A qualified inbound marketing consultant is an independent strategist that conducts a thorough analysis of your company, your market, your competition and your industry to identify unique online and inbound opportunities that will catalyze your company’s online performance, resulting in new leads, new customer conversions, increased revenue and profit.

Using data-driven analyses and research, your inbound marketing consultant will conduct a thorough audit of your:

• Brand
• Company
• Company goals and objectives
• Competition
• Market
• Industry

With this information, your consultant is able to provide you with a solid, quantified value impact and ROI-based strategy, a detailed action plan and the resource recommendations you need to maximize your corporate and marketing goals.

Your consultant will work with you to identify and quantify opportunities. She will identify your existing gaps and help you understand what those gaps are costing you today and exponentially into the future.

She will also develop strategy scenarios based on your budget and your goals. You’ll be able to compare cost to implement with the value impact and return on your investment – for the near -and long-term.

Your Inbound Marketing Consultant is your objective expert. They’re job is to conduct research and advise – not to sell you services. It is to provide you with an objective, data-based recommendation of opportunities that will (increase):

• Expand and increase brand recognition and loyalty
• Targeted website traffic
• Lead conversions
• Internal processes to support your inbound and online marketing efforts, including refining or defining your marketing and sales alignment processes
• New customers, new revenue and increased profitability

Capturing the Opportunity Gap

You may not realize it until a consultant reveals it: your website, your Facebook ad campaign, your blog, and your email campaigns could be costing you money – and opportunity. Missing huge (or even small) marketing opportunities – every day. For every gap or hole in your online solution, your opportunity, conversions and profits are just… well, not being captured.

Some of the most common pain points our clients come to us with:

• My website gets little to no traffic
• I have zero open rates on my emails
• I’m not getting any leads
• I have no conversion funnels
• My website isn’t ranking well in the search engines
• We can’t seem to develop quality content in a timely method
• Our blog posts aren’t attracting visitors
• I don’t have a clue what I need, I just know I need a website that attracts and converts qualified traffic into leads and customers
• My online marketing isn’t working and we don’t know why
• I’m hesitant to do anything because I don’t understand this online world

Your consultant will conduct data-based research (based on facts) on past and current performance. This information creates context. Sort of like a survey you get when you buy real estate.

With this fundamental information, your inbound marketing consultant is able to paint a picture for you that you can understand.

With this context and clarity, your company’s online opportunities and weaknesses emerge.

Knowledge is power. Your consultant will empower you with the right balance of information – without all the geek-speak and confusing techie language.

Hiring an inbound marketing consultant is similar to going to a doctor for a diagnosis. Using a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis, leadership interviews and industry tools and software, they will develop a fact-based report of the state of your online performance.

With this empowering information, your consultant will begin to make recommendations to resolve threats and weaknesses and discuss options to leverage your strengths and capitalize on opportunities.

She will even be able to help you understand the current “absence of value” and the profitability of the applied solutions (aka the potential “value impact”).

Inbound Marketing Consultants – Our Approach

Using a proprietary online performance analysis, we analyze your company’s online and real-world strengths and opportunities. Then we:

• Identify your competition’s strengths and weaknesses
• Evaluate online and the business-related threats that might be sabotaging your success and strategize how these threats are best resolved
• Gain clarity around what’s working and not working in your current online efforts
• We develop an understanding of the value impact solutions and options that will fulfill your company’s goals and objectives
• Examine your internal systems and marketing and sales processes to identify gaps that may be sabotaging conversions of marketing leads to sales leads and ultimately conversions of sales leads to new customers

With a clear understanding of your company’s goals and a collaborative approach, we begin the process of identifying and refining the inbound marketing strategy that will provide the greatest results for your business’ unique goals and opportunities. We begin by:

• Prioritize and sequence the phases of your strategy for maximum results
• Then create an effective scope of work so that you can go out for bid and get proposals for the scope of work you actually need; alternatively, we’ll put together an action plan for your marketing tam
• We identify and help you understand the KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and measurable benchmarks you should be measuring and managing for peak performance
• One-to-one or in team clinics, we educate you and your team so that you understand what questions to ask, what data to look at and how to maximize the relationship with your marketing agency; alternatively, if you have an in-house marketing team, we’ll teach you how to get the most out of your strategy
• We’ll help you understand how to best use your agency partner as an extension of your own marketing department
• How to get the most out of your agency-partner-relationship and maximize your ROI

Your inbound marketing consultant is key to maximizing your revenue, profits and ROI.

In fact, a consultant worth their investment, will be able to show you how their fee creates value in the short- and long-term – in a quantitative way.

