What you’ll learn about hiring an inbound marketing consultant:

• Inbound marketing consultants help businesses stand up or optimize their inbound marketing efforts
• Compared to inbound marketing agencies, they’re often a better choice for small- to medium-sized businesses
• Five benefits of hiring an inbound marketing consultant

As a small- to medium-sized business leader, you have so much on your plate. From designing and building your product, hiring the right people, and finding the right technologies to support your business, there’s a lot on your plate. Sometimes, all you need is a little help. 

One of the areas where you can bring in an external party to help reduce the load is inbound marketing. Focused on helping you educate and attract potential customers—as well as build trust in your brand—inbound marketing consultants offer a ton of experience that can directly benefit your business. 

In this post, we’re taking a look at why hiring an inbound marketing consultant might make sense for you. But first, let’s get some definitions out of the way.

What Is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound marketing is the process of attracting customers by sharing valuable content and experiences that are tailored to them. The primary goal is to build trust and provide potential customers with a solution to the problems they have. This can happen even before a prospect is ready to make a purchase—at the top of the marketing funnel—where you create awareness around your brand and encourage people to become a lead and then make a purchase. 

More specifically, inbound marketing is a strategy that uses various types of marketing tools—from content marketing efforts to events, search engine optimization, and social media—to make a brand more discoverable and attract new business. It focuses on increasing the visibility of a brand so that people come to you, instead of you chasing after them when they don’t need you.

What Does an Inbound Marketing Consultant Do?

As an approach with multiple elements, inbound marketing can require a lot of time and effort, especially for small businesses that have other priorities on their plates. Beyond creating the content or running events, you also need to track the performance of these events, and use that data to shape your strategy. This is where an inbound marketing consultant can come in handy. 

An inbound marketing consultant’s role is to help businesses with their inbound marketing efforts both at the strategic and executional level. Using their experience in the space, they help businesses establish a foundation of inbound marketing capabilities and then step away once the business has the time and resources to manage them on their own. 

Unlike inbound marketing agencies, which are better suited for large organizations that need a robust team behind their marketing efforts, an individual consultant is ideal for small- and medium-sized businesses that are just starting their inbound marketing efforts. Below, we’ve outlined some of the reasons for why you might want to bring an inbound marketing consultant into the fold.

Here’s Why You Should Hire an Inbound Marketing Consultant

To help you figure out whether an inbound marketing consultant is the right investment for you and your team, we’ve identified five reasons that could prompt you to do it.

1. You Don’t Have The Right Resources To Execute Inbound Marketing Effectively

As we mentioned above, inbound marketing is an intensive undertaking with a lot of different bits and pieces. For smaller organizations that lack the budget for a full-time employee (or two) to own the processes, partnering with an external consultant can give you those initial resources without draining your savings. This is a cost-effective way to start building your inbound marketing capabilities so that you can then hire more people to do the work when your budget allows for it.

2. You Get The Gist Of Inbound Marketing, But You Don’t Know How To Execute It

The inbound marketing funnel may be a simple enough concept to grasp, but there’s actually a lot of work that goes into attracting new traffic, giving them reasons to convert, connecting them with sales, and then ensuring they stay happy customers. Bringing a specialist on board can help you make sure that all the moving parts are working properly so that all the touchpoints with the prospect are smooth, engaging, and productive. Plus, an inbound marketing consultant can also help you avoid any mistakes that you might make on your own. 

3. You Still Have a Lot to Learn 

You don’t know what you don’t know. An external consultant can help you spot your knowledge gaps and fill them with what they’ve learned helping other companies. Once you have them on-board, you can set up knowledge transfer sessions where they talk to you about the approaches they’ve taken to make the inbound process work effectively across different industries and sectors. This knowledge can then empower you to have a more constructive role in setting the inbound marketing strategy, whether you still have your consultant’s support or not. 

4. You Need Inbound Marketing to Be a Priority—But You Don’t Have Time for It

When we’re trying to build something new—especially something we don’t fully understand—it can be hard for it to remain a priority when there are fires to put out on a daily basis. Hiring a consultant lets you assign a dedicated resource to an important initiative, while also giving you the space to keep putting out those fires. The bonus? You won’t feel guilty for not paying attention to inbound. 

5. You’re Not in a Position to Take Risks

Hiring full time employees to manage a function you don’t fully understand is a massive investment—and it doesn’t always pay off. Instead, working with a consultant gives you the opportunity to work with someone who has a proven track record in helping companies, who can then also support you in creating job descriptions and finding the right candidates for your growing in-house inbound marketing team.

Does this sound like the position you’re in currently? Then it might be time to consider adding an inbound marketing consultant to your business. 

At Umami Marketing, we’re a small but mighty team setting companies up for success across various parts of inbound marketing. If you’d like to learn more about how we do that, get in touch.