The good news is that once you’ve come this far, and you don’t think you can handle thinking about marketing for one more minute, you don’t have to. This is the point where you can take all the information about your basic plans and ideas about marketing, and all of the pertinent information about your company, and hand it over to your actual marketing consultant. Now the trick is just finding one. Just like when you’re looking to hire anybody else for your business, you need to start by doing some digging, and then scrutinizing every potential candidate.
Look for small businesses that have marketing ideas that appeal to you. You don’t need to go in and directly ask the owner who handles their marketing, but you can look for small signs, such as a marketing company’s logo or name inside certain pieces of brochures, pamphlets, or other marketing materials. If you know any of the small businesses in the area and feel comfortable asking, you can ask them outright who does their advertising, or if they hired a consultant, and start your list of names that way.
The other good news is that most marketing consultants today know that the Internet is the best budget-friendly way to reach a huge group of people in a short amount of time. For this reason, most marketing consultants today will have a website. So doing a simple search in your browser for ‘marketing consultants’ is going to yield you a huge listing of results. You can narrow it down even further by adding your location and you’ll still get hundreds of names. This is a great way to look for a marketing consultant for your business too, because consultants often use their own website to show off their marketing and web design skills, so you can really get a feel for what their marketing vision is and how they could work for your small business.
If you’re still having trouble finding a good-sized list of names of marketing consultants, you can always check your local Yellow Pages. Just look under “Marketing Design Firms” or other related category and there too, you should also get a list of names. And, they’ll all automatically narrowed down into consultants that work in your area.
Once you have your list of potential marketing consultants for you, you can then start calling around and setting up interview times, or just beginning the interview then over the phone. This will most likely depend on how much time each marketing consultant will have at the time you call. Just in case, have a list of questions ready that you can ask. These questions will provide more insight than any website ever will, when it comes to making sure the marketing consultant you hire is right for you, is worth the cost, and will benefit your company.