Our company, Blue Iris Marketing, is named for the results we get on behalf of our clients!

I am a strategist – have been for more than 9 years.  My company approaches everything from a strategic position. We are seasoned experts in corporate strategy development and execution. As a result, we know how to align strategy to every department of an organization – from the top down.

The Inbound Marketing arm of our organization was born out of customer demand. Our clients simply weren’t getting what they needed from the traditional website company.

The online world is very different than the real-world in a few very important ways.

It is ingrained in all of us that if you want something done well, you should hire someone who is an expert in that niche area. While that is true in most cases, it is only a partly true statement in the online world.

What am I saying?

You need a cohesive team of experts who work synergistically – and are incentivized as a whole and individually – to achieve the highest-level outcomes.

• If you hire a website designer separately from the developer, there exists a significant chance for the design and “design intention” to get lost.

• If you hire a website design and development firm that does not specialize – I mean really specialize, as in expert status – in SEO, your website is going to have problems. Don’t let anyone tell you that this is not true. I could write a series of articles on this one fact.

• If you hire an SEO expert who is not a content expert, you’ll be missing huge value in your SEO strategy and results.

• If you hire a content strategist who doesn’t understand succinctly, the goals of your campaign, your buyer personas and the buyer’s journey through which your buyer navigates – from the beginning symptoms of their need for your solution, to their decision to purchase – you’ll have a huge hole in your efforts. Your campaign will fail – for sure.

• If you piece-meal the technology or software platforms you use to execute your campaigns, you will miss out on significant automation and efficiency synergies. This will cost you money and result in missed opportunities. If your entire web solutions team isn’t using the same technology platform and accessing the same analytics, you have a huge gap in your processes. Your opportunities and conversions are falling through that gap.

• If your team doesn’t have a strong, fundamental understanding and cohesive effort around the cornerstones we’ve listed below, your inbound marketing spend will not return the results you were banking on:

• Aligning your business strategy to your marketing department goals
• Creating milestones and measurable benchmarks
• Translating daily, weekly and monthly data into strategy refinements that continually improve results
• Aligning, and annualizing the marketing department goals to the campaigns and campaign results
• Complete proficiency in:
  • Executing your company’s inbound strategy
  • Understanding and resolving the gaps that exist on the website
  • Designing the marketing funnel and translating it into effective campaigns, social and search engine marketing, lead nurturing campaigns and sequences and conversion funnels
• Reporting KPIs and recommended pivots to the leadership team
• Translating results into quantifiable returns that the leadership team can understand and take action on
• Understanding how to identify and communicate the required resources for next phases in terms that are meaningful to the leadership team

Having a marketing leader (internal employee or agency partner) who is driving the strategy, the execution, the measurables (KPIs), the strategy refinements and implementation is critical to achieving the goals of inbound marketing on online initiatives

Let’s look at this at 30,000 feet.

Whether your company is large or small, in the online world, the best solution is a full-suite agency that employs teams of experts who work together cohesively to deliver maximum results.

Hopefully, it makes sense why you need a team that is oriented around your company’s clearly defined online goals and is accustomed to working together synergistically to maximize the results of your strategy and campaigns. Having a dedicated team that is responsible for the outcomes of a comprehensive campaign is the best way to achieve maximum results.

If you have a marketing department, you’ll want to be sure they work cohesively together and have a shared understanding and responsibility to the whole goal and to each other’s performance. You’ll want to consider employing team performance rewards that are linked to the success of the entire project, as well as individual performance rewards that are linked to their personal performance. It often works best when the team performance reward is weighted higher than the individual performance reward.

If your team has proficiency or capacity gaps, you’ll want to hire an agency partner that will work as an extension with your internal marketing team.

Whatever your unique situation, an expert inbound marketing consultant can help you identify the gaps and opportunities and navigate the proper level of support.

What does an inbound marketing consultant evaluate?

An inbound marketing (aka online marketing) consultant will conduct a thorough analysis of your company, your brand, your competition, your market, your industry and your opportunities.

By analyzing your:

• Online presence
• Existing data
• Industry analysis
• Brand perception
• Competition
• Search engine optimization (SEO)
• Current online marketing strategy
• Quality of your online strategy implementation
• The results you are getting

Your consultant will then be able to determine whether (your):

• Existing efforts are cohesive
• Whether there are value gaps that need to be resolved
• Business’s online presence is at its peak performance
• Identify what’s required to close the gaps and maximize results

Predicting Value Impact and ROI

And, finally, an expert consultant is equipped to provide you with a comprehensive strategy, milestones and KPIs and detailed action plan. A really good consultant will also be able to provide you with a clear and concise quantitative value impact analysis and expected ROI.

