Hiring the right marketing consultant is going to make a big difference in whether your company is successful or not and it will directly correlate to how much success you achieve. Read on for three signs that a consultant is not the right one for you. This information can help you identify that the person you’re using is not working out or it could help you make the right choices in your quest to shop for the right consultancy firm from the start.
1. Ineffective Web Presence
If you are hiring someone to help you succeed online, you should be suitably impressed with their online presence. If you search for them, do you find them? Are you impressed with what you’ve found? Reputation management is a vital component of online and offline advertising. If a marketing consultant is ineffective at managing their own reputation online, how can you trust them to manage yours?
2. Poor Response
Response is vital. You want someone you can communicate with and you want to deal with someone who communicates sufficiently with you. If expectations have been set and they’re consistently left unmet, this is a sign that things are not going to work out. You can expect the disappointment to continue in the vast majority of cases. Marketing experts should be adept at communicating in a style that you’re comfortable with, whether it be via progress reports, verbal discussions, or e-mail updates and the responses should be in time with what was promised more than 99% of the time.
3. Lack of Knowledge
If you ask your consultancy firm about a tool that you’ve heard might help you and they’ve never heard of it, clearly they don’t have their finger on the pulse of the marketing world. An expert should be up to speed on current and upcoming trends. They’ll also know which tools are past their prime in terms of no longer being as effective.
A lot of things need to be considered when choosing to work with a consultancy firm. Pricing, expectations, measurables, service level agreements, response times, and other areas have to be carefully discussed so you know what expectations to have. If your consultant is missing the mark repeatedly, it’s time to consider your options. If you’re just in the early stages of thinking about outsourcing some of your marketing and advertising needs, you’ll want to know that the marketing consultant or company you deal with can be trusted, is knowledgeable, and delivers what they promise.