ancef.info

Many marketing consultants spend some of their time helping businesses market their blog. Why? Because blogs are a way to reach out to customers that goes above and beyond the traditional website. While your business website may describe in great detail exactly what your business is, how it operates, what your business philosophy is, and how clients can contact you, a blog is more informal. Blogs help show a personal side to the business world.

For example, a realtor who has a professional website detailing listings still remains somewhat of a mystery to potential clients. But a realtor who has a professional website and a link to his or her blog allows potential clients a different look at their personality and business sense. That’s because you can include blog posts that are personal stories, information about your industry, professional advice with personal anecdotes, and run contests or giveaways. Your blog is a means to reach a wide audience and get them to want to work with you.

How Marketing Consultants Can Increase Your Search Engine Ranking

One reason you may not be reaching clients with your website or blog is because you don’t have it optimised to attract the search engines. When an Internet user plugs in a few keywords, the search engine crawls around looking for the best possible matches. If your site isn’t optimized for any of the keywords commonly used to search for your type of business, your site will get buried pages deep in the results, and only those familiar with your product or service will know to search for you.

Marketing consultants understand what it means to optimize a blog for the search engines. Since search engine optimization can take a while to learn, your consultant will most likely recommend that you consider hiring someone to optimize your blog and website. This can be a freelance writer who creates the majority of your blog posts or a web design company that specializes in blog optimization.

Advertise Your Blog

Just like a website, if no one knows your blog exists you won’t have any readers. A consultant can help get your business on social networking sites that allow advertising. You can post on these networks when you have a new blog post or when you want to direct someone to your blog. Your consultant will explain how to maintain a presence on these sites without seeming like you’re posting just for promotion. By using marketing consultants to create and advertise your blog, you draw in potential clients and build your brand.

In general, case interview is very common in interviews with consulting companies, interviewer will measure a candidate’s attitude toward risk and comprehensive logical analysis ability with some cases, to see whether a candidate is flexible and can adapt quickly.

There are two stages of case interview: preparative stage and formal case interview stage. During the preparative stage, you may need to introduce yourself. Then answer the interviewer’s question about your resume and some broadly issues about personal considerations.

The next stage is a formal case interview. Case interview is to draw a conclusion about some business issues with analysis. Unlike other kinds of interviews, case interview is an interactive process. You will get some business issues from the interviewer and are required to provide an analysis and advice on these issues. Your task is to put forward some logical questions to the interviewer in order that you could have more comprehensive and detailed realization on these issues, and finally give a conclusion through systematic analysis.

Please keep in mind there are not absolutely correct answers in case interview, interviewer concerned about your analytical ability and creativity exhibited during the interview, but not the answer.

Purpose of case interview

Consultant will spend lots of time with their clients and colleagues for the purpose of intercommunion, and they were required to have some special qualities in order to succeed in consulting projects. These qualities include: ability to remain calm under pressure, ability to quickly established an assumption according to the details of projects, and make a conclusion depend on strong logical analysis capability and so on. Therefore, the cases interview which highly interactive and tight bounds for practical as well as strong requirement analysis skill would let interviewer evaluate the qualities of candidates effectively.

Which qualities are crucial in case interview?

Leadership

Consultant must be able to work independently and lead a focused team to achieve common goals. Therefore, the leadership is very important to a consultant. During the case interview, you need to grasp the initiative and ask target questions confidently in order to embody your leadership potential.

Analysis ability

Analysis is the core competency in consulting industry. In case interview, your task is to put forward assumption depending on the facts, understanding the meaning of the data, and then form a set of analytical framework, reached the conclusions and recommendations finally. During the case interview, you need to put effective and purpose questions in order to embody your analysis ability.

Expression ability

Once the consultant has carried out a detailed project analysis as well as work out best strategy, he need to demonstrate the solutions and recommend it to the consulting team and discuss it with clients. Therefore, the ability of expression is also very crucial to a consultant. For this reason, in case interview you should always spend some time think before speak, would rather to slow down a bit than stammer.

Energetic

Consulting firms want their consultant still energetic enough when them appearance before customers even after 12 hours aircraft time. So give your interviewer a firm handshake, a genuine smile with self-confidence and clean appearance will leave the interviewer a good impression and get a good start in case interview.

Calm

In case interviews, sometimes the interviewer will deliberately create a very tense atmosphere, for example, ask constantly aggressive questions and always deny you. These does not mean that you have come a wrong way, In fact they want to inspect whether or not you could stay calm under pressure. You should know that when a consultant face to face with clients, it is very important quality of thinking deeply under pressure and resolve the problems calmly.

Types of case interviews

There are three general types of cases interview: guesstimates, business cases and brainteasers. Let’s discuss these in detail:

Guesstimates

These kinds of questions are always referred as market assessment, you need to estimate the size of a market even though the details are not available, such as: you may be asked to estimate the elevation of rocky mountain.

Same as the other case interviews, it is not very important to get a correct answer, but the method you decomposed a large-scale project into several small-scale projects and resolve each one respectively is really the most crucial, as well as you should have some common sense to answer these kinds of question.

Business cases

For business cases interviews, the most common case is that interviewer ask you how to analyze an project according to the description of project background such as market entry, profit decline, industry analysis, sales decline and so on. The interviewer always doesn’t provide you enough detailed information, so you need to keep on asking targeted questions in order to get more useful information.

Brainteasers

Brainteasers are often very hard and very tricky questions that include mystery question and numerical estimates question. The purpose of these questions is to inspect your creativity and ability to analyze and resolve issues under pressure.

