What Does a Content Marketing Consultant Do for Your Business?

March 30, 2023 (Updated: May 4, 2023)

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Content marketing can sometimes feel like an uphill battle. Across managing all your different social channels, creating content, and optimizing as you go, it’s easy to feel a little stuck. To give your business the boost it needs, asking a subject-matter expert for help can go a long way. Content marketing consultants can revolutionize a company’s current strategy and help them build a better marketing plan going forward. To give understand just how impactful a content marketing consultant can be, we’ve created this guide, covering the following topics:

What Does a Content Marketing Consultant Do?
How Does a Content Marketing Consultation Work
What Are the Benefits of Working with a Content Marketing Consultant?
What to Consider When Working with a Content Marketing Consultant

What Does a Content Marketing Consultant Do?

A content marketing consultant works with your business to improve its content marketing strategy. To do this, they immerse themselves in the business and review current strategies, past performance, and all available sources of analysis. From there, they guide your business to more effective marketing by suggesting new strategies, channels, or marketing materials to use. Most content marketing consultants will work with a company for an extended period of time to support the strategies they outline.

How Does a Content Marketing Consultation Work?

Content marketing is a complex field that goes beyond just creating a blog. And as expansive as this field is, a consultation can focus on many areas. But if you’re looking for full content marketing consultation, an expert will usually walk you through a few key steps:

1. Conducting Research

Effective research is the first step toward any great marketing campaign. No matter the channel or the content format, research should always come first. With that in mind, content marketing consultants will regularly conduct in-depth research about your company. Most of the time, this starts with search engine optimization (SEO) analysis. With SEO analysis, the consultant looks at your website, your organic traffic, ranking keywords, and current marketing strategies. Using this data, they provide guidance and recommendations on the approaches your brand can take to improve your SEO and online presence.

While understanding the current status of a website and its optimization is important, it’s even more important to remember that no company exists in a vacuum. There’s a range of external factors influencing success, including competing brands and content. It’s a fact: You’re going to be competing with other brands. So content marketing consultants also perform competitor research. By discovering who your competitors are, what they rank for, and where their traffic comes from, you’ll be in a much better position in terms of overcoming them.

2. Assessing Current Marketing Strategies

Using the context they find in the research stage, a content marketing consultant then moves through the company’s current marketing materials. This includes reviewing current content strategies, the performance of online channels, and any analytics that are available. Overall, the first two stages in a content marketing consultation are all about building up a clear picture of your brand as a whole. Without clarity about what your brand is trying to do and where it’s trying to get to with content marketing, a consultant wouldn’t be able to give you useful advice.

3. Creating Objectives

After gathering initial research on your company and its competitors, a content marketing consultant starts to plan objectives. These goals should complement your current content marketing plans, helping your business to increase the impact of all your campaigns.

These objectives can vary, depending on your business goals and reasons for bringing on a content marketing consultant. For example, one company might want to focus on improving organic traffic from blogs, while another might only focus on boosting conversions through email marketing.

Any content marketing agency worth its salt should be able to guide you through full-funnel marketing strategies. Consultants should be able to structure goals based on the end results you want to achieve.

4. Planning the Strategy

Once a content marketing consultant establishes content marketing goals for your businesses, they suggest how you can reach them. This is often the most meticulous part, with some consultants planning out six months’ worth, or even a year’s worth, of content calendars.

The specific focuses of your strategy should align with your overall goals. For example, if generating more leads is the goal, you might focus on building out the breadth of your blog and concentrating on top-of-the-funnel marketing content. If you want to convert your current readers, then bottom-funnel marketing might be the objective instead.

5. Measuring and Adjusting Approaches

Finally, after establishing the research, goals, and strategy, it’s time to set the wheels in motion. Most content marketing consultants help your team produce content along your planned road map. They can wear many hats, helping the creative, writing, and digital marketing teams produce needed content.

Another big part of content marketing is understanding analytics and using them to tailor your strategy over time. Marketing consultants should be experts at understanding marketing analytics and drawing actionable insights from them. For example, if they notice that your customers respond well to a certain strategy, they may increase the amount of content produced in this area. Even with an expert, marketing is never a straight line. Your content marketing consultant will modify their strategy, iterate, and shape your course over time.

