Do You Need a Content Marketing Consultant?

Content marketing has become a key part of every company’s strategy. If you don’t have a clear idea of what content marketing is or why it matters, then you might want to consider hiring a consultant.

A content marketing consultant helps businesses create and distribute high quality content that attracts customers. They also provide guidance on how to measure success and improve performance.

When is the Right Time to Hire a Content Marketing Consultant?

You’ve chosen a content marketing strategy to generate leads

If you’ve chosen a content marketing strategy to generate leads, you might want to consider hiring a consultant. A content marketing consultant can help you create and distribute high quality content that attracts customers. They can also provide guidance on how to measure success and improve performance. So, when is the right time to hire a content marketing consultant? The answer depends on your business and your goals. If you’re looking to take your content marketing strategy to the next level, or if you’re not sure where to start, then it’s probably time to hire a consultant.

You want to generate new customers with organic traffic 

Content marketing consultants are specifically trained in search engine optimized content creation so that when your target audience searches for a problem, product, or service that you provide, they find you.

This is a much more technically complicated effort that goes way beyond just creating content. A good content marketer can help you organize your thoughts and ideas in a way that identifies the top 20% of topics that will generate 80% of your organic results.

You want to publish more blog content

Assuming you have a solid content strategy and content calendar, you’re going to want to publish a lot of engaging content consistently. Most content marketing consultant services include planning out and creating blog posts that will help you achieve your goals.

You want to develop and build your online reputation 

A content strategy requires that you build your authority and reputation. And most content marketers know exactly how to create the kind of great content that will do that.

The Benefits of a Content Marketing Consultant

Measure Success

When you hire a content marketing consultant, you can track your progress by measuring results. This allows you to see which areas of your business need improvement.

Improve Performance

Your content marketing consultant will help you identify where you’re losing potential customers. Once you understand these issues, you’ll be able to make changes to your website and other digital assets to improve conversion rates.

Create More Leads

Your content marketing consultant will work with you to create lead magnets that convert visitors into paying clients. These lead magnets could include ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc.

Increase Sales

Once you start generating leads, your content marketing consultant will help turn those leads into sales. Your consultant should be able to show you examples of companies who have used similar tactics to grow their business.

Reduce Costs

Hiring a content marketing consultant means you won’t have to spend money on advertising. Instead, you can focus on growing your business instead of spending time creating ads.

Build Trust

Trust is one of the most important things that people look for when choosing a company. When you hire a content marketing specialist, you’ll gain trust because you’ll be providing them with valuable information about your business.

Build Authority

A content marketing consultant can help you and your business build authority and credibility by generating  

The Drawbacks to a Content Marketing Consultant

Can be expensive

If you choose to hire a content marketing consultant without doing some research first, you may end up paying too much. It’s important to find someone who offers value before you pay for services.

Highly specialized

Some content marketing consultants lack experience in certain areas of content marketing. For example, they may not know how to write an ebook or how to use social media effectively. This is why I recommend hiring more than one person.

How Much Should You Pay For a Content Marketing Consultant?

There are many factors that determine how much you should pay for a content marketing consultant. The following are just a few:

Experience level – A content marketing consultant with years of experience can charge more than someone who has been working as a consultant for less than a year.

Skillset – Some consultants specialize in SEO while others focus on email marketing. You may want to consider hiring someone who specializes in your industry.

Services offered – Some consultants provide all of the services listed above while others only offer select services.

My recommendations on setting a budget for paying a content marketing consultant:

• Write down your business goals and prioritize them.
• Set a monthly budget for how much you can afford to spend.
• Start by looking at freelance content marketing consultant that you find on Upwork.
• Make a list of specific projects and tasks and talk to a variety of content marketing folks. and get quotes to find out what you should budget.
• Look for a content marketing agency and see if they have packages that you can afford.

Start with about $200-$500 for a project. If you go less than that, you may not get the quality that you’re looking for. If you go more than that, the quality you get is NOT going to be that different.

What Do Content Marketing Consultants Do?

Content marketing consultants do everything from writing blog posts to managing social media accounts. They also work closely with other members of your team to ensure that your website and social media pages are optimized for search engines.

