The main reason you would consider hiring a content marketing consultant is that the right person will help you gain more customers and grow your business.
However, you may not be aware of some of the specific tasks that a marketing consultant takes on when working side by side with your team.
Ideally, a content marketing consultant will continually teach your team “how to fish” — not to work themself out of a job, but for the consultant to create greater synergy between themself and your team members.
As with sound equalization, the right mix of consultant contributions depends on several factors. In the case of marketing, these factors can include things such as overall goals and the ability of internal staff to take on certain tasks.
Over time, several tasks can be fully handed off to your internal team members so that the consultant can have a more concentrated focus.
We have assembled a list of typical content tasks to give you a better idea of what exactly a content marketing consultant does.
1. Learn about your product or service offerings
To help with valuable content, a content marketing consultant needs to become intimately familiar with your company’s products or services.
The consultant must also understand who is using your offerings and how it benefits them or their organization.
2. Assess your current digital presence
Through observation and data analysis, an inbound marketing consultant will assess and benchmark your current online presence.
The consultant will audit each of your content channels to develop strategies for the different mediums that you’ll be using.
3. Develop your content marketing strategy
The inbound marketing consultant will assemble all the information they learned about your business, product, or service offerings.
The consultant will then create an inbound marketing plan or playbook that will be used as a guide for marketing your product or service offering.
4. Apply SEO best practices to content
The consultant will research what keywords your competitors are ranking for. The search intent for keywords will be determined. Queries from Google Search Console will be examined.
This information will be used to assemble a list of higher volume, lower difficult keywords that can be applied to existing and new content.
The consultant will also recommend entities to include in content, based on an analysis of Google’s NLP results for top-performing content for the keyword.
5. Come up with a plan for social media
The inbound marketing consultant will help your business create a social media approach that both provides value to your audience and drives more traffic to your blog content and landing pages.
6. Create new blog content
Content marketing is based on the idea that prospective buyers are more likely to find your business if you create valuable content for your audience consistently.
For that to happen, however, you need a steady supply of valuable new content. New blog posts are key to this process.
7. Edit internally generated content
The marketing consultant works with internal team members to ensure the content that they initiate is edited and properly structured for search before it is published.
8. Re-optimize existing page & blog content
The best-laid marketing plans can be undermined by underperforming content.
A consultant can identify weaknesses of current content and recommend edits to these posts so you can get better results from your existing content.
9. Identify “low to no traffic” content that should be unpublished
Some existing content may be “thin” and not have a lot of value. Thin content can even have a negative value. To focus on the content that will succeed, an inbound marketing consultant will help you identify and remove content that isn’t doing anything for your online presence.
10. Suggest lead magnets and calls to action (CTAs)
Every piece of content is an opportunity to build your prospect list.
It is important for each blog post to have a contextually relevant call to action that encourages readers to take the next step — whether that is requesting a quote, scheduling a demo, or downloading a digital asset.
11. Recommend landing page structure and copy
A landing page has one job — to get a visitor to enter their information and hit the “Submit” button (although the button text should always be more action-oriented than “Submit”).
A well-designed landing page helps you tell a story and capture the prospect (or sale). A good consultant knows how to write copy that does just that.
12. Project manage the development of lead magnets
The content marketing consultant can coordinate the copy and the design of lead magnets such as cheat sheets, checklists, and white papers.
13. Make recommendations for acquiring high-value backlinks
Backlinks are an important ranking factor. An inbound marketing consultant works with you to leverage existing partnerships to increase your authority within the eyes of search engines.
14. Manage your Google Business Profile(s)
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) listing is a valuable inbound marketing asset. Many organizations, especially B2B companies, do not pay enough attention to GBP.
To make the most of this channel, you need someone who can optimize your profile and help you to feed GPb on an ongoing basis.
15. Create a marketing calendar
A marketing calendar is key to managing the development of content. An inbound marketing consultant knows how to put together a cohesive plan for content before an idea is even hatched.
16. Recommend content distribution channels
Distributing or “atomizing” your blog content can drive more members of your target audience to your website.
A content marketing consultant will work with you to determine whether and how to distribute your content using platforms such as Medium, SlideShare, Google Slides, and YouTube.
17. Run technical audits on your website
A sub-par page experience can harm your website traffic.
The consultant can run tests on your site and then recommend improving user experience to increase traffic.
18. Measure the performance of your inbound content
As with many other business initiatives, it’s important to set goals and measure progress against those goals.
Using freely available tools, an inbound consultant can create a customized marketing performance dashboard for you.
19. Ensure your marketing leads are being managed in a database
The starting point for some organizations is for visitor form submissions to be distributed internally as emails.
It’s important to capture inquiries into a marketing and/or sales database. An inbound consultant can help you with the mechanics of turning form submissions into records in a database.
20. Develop workflows and automations in your marketing or sales system
Once web form submissions are captured in a marketing database as prospects, workflows or automations can be applied to those prospects. Popular marketing automation platforms include HubSpot, Pardot, and ActiveCampaign.
Marketing system workflows can be used to send the right message to the right prospect at the right time. They can also be used to forward a prospect to the right salesperson at the right time.
21. Facilitate communication among salespeople and marketers
As most teams know, effective communication is fundamental to success. The inbound marketing consultant makes sure everyone is on the same page so they can do their work more efficiently.
We refer to this as sales & marketing synergy.
22. Help to foster a culture of content
The inbound marketing consultant helps to educate the internal team about content marketing. This means sharing best practices, resources, and methods for success.
23. Relay new information about SEO and inbound
In terms of inbound, the internet is in a state of constant flux. Whether it’s Google changing the rules or new competitors popping up, businesses need to continually adapt their approach to SEO and inbound.
An inbound consultant has to continually add to their base of knowledge. Any relevant, new information about strategies and tactics should be relayed to your team.
Conclusion
This article covers some of the more common tasks an inbound marketing consultant performs. But it’s by no means an exhaustive list.
If you have any questions about how an inbound marketing consultant can help you, don’t hesitate to ask. Our team would be happy to develop an inbound plan for your business.