You are probably bombarded by people trying to sell you marketing services and marketing solutions so I would like to explain why working with a marketing coach is so effective and how it differs from working with a marketing consultant or the businesses who promote what I call marketing media solutions.
In Why Marketing Frustrates I identified four key aspects of your marketing:
- Having the right marketing mindset
- Targeting the right markets
- Sending the right marketing messages
- Using the most cost effective marketing media
A marketing consultant is a marketing expert who will provide a "done for you" service which limits your time required in marketing. This can be a great benefit for someone with more money than time.
If you need to research a new market, you can find a marketing consultant and they will research the market and write a feasibility study based on what they have learnt.
If you want to put together a new brochure, a marketing consultant can coordinate with your graphic design agency, photographer and printer and write the copy so that you have a new brochure.
If you want to launch a new advertising campaign, a marketing consultant can design the promotion and negotiate with the advertising media.
If you need a new marketing strategy a marketing consultant can write the strategy for you based on extensive research.
A marketing consultant will save you time and often this is invaluable but there are two downsides:
- The cost - a good marketing consultant will be expensive
but should earn the money back many times over. The more work you
outsource to a marketing consultant, the more it costs.
- Your knowledge and ownership of the marketing solution -
the more you use a "done for you" service from a marketing consultant,
the more you rely on other people for the success of your business and
the more you miss the opportunity to learn the essential discipline of marketing yourself.
A marketing coach will teach you how to fish.
There is a time and a place to employ marketing consultants but I hope that you can see the benefits of working with a marketing coach to learn the right marketing mindset and to upgrade your own marketing skills.
When you have the right marketing skills you can delegate the marketing support work to your own staff with confidence.
Marketing Media Salespeople
I am sure you, like me, regularly receive telephone calls, letters and emails from all kinds of different marketing media companies promising you a stream of warm leads if only you spend some money.
- Yellow pages
- Website designers
- Website directories
- Exhibitions
- Telemarketing
- Printers
A good test is to ask them if they will guarantee the number of enquiries you will receive or in any way guarantee that you will receive value for money?
You may already have found out at your cost that
- Yellow Pages doesn't work for your business,
- That having a website doesn't work,
- That having your company details in
website directories doesn't work,
- That having a brochure doesn't work,
- That networking doesn't work and
- That telemarketing doesn't work.
Each can work but the marketing media is only part of the answer.
Investments in marketing media will only work reliably if you invest in developing the right marketing mindset, if you select the target market you can best service with what they want and need and if you use compelling marketing messages.
Marketing Coaching Is The Answer
Yes I admit it. I am biased but I hope you can see that marketing coaching is the only solution that works on all four essential components - your marketing mindset, your target market, your marketing messages and the marketing media you should be using.
I offer two marketing coaching programs:
Guerrilla Marketing Coaching - specialising in the high impact, low and no cost marketing techniques made popular in the world's best-selling brand of marketing books in history.
Bespoke Marketing Coaching - a stripped down version of my business coaching program focusing on the main marketing pillars included within the Eight Pillars of Business Prosperity coaching model.
This website also includes a number of business development programs which you can buy "off the shelf" which I have used and reviewed and I am happy to recommend.
These business development programs are a lower cost solution to improving your marketing knowledge and skills but they lack the personal one-to-one interaction, focus and accountability that comes from a coaching program.