Here are some of the main responsibilities of a content marketing consultant:

Strategy and project management

Your content marketing consultant will help you create a strategy that’s tailored to your business goals and target audience. Once the strategy is in place, your consultant will manage and oversee all of the projects related to your content marketing plan.

Content Marketing Plans and Calendars

You can hire a freelance content marketer to help you create a content marketing plan and calendar. Believe it or not, this is a talent in and of itself. In fact, if you like to write your own content, having a content plan and calendar will eliminate hours and hours of planning and brainstorming.

Another benefit to having someone help you with a content plan and calendar is that this gives you a roadmap you can use to hire freelancers to create social media content.

Articles & Business Blog Posts

This is what most people think of when they think of content marketing. While you can certainly hire a content marketing agency to write articles and blog posts, this is something that a freelancer or content marketer can do as well.

SEO Optimization

Search engine marketing and search engine optimization are a skill that is separate from writing. The combination of writing, content marketing and SEO are the true engine behind your online marketing efforts.

Long-Form Content & Ghostwriting

If you’re interested in creating long-form, ind depth content like an ebook, white paper, or case studies, a good content writer can make this infinitely easier.

Content Promotion

You may not think so, but content promotion is something that is yet another special skill that content marketing consultants can help you with.

Promoting your content with social media posts as well as with PPC ads will drive traffic to any sales pages with your offers on them.

SEO Consulting

There are two kinds of SEO consultants. Technical SEO consultants who deal with user experience and site organization and content SEO consultants who can help with content optimization and helping you with a content strategy that includes defining the best keywords and keyword phrases as well as potential topics.

Acquire brand mentions & backlinks

Another element of SEO consulting is to build your website’s authority and credibility with link building. This means that you’re enrolling other credible sites in your industry to link back to you and mention your brand.

This is a lot like a PR activity because it requires you to build relationships with other experts and brands in your industry.

This might also require writing articles and blog posts for other sites. And, if you’re busy running a business, you’ll need someone to write for you.

Fuel your inbound marketing and sales funnels & drive sales

Of course, the most important element of your content marketing strategy is to generate leads. And that means that you’ll have some sort of marketing and sales funnel.

An important part of every funnel is CONTENT. That content includes, a landing page, video, webinar, video sales letter, and emails.

Again, each of these pieces of content requires a specific writing skill and style.

What to Look For in a Good Marketing Consultant

The first thing I’m going to tell you is don’t look for ONE content marketing consultant. And that should be great news for you because it’s going to save you a ton of money.

Because content marketing has so many moving parts, each individual task requires its own skillset.

Where to start?

In this section, I’m going to give you my priority list. I recommend you look at hiring multiple people with specialized skill sets. No one is great at everything. You might also look at hiring an agency to cover all of the skill sets. They will assign you an expert as you go through the process.

There are three basic skill areas for content marketing consultants:

1. Strategy: These are folks who can help you prioritize and organize your content based on your business goals, marketing strategies, offer etc. They will help you make sense out of everything and create a content marketing plan and calendar along with other high-level decisions.
2. Content Creation: With the strategy. plans, and calendars in hand, you’re ready to create content. Here, you can hire consultants who specialize in each type of content; video, audio, written, social, etc. This will also include things like understanding Google Analytics, collecting and using client testimonials as a way to attract traffic and site visitors.
3. Promotion: You will have chosen your promotion channels such as Facebook or Google ads and once you’ve chosen that, you’ll want to hire consultants who have hands on experience with creating ads in each of those specific channels Every ad channel has its unique quirks so it’s best to find someone who works in that channel.

Now that you see that these are three entirely different skill sets, it’s a lot easier to choose which skill set you’re hiring for and whether you need one or more people.

How to find someone who best matches your needs

Now that you understand that you will need at least 3 types of people to help you with content, I recommend that you start one at a time.

If you don’t have a content strategy or calendar, then look for a strategist who can help you with that.

Start working with your calendar and notice where you’re stuck and what type of person you’ll need to create your content.

Finally, after you have that system buttoned down, you can tart hiring writers to create content at a quality level that you’re happy with.

So take it one at a time and use this process.

