Everyone wants marketing. Everyone wants the best marketing consultant. Everyone wants to spend close to nothing.
Now please you stop dreaming and let’s go to understand how you can “understand” if your marketing consultant is right for you.
Somebody can now say: it is simple, if he brings results he is good otherwise not. But you have results only after he started to work (and being paid) and sometime results is not the perfect parameter to consider.
There is a big issue that any marketing consultant should manage first: he doesn’t know your business.
You are the “king” of your business, you know market, customers, business model, goals, needs. He knows nothing about that.
So here are the rules to follow to understand if that marketing consultant really cares about your results:
1) First questions he does are about your business
If he starts talking about the past results he did with other customers, I would try to understand if he applies standard model to any customer. In this case sometime he is lucky, sometime not. In your case maybe he will not be lucky
2) He spends time with you to understand what you want really
It is not true that any company wants to grow:it is different for each company how they want and they can grow. A good marketing consultant helps you to go where you want to go, not where he thinks he is right to go
3) He explains you the “why”
He knows nothing about your business but probably you know little about digital marketing. The difference here is that you are paying him. So it is important that he is able to share with you the reasons why he is planning to do something. It is a way to make you able to review him
4) He admits mistakes
Everyone does mistakes. Then there are people that find a culprit for everything. But they never learn from their mistakes. Others they know they can do mistakes. In this case they learn from the, they know how to repair what they did wrong.