In general, case interview will include either a long time business case, or two short time cases: almost inevitably one should be guesstimates and the other one might be brainteasers or a short time business cases.

If you feel like you can market your business online in the same way as an Internet marketing consultant, you may not realise the scope of this professional’s job. A business consultant who specialises in Internet marketing does more than just submit your website to the search engines. A good consultant studies the market, understands which marketing tactics are currently working on the web, and employs certain marketing aspects that attract potential customers to your business. There are a number of ways a consultant can market your business, but many of them focus on search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and social media strategies.

What Is Search Engine Optimisation?

When you create a business website you give out the web address to current clients. But how do you attract new customers? The web is full of websites, many of them probably like yours. How do you guarantee that when a person performs an Internet search for your type of business that your company will show up in the search engine results? Without an experienced Internet marketing consultant marketing for you, you probably won’t be able to guarantee anything.

One way Internet marketers draw attention to your business is by submitting articles to article directories. These directories draw thousands of visitors a day who are looking for information about your type of business. For example, if you run a dry cleaning business the consultant may draft up a handful of articles that discuss different aspects of dry cleaning. At the end, or sometimes mixed into the article, there will be one or two links directing readers to your business website. If you sell a product or service, this can greatly increase your business. By using words in the article that the consultant knows readers use to search, your business starts showing up on the front page of search results.

What Is Social Media?

Social media is the term used to describe Internet applications that allow users to communicate. It’s recently become quite popular and many consultants will recommend that you set up business sites at some of the more popular social media outlets. Blogging is also an aspect of social media, and a marketing professional knows how to create blog posts that not only attract people searching the Internet, but draw traffic to your business website. Social media allows you to reach people you wouldn’t normally have targeted in a typical business demographic marketing effort. By using an Internet marketing consultant, you can get your business and your brand out to a wider audience.

Choosing the right consultant for any job or project is extremely crucial. So, if you are looking for one yourself, make sure that you follow the steps given below.

Pre-requisite – Before you go into the full mode of looking for the perfect consultant, you must at first define the goals of the project and understand them in great detail. This is important because once when you will understand the need of the project yourself, only then will you be able to find the right person for the job. Thus, it is highly recommended that you first spend some time with your project and then go out to look for the perfect candidate.

Ask people around – The first and foremost thing that you must do is check with your friends and family if they know someone. This will be highly beneficial as then you will be able to get references and reviews of the consultant. You can also check with your firm and see if they have a list of consultants with them or not. Moreover, posting on social networking sites about your requirement also helps a great deal.

Check the experience – You must check with the consultant and see if his or her prior work fits your checklist or not. The previous work done by any consultant will help you a lot to understand his line of work. Also, you must check whether his experience includes working with non – profits or not.

Check for solutions – Once you have discussed the project and got some answers, you must check whether the solution provided by the consultant is feasible or not. There is no point in planning something if it cannot be implemented in practical terms, Also, you must discuss whether the solution so provided is the best one or is there an alternative that is better?

Communication – In order for the success of any project, communication is essential. Thus, you must ensure that every detail is communicated to you by the consultant in a proper and timely fashion. There should be no problems pertaining to the project, especially when communication is concerned.

Time and fee – You must be absolutely clear about these aspects with your consultant. First and foremost, you must check if he has enough time to devote to the project and also, you must ensure that he is crystal clear about his position and his responsibilities. Also, you must discuss his fee structure in detail. You must make sure that his rates are affordable and only when you are convinced, you should go ahead with it.

So, now that you have read this article, make sure to follow the given steps and hire a good consultant for yourself!

Hiring any sort of consultant can be either a very wise move or a very bad one. And marketing consultants are no different. The risk of course, is that the marketing consultant ‘talks a good game’ but underneath the hype and enthusiasm, you don’t know if their ideas and suggestions are going to fly, or dive.

When hiring anyone you have to take a leap of faith that they can do what they say they can, but there are some questions you can ask that can help you make the right decision.

Do they practice what they preach?

If a marketing consultancy is positioning itself as a marketing expert – is their own marketing up to scratch? That’s not to say they should be doing all types of marketing to promote their business – after all, marketing a marketing consultancy will be very different to marking other businesses. But the marketing they are doing should be of a high quality. So, their website should be well branded, with well written copy and useful marketing-related information. If they have a brochure, it should be well designed and if they do direct-marketing they should be able to show you well crafted letters or HTML email designs.

Remember, you don’t need to judge them on whether they do all types of marketing, but do judge them on the marketing they do deliver to promote their own business.

Will their customers speak highly of them?

Any business that offers a quality service will be able to provide examples of current customers that are happy to speak on the marketing consultants’ behalf. If they don’t, then alarm bells should be ringing. It’s actually quite surprising how few prospective customers will take the time to speak to a reference customer of the consultancy. Do take the time – you will find out just as much about the consultancy from the references as you will from the consultants themselves.

Are they hands on?

Any advice is of a better quality when it comes from recent experience. In other words, you should be wary of a consultant that gives advice on how a marketing activity should be planned or delivered if they (or people in their team) are not also hands-on involved in delivering similar activity. Without this, you run the risk of taking advice that is either out of date or untested. Good quality marketing consultants will be able to tell you about the work they are delivering for customers now (without breaching the confidentiality of those customers) and how that experience has shaped the advice they are giving you.

Lastly, if you are considering hiring a marketing consultant, make sure you like them – happy working relationships always deliver better results.