To explain what a digital marketing consultant (DMC) does, we must first define what digital marketing is.
From our very own blog, “What Does a Digital Marketing Agency Do?,” we define digital marketing as “data-driven and targeted brand promotion through technology.”
Put simply, a digital marketing consultant is exceedingly organized, highly targeted, and delivers measurable results in real-time using advanced marketing strategies and techniques that leverage digital technology.
So if digital marketing is vital to a modern business’s success and growth—and it is—how does the digital marketing consultant support our team and help companies increase sales?
As you will learn in this article, our DMCs are elite at executing marketing campaigns and delivering results.
What Does a Digital Marketing Consultant Do?
A digital marketing consultant combines the depth and breadth of marketing and digital communication channels. Also commonly labeled a digital marketing manager or content marketing manager at some companies, a DMC knows what is necessary to market a certain product or service and the avenues necessary to get results—whether paid or organic.
Today’s digital marketing ecosystem requires knowledgeable, action-oriented, and proactive experts that are able to come back at a company’s opportunities and problems with a thoughtful, strategic solution. That being said, there is a simple development process that all digital marketing consultants experience.
Whether they are a junior DMC just being introduced to the professional side of marketing and getting to know their needs or a digital marketing strategist that has been in the marketing game for years and can respond to any scenario with tested strategies and tactics, consultants provide immense value to their team and clients.
Digital Marketing Strategy Development
Uhuru digital marketing consultants are responsible for creating strategic Business Advantage (BA) programs that deliver real, quantifiable results for B2B and B2C clients. The DMC works with clients to counsel, coach, and advise them on results-driven marketing strategies that grow their businesses. Our clients need to get the right advice from us, and our DMCs need to be able to deliver it in a straightforward, bold, and direct manner.
A digital marketing consultant is involved in developing the overarching marketing strategy, which includes fully revising them every 6–18 months to stay relevant. In addition to revamping the living strategy documents every year, it is a DMC’s job to stay on top of industry trends, changes to analytic tools, software programs, and social media regulations. DMCs should be looking at data every single day in order to optimize digital marketing campaigns.
If they don’t, it’s wasting the client’s resources.
Working Closely With Clients
The digital marketing consultant is responsible for giving clients a truly world-class marketing experience from start to finish. This might mean suggesting a deeper dive with analytics, offering an unsolicited recommendation, or talking clients through the “whys” behind marketing tactics in clear, easily understandable terms. The DMC’s job is to guide clients as the marketing “consultant” on the implementation of their complete marketing program.
Before creating any strategy, the DMC and the rest of the marketing/creative team should understand the client’s needs, goals, and motivations and have a full grasp of the impact their actions have on the client and their company.
From the get-go, there should be conversations about budget, what’s launching, why we’re launching it, and who we’re launching it to. Hyper-communication and transparency throughout working with clients are crucial to retaining the relationship.
DMCs should also be hyper-communicating with the team as it optimizes different ad campaigns and content marketing strategies. If something is working really well or failing terribly, you need to communicate exactly what is happening with coworkers so the team can either make sure the same strategy is incorporated moving forward or readjust and take note of what didn’t work.
The key to being a successful digital marketing consultant is managing a variety of tasks and ensuring that marketing tactics deliver the expected results.
Our clients hire Uhuru for our expertise and opinion. Uhuru DMCs need to be confident and comfortable giving their expert perspectives—even if it occasionally makes clients uncomfortable. If this is the case, digital marketing consultants must help clients work through the change so their company shines and their marketing drives long-term, sustainable growth.
How to Create Strong Relationships With Clients
Clients are real people with real problems—both professionally and personally. A digital marketing consultant should invest in their relationships with clients by making an effort to get to know who they are both in and outside of work.
A great DMC establishes trust with clients by being 100 percent transparent. This can be done by making training videos for clients and telling them exactly what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. Send four- or five-paragraph report summaries so they know that these results aren’t magic, they’re the product of staying on top of the campaigns and optimizing them effectively based on the digital marketing consultant’s personal experience in industry standards. By sharing this information, you’ll be able to build invaluable trust.
A Digital Marketing Consultant’s Typical Responsibilities
Although a digital marketing consultant wears a lot of different hats, there are some tasks and responsibilities that they need to take care of regularly. If an employee cannot properly fulfill these duties, they will not last long in the DMC role.