What Are the Benefits of Working with a Content Marketing Consultant?

Whether you need to completely rework your strategy or just need a little guidance, content marketing consultants can be an invaluable addition to your team. As professionals that have worked for years in this field and can offer a lot to your team:

Expertise

A consultant is someone that has built up extensive experience in their chosen field. Over the course of their own pursuits in content marketing, they will have built up an extensive knowledge of the industry.

Their training in content marketing alongside any qualifications that they’ve gained over the years gives them the knowledge to help improve their clients’ current marketing workflows. What’s more, many consultants have diverse strategies they’ve developed through expertise, serving as valuable resources for brands’ authority content.

As a person that’s developed several content marketing strategies over the years, they know what works and what doesn’t. They can save you the headaches of trial and error and help streamline your content marketing output from the beginning. Whether you need to ask a difficult question or need someone to fully guide your team, content marketing consultants often do it all.

Accountability

It’s no secret how effective content marketing is for reaching customers. But many companies can find it overwhelming, especially considering the many forms of content there are to use. This overwhelm can lead to inactivity and even a lack of accountability with maintaining consistent content production and promotion.

Working with a content marketing consultant can combat this, though. By delegating the management of your content creation and promotion processes to a consultant, they can ensure teams stay organized and on track to meet important goals. This added accountability can help keep your content consistent across all your marketing channels, improve productivity, and lead to more leads and conversions over time.

Flexibility

For a lot of small businesses, the thought of bringing on a full-time employee to manage online content can be a little daunting. Although we know how effective content marketing is, that doesn’t mean you necessarily have the budget for a full-time marketer. In this regard, content marketing consultants can make the perfect in-between team player.

This is because many content marketing consultants freelance. So instead of committing to a full-time employee, you’ll be working with your consultant—or consulting agency—on a contract basis. This can remove a lot of the pressure that comes with employee management, helping you save money and the time it takes to hire and train a new employee. If you’re just dipping your toes into scaled content marketing, then a test run with a consultant can provide a great deal of flexibility and support.

Objectivity

At the end of the day, content marketing requires creativity. From developing water-tight copywriting that engages your customers to designing beautiful graphics that add to your content, creativity is everywhere in marketing. Sometimes, this can lead to marketing managers feeling a little personal about their projects. Instead of constructive criticism and improvement over time, any comment about content or a campaign can start to feel like an attack. Equally, some people may not be able to separate personal pride from their marketing campaigns, which can hurt your returns in the long run.

This is where a content marketing consultant can help. An external source provides a more objective perspective that separates the personal from impersonal. And this objective viewpoint can be extremely beneficial for teams struggling to adjust with evolving strategies.

What To Consider When Working With a Content Marketing Consultant

If you’re searching for a content marketing consultancy service, there are a number of qualities you should look for. These cover everything from experience to testimonials from past clients. Equally, you should always check out what content marketing industries someone specializes in to ensure their expertise aligns with your business’s product or service offering.

When you work with a content marketing consultant, they’ll outline some core objectives that your business will work toward. Beyond these, though, a consultant will likely suggest focusing on several key marketing KPIs:

Total organic traffic: One of the main goals of content marketing is to improve the organic traffic to your website. If you notice that your inbound clicks are improving across different mediums, you’re on to a winner.
New leads: Whether it’s email signups, new accounts on your site, or qualified sales leads, more leads will always be a good thing.
Conversion rate: Conversion is closely tied to bottom-funnel marketing. If your marketing consultant is helping to optimize this part of the funnel, your conversion rate should begin to improve.
Engagement: Engagement is a good blanket KPI to track as you’ll be able to find individual data on all the channels that you use.

As you can see from the SemRush graph below, not all marketing departments will focus on the same goals:

It’s also important to understand that successful content marketing doesn’t mean you’ll see results overnight. Your posts might not start to gain traction for several weeks—or even months—especially with a long-term strategy like SEO content creation. If you’re a startup or a newer company, it could take even longer. So, make sure that you give your new strategy enough time to work its magic. Then, continue adjusting and improving on your approaches to maximize on your content marketing.

Get Started With Your Content Marketing Consultation

For even more insights into how a consultation can add to your content marketing, contact the team at CopyPress. Our experts can help you pinpoint your goals and create a strategy that can support your efforts and drive results.