Sign in to view more insights
Get insights to quickly find providers that fit your needs, view mutual connections, and contact them directly Sign in
How Specialized Marketing Consultants Can Benefit Your Business in Portland, OR
Portland is a great place for business owners, but like many cities, it can be extremely competitive, a place where industries change fast to meet the evolving needs of their customers. To help you keep up and make sure your business is equipped to stand out from the crowd, you should consider hiring a freelance marketing consultant.
This guide breaks down the importance of marketing and why hiring outside help may be the best option for you and your business.
Why Marketing?
When you run a business, you're an expert in your industry — but you may not be an expert at communicating your unique leverage points to the right people. No matter how savvy you are at providing a quality product or taking practical financial steps, without marketing efforts that meet your needs at any given time, you may be at risk of falling short in a competitive atmosphere.
What are your options?
Marketing is critical to your success in any industry, so you need to have someone who is a specialist on your team. You have a few options:
You can become a marketing expert
Some business owners spend the time necessary to learn the tools of the trade, but at the end of the day, it just isn't a practical solution.
Marketing (especially digital marketing) changes rapidly, and it's unrealistic to expect to be able to run your business while also keeping your marketing knowledge as current as it needs to be to succeed.
You can put one on your payroll
A better option is to hire someone who knows their way around the marketing space.
You might have someone on staff who can advise you on your marketing efforts, but this may not be enough. It's difficult to expect one person to be an expert in every area of marketing, especially in digital marketing, where trends change daily.
You can hire a private contractor
Especially if you're navigating a rapidly changing industry with fine margins, you may opt to look outside your team for a marketing expert who can help you differentiate your business without the long-term commitment of hiring someone or the unrealistic demands of becoming a specialist yourself.
It's not just about doing it; it's about doing it right
Sometimes, business owners fall prey to the belief that they can get by with just themselves or a part-time marketer on staff. After all, as long as the ads are written and the emails are sent, everything will be okay, right? Well, not exactly.
Marketing is a field that's abstract enough to seem pretty simple, but the deeper you dig into it, the more complex it becomes.
Let's take an email campaign, for example. Pretty easy — you write a few emails that send interested audience members to a web page where they can claim a coupon and make a purchase, and your job is done.
But, there's more involved than simply sending an email in many cases. You might be pretty confident about your ability to entice recipients to click on your email, but do you have the same level of confidence in the landing web page to do its job? Did you know that skilled.co found that 47% of customers expect a page to load in less than two seconds? Do you know which levers to pull to make sure a web page is in line with relevant best practices?
This is a perfect example of how complex marketing — especially in the era of digital — can become.
It's okay not to have every answer because you can pay a person (or two) who does. An independent marketing consultant can step in, run a single campaign or an entire marketing strategy, and give you peace of mind that your marketing budget is being spent in a way that gets you the best possible return on your investment.
Get Qualified Help With Your Current Initiative
One of the key benefits of hiring an outside specialist in marketing is that your needs may change between different initiatives. For example, if you're running a major promotion, the marketing consultant you hire to target your advertising won't necessarily be the right choice if your next move is to try to build your audience using email marketing.
If you're using someone on your staff, they may be limited in their versatility. After all, "marketing" is a fairly generic term for a broad field. As a result, most marketers specialize in a few areas. Even if you have an in-house marketing consultant, the proverbial jack-of-all-trades may not be the best option for a specific campaign.
Using a freelance marketing specialist guarantees that you'll be able to find someone suited for your needs, no matter what your current priorities are. Here are a few common areas of marketing in which a specialized freelance marketing consultant can use their deep knowledge to generate results for your business.
Advertising
Advertising is all about targeting marketing assets to the right audiences, which takes extensive knowledge of several different channels. Getting your ads out there is easy, but getting then in front of the right people isn't. And studies show this is often more challenging than it seems.
Adobe Digital Insights' report on the state of digital advertising in 2018 found that over 70% of advertisers thought they were reaching their target audience with their ads, while only 8% of consumers felt that the ads they receive are relevant.
This deficit underlines the need for experience and expertise in an area of marketing that is constantly changing. When you're planning an ad campaign, an outside marketing consultant can identify your market, make sure your advertising is reaching the right audience, and ensure that you're spending your marketing budget as efficiently as possible.
Branding
Your brand is how your customers know your business, and it's an area where you can't afford to cut corners. Whether you're developing your initial brand or undergoing a rebranding project, an experienced partner can be a major boost in helping you with conception, naming, designs, and other critical parts of a brand that catches the eye and resonates with an audience.