Pay-Per-Click Ad Campaigns
Digital marketing consultants need advanced knowledge of paid search (Google AdWords) and paid social media (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube). This includes not just an understanding of these tools and channels, but the ability to analyze and interpret data to readjust campaigns as needed. A DMC is responsible for communicating campaign performance to clients and creating a clear road map for the future.
Content and SEO
When it comes to content and SEO, a digital marketing consultant’s job focuses on two major criteria: nurturing client relationships and delivering inbound marketing results. Creating a strong relationship between the client and agency with open communication is crucial for fostering a successful ongoing engagement. A DMC works with the creative team to ensure the client’s messaging is delivered in innovative and engaging ways that drive traffic—and ultimately, qualified leads—to the client’s website.
Each piece of content should be created with buyer personas and the buyer’s journey in mind and optimized to rank. Without ranking power, content pieces will sit in the vast abyss of the internet—never to be seen by potential customers (no matter how incredible the writing, graphics, or page design is). Digital marketing consultants need to live and breathe content marketing strategy.
A successful digital marketing consultant should be able to:
Catering to many clients’ needs can feel like a juggling act. To be blunt, not everyone can handle nurturing several client-agency relationships at once; it takes time to gain and maintain a client’s trust.
In addition to fostering a healthy relationship with clients, it is also the digital marketing consultant’s job to devise an in-depth content marketing strategy and oversee its execution.
It is a DMC’s job to understand the clients’ strengths and weaknesses so the agency can properly focus on areas where the client can beat their competitors. This requires a keen awareness of not only the client’s company but their industry as well.
Kicking off a client-agency engagement and onboarding process is an essential step to fostering a healthy relationship with the client. This presents the digital marketing consultant as knowledgeable and approachable. It also communicates what the client can expect moving forward.
The key to a digital marketing consultant’s success is to provide hyper-communication to stay ahead of the client’s questions and verify that both sides understand the expectations of each engagement. With this knowledge, a DMC then collaborates with the creative team to deliver targeted results.
A DMC is extremely knowledgeable about content marketing strategy. This allows them to pitch effective tactics to new or existing clients.
Digital Marketing Consultant Required Skills and Experiences
To be a digital marketing consultant, you will need an undergraduate degree—ideally in business or marketing with a focus, concentration, or minor in internet marketing, social media marketing, e-commerce, or e-business.
While there are many master’s degree programs that specialize in digital marketing, you do not need a master’s to be qualified to work as a DMC.
While most colleges and universities have some type of marketing program and several courses that teach different aspects of digital marketing, online bachelor’s degree courses are becoming more and more popular in the field. Seeing as just about everything a digital marketing consultant does is online, the validity of this option should not come as a surprise.
Job Experience
In order to gain the job experience needed to be successful in the digital marketing consultant role, you will need at least three to five years of marketing experience developing strategic marketing plans and tactical marketing programs for a variety of different industries.
In addition to time spent in the marketing industry, a digital marketing consultant needs a proven track record in developing marketing programs that have contributed to increased revenue, new customer acquisition, and customer retention. It’s not enough to have had a good job—a DMC needs to have exceeded the expectations of both their clients and their coworkers.
It’s also extremely important that a digital marketing consultant has at least three years in account management or client-facing role within an agency, consulting firm, or internal agency.
Experience working directly with customers is critical to ensure that they know how to best help their clients.
In addition to being excellent written and verbal communicators, digital marketing consultants should be well-versed in the following software programs:
Skills Needed to Work Remotely
As a 100 percent globally distributed team, Uhuru knows a thing or two about working remotely. It’s taken years of trial and error to discover the crucial structure to support an agency spread out across time zones and continents—and if we’re honest, not everyone can handle the work environment.
Here are some of the necessary skills to succeed as a remote worker:
Do You Have What It Takes to Become a Digital Marketing Consultant?
Do you get absolutely pumped to work with clients’ data and analytics? Do you find joy in optimizing ads, watching how the results change, and finding loopholes that can help your clients increase their ROI?
If you answered yes, a digital marketing consultant position might be right for you! Are you interested in joining the Uhuru Network team?
Apply today to see if you have the right stuff to become a DMC.