Ask Dr. Bhide – Frequently Asked Questions
1. What does a marketing consultant do?
A marketing consultant helps you to market your products/services effectively. The consultant develops a marketing plan. Before developing the plan, the consultant understands the various marketing initiatives the client has already taken. Then the research is done, and the plan is finalized after a couple of drafts and discussions with the client. A marketing consultant also assists in execution by collaborating with the client’s marketing and other teams.
2. When should a company hire a marketing consultant?
There are three specific situations to hire a marketing consultant. First, you should hire a marketing consultant when you are starting a business. Second, you should hire a marketing consultant when you experience stagnation or a lack of growth in the business. Third, hire and keep a marketing consultant regularly while going through the ups and downs of a business.
3. How can SMEs improve their marketing strategy?
Since Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) don’t have the luxury of having huge marketing and sales teams and budgets. Hence, SMEs need to be careful while preparing their marketing strategy. Three avenues for improving the marketing strategy of SME’s are, one, thinking long term. It is said that marketing is an idea, whereas an invoice is a sale. SME should note this different and should always have a long-term view. For example, while approaching prospective customers, digital mediums are cluttered; can you explore offline mediums? Second, SMEs can improve their marketing by enabling the sales team with support from marketing. For example, in a business-to-business marketing, sales executives need help in planning the visits, follow-ups and so on. Third, adopting suitable technology can transform the marketing efforts for SMEs. For example, the online world is shifting from Search Engine Optimization to Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), and if adopted, you can improve your marketing and, in turn, sales.
4. What are the biggest marketing mistakes businesses make?
“Focusing on marketing efforts after sales are down.”
Marketing function is like exercise, if you don’t exercise daily, you don’t get fit. If you don’t do marketing activities daily, you don’t get sales.
This is the truth, with decades of experience, I have seen this mistake again and again and the only way to not make this mistake is to do your marketing activities daily. Do something or the other, but don’t stop once your sales are good, in fact, when your sales are good, increase your marketing efforts. When your sales are down, increase your marketing efforts further more.
5. How important is digital marketing for businesses today?
Importance depends on the nature of your business. For example, if you have a café business and your location on the map is incorrect, your digital marketing is not accurate. Now map location may not necessarily come under the typical digital marketing of website, social media and so on.
There are some businesses which are completely dependent on digital marketing, for some digital marketing doesn’t matter and other businesses are in between these extremes. For example, if you are a software product company, digital marketing is important to you. If you are a restaurant with no interest in using digital technology to grow your business, digital marketing is not important. If you are a packaging company with a lack of a marketing mindset, although digital marketing is important, you are not doing it.
6. How can educational institutions improve their marketing and admissions strategy?
Although the core teaching has not much changed for the educational institutes, your audience, students, and parents have already adopted the technology. If you are an educational institute with a long legacy, you may feel that your business will always grow but the coming years will tell you that either you adopt change or you become irrelevant.
Earlier, the educational institutes were not required to do much marketing since there was high demand and less competition. Now things have changed after numerous colleges closing down or having vacant seats in existing colleges.
There are 3 things educational institutes can do to improve their marketing and admissions strategy. One, have an up-to-date website. Two, make sure that offline and online marketing efforts go hand in hand. Three, think from the students’ and parents’ perspectives and start planning everything from their perspective onward.
7. How long does it take to see results from marketing consulting?
How long does it take to see results from exercise in your weight reduction? Almost the same is the time for seeing results from marketing consultancy. On average, you need to invest 6 months to 1 year for efforts to yield. One of the clients we are working with now hasn’t seen much of a new client win in the last couple of years. Still, the client is having faith and sticking to efforts. Same client, we had served earlier in 2014. Remember I told you that marketing is long-term?…
8. What is the difference between marketing strategy and marketing execution?
Strategy is a plan and execution is the actual implementation of the plan. Marketing strategy will say that change is digital marketing is required but if that change is not executed, we can see an impact on the marketing efforts.
9. How can businesses measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts?
This question is as tough as asking how to measure happy-ness. Typically, businesses measure the marketing efforts with sales. But going beyond sales, marketing efforts should be measured in terms of business growth, customer satisfaction, new products, new markets, new attitudes and so on.
10. What role does leadership play in successful marketing?
A leader should be visionary. If you are not visionary, you are a manager but not a leader. I feel that a leader has the most important role to play in marketing. Consider a leader without conviction trying out promoting new product. If the leader does not have a conviction, the marketing team will not feel motivated to promote the product and sales of the product will suffer since marketing has an immediate impact on the sales team too.
For More Questions, Contact: