Businesses and major brands often hire the services of professional marketing consultants to either launch new products and services or renew the sales of their existing products. Marketing consultants, based on their study of the target consumer base, design strategies and actionable tasks to boost the business of their clients. On a global level, marketing consulting has emerged to be one of the most sought after services. Procurement specialists at Technavio believe that increased demand for product differentiation, along with a competition to tap emerging markets are the two important factors behind the growing demand for marketing consulting services.
How is technology fueling the marketing consulting market?
Improved ROI is the ultimate goal of hiring the services of marketing consultants; buyers prefer hiring services of suppliers who provide easily measurable results. In sync with the demand of the buyers, suppliers are now increasingly resorting to technology to come up with enhanced forecasting and improved streamlining of the businesses operations.
Some of the major technological innovations in the global marketing consulting market are:
SEM tools
Search engine marketing (SEM) tools help marketers achieve high organic search listings for their client’s website content. Though many SEM tools are available for free online, paid search ads such as Google AdWords is popularly used by several suppliers. SEM help marketers optimize keywords, ad copy, offers, forms on websites to be filled by visitors. It also helps in tracking ads which are most clicked and help understand which strategy brings in more revenue for the buyers.
Marketing automation
Typically any marketing plan includes repetitive tasks like sending emails, updates on various social media platforms, and other online actions. Suppliers like ZS Associates, LEK Consulting make use of marketing automation software and tools to automate the repetitive marketing tasks so that they can focus on other aspects of the marketing strategy.
From the buyers’ point of view, marketing automation facilitates easy alignment of sales and marketing goals along with easy tracking of activities of the visitors on the company websites.
Remarketing tools
Remarketing is one of the major ways in which marketers push the sales of a particular product. Remarketing tools not only make the entire process quite cost-effective, but is also quite effective as it targets the specific audience, helps enhance ROI, and most of all are one of most cost-effective branding techniques.
Web site analytics tool
One tool which is regularly used by Bain & Company and PwC Digital, website analytics tool assist in tracking the performance of marketing campaigns like ads, offers, and performance of marketing channels. Google Analytics is one of the most popular websites analytics tool. According to a survey, in the year 2014, around 80% of small and mid-sized websites use Google Analytics to enhance marketing ROI.
Apart from the tools mentioned above, marketing consultants also use Unbounce, Optimizely, and Landing Page Grader to boost the lead-to-customer ratio. On the whole, the tools used by the marketing consultants facilitate optimization of the landing pages and identify benchmark values of conversion rates for specific industries to measure performance.
For more information on the future of marketing consulting market
You might also be interested in:
Current Affairs: Digital Marketing’s Role in the US Presidential Elections