Create a profile of the type of person you want and their qualifications

Before you go out looking for a content marketing consultant, create a profile of the ideal person. This profile can include any of the following:

• Geography
• Industry specialization
• Works with specific tools
• Years of experience
• Agency or Freelancer
• How you want to communicate with them
• Software they need to know and use

This is a short list, but it will get your started.

Set a monthly budget — 10x more isn’t 10x better

THIS is critical. Yes, people will give you their rates, but it’s important for you to set a monthly budget that you can afford.

This doesn’t mean that you should hire the cheapest person, either.

When you start looking at writers, you’ll notice that some charge $30/hr and some charge $300/hr. What I learned the hard way, was that $300/hr might cost 10x more, but the writing wasn’t 10x better.

This is when I decided to set a monthly budget and look for people who were “just right” for me and my project.

Make a list of specific tasks you are looking for

With a budget in hand, and an understanding that you need strategy, content, or promotion — you’re ready to dig a little deeper and create a list of specific outcomes you want and the tasks needed to get there.

If you’re NOT sure what tasks you’ll need, stick to the outcomes and search for that.

Here are some sample tasks

Strategy:

• Meet with me
• Create a content marketing strategy
• Create a content marketing plan that includes, monthly themes, SEO keywords, and topic ideas for each week.

Content:

• Write 3, 1000-keyword optimized blog posts on industry topic each week.
• Convert blog posts to videos and videos to blog posts-

Promotion

• Create and schedule social media posts into Buffer
• Create custom images and videos for social media posts

So this is an example of what your tasks might look like as you start bringing your digital marketing plan to life.

Create and document a process you want to follow

Even though you may NOT be an expert in content creation, you should have a written out process or plan of how you’re going to achieve your goals. It doesn’t have to be some big formal document, just something that will give the consultant enough information to help you with your content marketing efforts.

Ask your network for referrals

Of course, the best place to go to find someone to help you with your content marketing is to ask your network for referrals. This is a quick and easy way to get the ball rolling. Again, be sure to understand who your target audiences are, and how you intend to drive qualified traffic.

Create a document with questions that you’re going to ask

The next step is to schedule meetings or interviews with the folks that you’ve identified.

Do NOT attempt to run these conversations cold. Prepare by having a written discussion guide with the questions you want to ask in order to determine their level of expertise.

Here is my list:

• Do they have experience driving results from content marketing?
• Are they content marketing thought-leaders?
• Do they have processes to develop and execute content marketing strategies?
• What type of content do they excel in? Blogging, Case Studies, White Papers, etc.
• How do they measure success? 
• Request and verify their references

How much is a content marketing consultant paid?

The average salary for a Content Marketing Specialist is $62,150 per year in the United States. The median pay is $62,150. The middle 57% of Content Marketing Specialists earn between $62,150 and $67,300 each year, with the top 86% earning more than that.

Measure ROI of Content Marketing Consulting Services

How do you know you’re getting your money’s worth? It will take a little time — say about 60-90 days, but you should start seeing results in the areas you’ve targeted.

Here are a few things you can measure:

• Increase in website traffic
• Backlinks and brand mentions
• Number of new leads and conversion rate

How do I become a content marketing consultant?

The best way to become a content marketing consultant is to start out as a content writer. There are many online courses and resources that can help you learn the ropes of content writing. Once you have a strong understanding of how to write great content, start building your portfolio and reach out to companies that could use your help. You can also join online communities and forums where content marketers gather and offer your services.

Where can I get practical education and experience?

I think it’s a great idea to read a couple of books to get you started

I also recommend Julia McCoy’s Content Hacker Courses. Her philosophy on generating results with content is extremely user based and uses solid SEO strategy.

Summary and Conclusion

Unless you love writing and creating content as part of your business, you’ll want to get help with your content. Here’s a short list of consultants you’ll want to look at:

• Content marketing strategist
• Content creation expert
• Content promoter
• Graphic designer

You’ll appreciate the outside perspective you get from these content experts who can really help you come up with a plan that makes sense.

I know I gave you a lot of information here – but if you follow this process and the order I recommended you’ll see results in just a few months.