An expert branding advisor is someone you can find when you look for an experienced digital marketing consultant. The level of specialization it takes is necessary because first impressions matter: Markinblog found that 48% of consumers say that their first impression with a brand is the best opportunity to earn their loyalty.
SEO/SEM
The big picture of search engine marketing changes with the wind. Without a specialist dedicated to staying up-to-date with the latest trends in SEO, you won't know what optimizations will provide the biggest benefits to your business's online properties.
Most business owners understand just enough about SEO to serve their needs. You might recognize the importance of Google's local pack to your website traffic and local competition for select keywords. But the more you learn about SEO in general, the more you may realize how much there still is out there to master.
So how can you keep up-to-date with the latest trends, content strategies, and algorithm changes that make the big picture of search engine marketing and optimization so dynamic? You can't, unless you dedicate essentially every day to reading up on the latest trends and immersing yourself in your own SEO strategy.
That's where outsourcing this part of your marketing strategy can pay off in an important way. SEO is one of the most difficult areas to understand in the marketing field, where mistakes can't always be seen but can still hurt your ability to generate new customers and traffic on your website.
Email marketing
Most business owners keep a list of their customers, and often, this list contains email addresses. Email is thought of as a high-ROI channel, and it can be tempting to blast every product announcement, company update, and promotion to every address on your list. You're not hurting anything, right?
Except, this isn't always true — you could be hurting your ability to engage with your audience. If people see your emails as generic or irrelevant, they're less likely to even glance at the subject line, let alone open or click on them.
When it comes to email marketing, the strategy you employ is just as important as with any other channel, despite the comparatively low marginal cost of deployment.
One thing that a freelance marketing consultant can do is optimize your email marketing strategy using segmented campaigns. Sending a campaign only to a small portion of your list it will resonate with, or splitting a campaign into groups, targeting smaller segments with different subject lines, has the potential to increase engagement quickly.
Mailchimp reviewed user data to compare a standard "e-blast" and a segmented send, finding that the latter yields a 10.64% increase in opens and over a 100% increase in clicks, on average.
Event marketing
There are lots of ways to promote an event to your audience. You could send emails or postcards. You could offer incentives for registration and run Google and Facebook ads about it. You could even buy airtime on a local radio station and announce the details — but at the end of the day, the only sure way to verify that the news got out is to hire a specialist to help you spend your marketing budget in the most efficient way.
And the importance of event marketing doesn't end when the attendees list is finalized. The way you plan to run (or attend) an event can make the difference between prospective customers who engage with your brand and those who don't. Hiring an outside marketing expert can help you make sure you don't miss critical opportunities with in-person leads at an event.
The Top 3 Reasons to Hire a Freelance Marketing Consultant
We've looked at why marketing is so important and some of the primary ways that hiring a freelance marketing consultant can help your business thrive in the competitive Portland business environment.
Here are the three biggest reasons why you should be exploring your options.
1. You can scale your team up and down depending on your needs and budget
One of the main advantages of having an outsourced marketing team is being able to switch specialists or add to your arsenal at a moment's notice.
Business owners often operate on tight margins, making it difficult to hire a marketer full-time. One of the best aspects of using freelance marketing help is that there isn't the same obligation as you have with a person you put on your company's payroll.
Freelance marketers are used to short-term contracts and engagements that start and end with a campaign.
Need a new website? Budget for a few freelance copywriters and a user experience web designer to help you build a site that ranks high and converts.
Running a promotion? Hire a paid search specialist to make sure you don't miss an opportunity to maximize revenue.
Need to rise in the rankings? Find a few SEO gurus to optimize your site content and deliver the benefit of making your web pages appear in more organic searches.
No matter how many or how few marketing consultants you need at one time, using outside help lets you scale up and down as flexibly as possible.
2. You can find a freelance marketing consultant who knows Portland
Many business owners' main concern about outsourced marketing is that outside help won't understand the customers in your local community. Portland has a unique ethos, and you may need someone who can speak to that. But, just because an independent marketing consultant doesn't work full-time in your industry or with your customers, it doesn't mean you can't find someone local who understands your city.
Whether you operate an indie clothing boutique in the Pearl, an antiques shop in Sellwood-Moreland, a coffee shop downtown, or are an industrial wholesaler in the Northwest, having a wide pool to choose from guarantees that you'll find a marketer who knows how to engage with your customers.
3. You'll benefit from a fresh perspective
An often-overlooked advantage of hiring someone who doesn't work for your company to spearhead a marketing initiative is that they won't be operating under preconceived notions about your business or be colored by past campaigns.
When you hire from outside your own business, you benefit from working with an experienced specialist who knows what a successful campaign looks like but can think outside the box and generate innovation that you may not have been able to find on your in-house team.