t precise KPIs or metrics – just directional signs of progress.
I asked Jessica to think of the current state and the future state.
Said another way, how do you know you are getting closer to your destination if you are in a car traveling on the highway? Together we will create the road signs of positive progress.
We constructed several signs of progress that could be helpful ways to see if we were moving closer to the destination – or farther from the target. And I shared with her that from some strategic revisions, I would be there to execute the changes myself – perhaps with some help.
We connected strategy and tactics – with a way to keep score.
Keeping Score
Here are a few metrics we chose that aligned with the problems to be solved. And each helps her business with connecting the dots.
- IMPROVE OPEN RATE: Since her emails weren’t getting opened, we agree that better subject lines, copy, and design could help her go from where she was now – 7% open to a goal of 14%. By hiring a professional copywriter and working with a design agency, we wanted to see over 90 days an improvement. Her emails were too long, covering too many topics.
- LEAD FROM WEBSITE CONVERSION: Only two leads were coming from her website each week. Not enough to meet her growth goals. We agreed that her key messages might not resonate with visitors and the problems they wanted to solve. I suggested that if she could hire me to interview several customers, I could help improve her core messaging.
- Now – her message focused too much on the features of what she sold, not the benefit to the prospect. Our goal became that after 90 days of going live with the revised messaging, we would see an improvement from 2 leads (filling out a form) to 6. Not a big goal since leads are so low, but Jessica needed some evidence that we were getting closer to touching a hot button.
- IMPROVE THE SALES NARRATIVE: The sales team used a bloated deck of slides that mainly talked about the company and not the prospect. If they hired me, I’d help fix some of these apparent problems and train their sales team. The goal we set was after revisions and training, their conversion rate from demos would go from 1 out of 19 to 3 out of 19. Not super aggressive, but enough evidence that we were making progress.
Connecting the Dots
Consultants like me need to provide a connect the dots approach to advice. Not everyone will see how a revised strategy can come to life. We can agree on a scorecard by where the brand wants to go. Imagine a soccer coach who tells the team what they are doing wrong without showing them how to change the playbook.
Setting reasonable goals and expectations needs to happen before working together to improve. And having a plan for what needs to be done is why brands need to hire experienced professionals, either consultants or agencies.
Is the marketing advisor or consultant you hired working with you to establish clear connections of your dots?
You can set up a time to chat with me about your marketing challenges using my calendar. Email me jeffslater@themarketingsage.com Call me. 919 720 0995. The conversation is free, and we can explore if working together makes sense. Watch a short video about working with me.
