Do You Need a Marketing Consultant?

By JOHN FOLEY – March 22, 2016

If your association doesn’t have the time or proper resources dedicated to your marketing efforts, then the ultimate answer is yes, you should be using a marketing consultant. It does not matter how small or how large your association is. Marketing is a key component to success. So why is marketing something that many organizations can’t do themselves? The answer to that question is that, in part, you can do marketing yourself, but the reason that you should use a consultant is because marketing is more than just putting out a few fliers.

Marketing 101

One of the key components of marketing is being able to track your results and then to apply what you have learned in such a way as to improve your marketing plan’s performance. That is a process that can be labor intensive. However, without being able to measure the effectiveness of a marketing campaign, you will lack the information needed to tell you if your campaign is working, or if it is working to the best of its ability. What you do in terms of marketing needs to be measured, evaluated, and then properly adjusted.

Another key component of marketing involves social marketing platforms. These not only involve technology but also they involve technology that is rapidly changing. This means that a portion of your marketing energy will need to be spent just keeping up with changes in social technology. If you are keeping track of the technology changes in marketing, then you should see that this is a process that becomes very labor intensive. For all of this work, we have not even gotten into designing a marketing campaign.

Managing Your Time

For small and medium-sized organizations, they say that you should do what you do best and leave the rest to other people. If you manage an association and you are reading emails and answering phones, then you are doing administrative work and not the work of a leader. That is not to say you cannot do both, but when you are focused on many tasks, do you do any of them well?

Leave marketing to those who do marketing extremely well and free up your time and resources to become the leader of your association. Take control of your organization’s efforts by utilizing a marketing consultant. We’re here to help! Click here to contact our team and see what we can do to help your association thrive.