Your inbound marketing consultant may be completely independent or they may work for an inbound marketing agency.

Either way, their analysis and recommendations should be objective and factual.

Your consultant should provide you with a written report of the data, their recommendations and results, regardless of whether you hire the agency they work with. You should receive a report of the information (I’ve outlined herein) so that you can go out for bid, implement the recommendations in-house or hire their agency and manage the expectations and results effectively.

Two young woman at office working on a new creative design. Diverse team of professionals looking at a document smiling.

Hiring an Inbound Marketing Consultant – Types of Engagements

The suite of consulting services each client needs varies. We’ve created several engagement options, including an ongoing engagement for companies that require third-party management of the execution and results of their inbound marketing and online performance strategies.

The majority of our engagements last approximately 60 – 90 days. They may include some or all of the following services:   

A two-day workshop with the leadership. We provide pre-clinic intake assessments to insure we gain a deep understanding of the company’s:

• Culture
• Goals
• Objectives
• Growth plan
• Operations
• Marketing and sales processes and resources

Our goal is to gain a clear understanding of the business from the top down

• Collect data to support a successful and thorough SWOT analysis
• Review with leadership, the existing marketing assets, processes and messaging
• Analyze your Inbound / Online marketing strengths, capabilities, practices
• Audit existing tools, processes, resources and capacities
• Conduct industry and competitor analyses
• Identify and develop or refine key buyer personas
• Develop a detailed content marketing strategy
• Create design mockups for a conversion-focused website redesign, when needed
• Design goals will be to create cohesive website branding and fresh-messaging, where needed
• Collaborate, design, review and finalize a detailed 12-month inbound marketing campaign strategy.

Strategy recommendations will:

• Prioritize and resolve key marketing challenges, weaknesses and address threats
• Increase brand awareness
• Increase sales qualified leads

Typical 60 – 90 Day Deliverables

• We provide a report of the results and recommendations from our interviews with
  • Customers
  • Targeted buyers
  • Your team members
• Develop a Marketing Scorecard that will include KPIs your marketing team should measure and managed for peak performance
• Either 1) deliver recommendations, the detailed strategy for all of the web solutions that were evaluated, including a detailed inbound marketing strategy and action plan, which includes the content marketing with individual campaign strategy and action plans or 2) deliver a detailed Scope of Work so that the client may go out to bid and receive pricing on a strategic scope of work
• Create design concepts and mockups for the company’s new home, interior and blog page, when needed

Pre-Engagement Research

When a client engages our 12-month inbound marketing services following this 60 – 90 day engagement, we provide a dedicated team whose initial priorities are to:

• Become completely familiar with the client’s industry, unique market position, culture, buyers and more, so they may further identify marketing opportunities, client strengths, weaknesses and possible threats
• Familiarize themselves with how the client is perceived by their employees, clients, referral sources and industry thought leaders
• Identify and create strategy to close any gaps between the way the company is perceived and the way it needs to be perceived

Fully comprehensive and scalable

We are able to scale our services according to your needs. Our services are available as:

• Fully comprehensive, end-to-end packages
• An extension to your marketing department to support you where you need it most
• Individual services
• Consulting only

Some of our inbound marketing service capabilities include:

• Inbound Marketing Strategy
• Conversion-Driven, Brand and User-Experience Design
• Inbound Website Design and Development
• Targeted Inbound Marketing Campaigns
• Marketing Automation and Sales Enablement
• Search Engine Optimization (White Hat)
• Social Media Strategy, Implementation and Management
• Email Marketing and Lead Nurturing
• Search Engine Marketing, PPC, Retargeting
• Social Media Marketing
• Content Audit
• Content Strategy and Asset Development
• Content Marketing
• Blogging Services
• Buyer Persona and Buyer’s Journey Development
• Comprehensive CRM technology
• Graphics Design
• Marketing collateral design and development
• Marketing communications (internal and external)
• Print design and marketing

If you are ready to turn your website into an online marketing machine, give us a call. We’ll help you evaluate your opportunities and your needs.

Whether you need an inbound marketing consultant to help you identify your greatest opportunities, strengths, weaknesses and threats or you need a full-service web solutions and inbound marketing agency to help you grow your brand and customer base, we can help you – one step at a time.

Connect with us and let’s discuss the possibilities.

It won’t cost a penny and it might be the most profitable decision you’ve made all year!

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• Website Performance
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• Inbound Marketing Strategy
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• Competition
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