Key takeaways:
- Freelance marketing consultants often struggle to prove their worth to clients, especially when their contributions may seem fragmented or difficult to quantify.
- It’s essential to demonstrate how all marketing activities are integrated and how they impact the overall marketing strategy.
- Creating a customer journey map can effectively showcase the consultant’s contributions by illustrating their role in the entire marketing strategy.
- Collaborating with other marketing team members to create the customer journey map can deepen the consultant’s understanding of the company’s marketing strategy and generate new marketing ideas.
- Customer journey maps also provide a visual way to present performance data of campaigns, allowing consultants to highlight their successful contributions and demonstrate their impact on the client’s marketing efforts.
Striving to keep the clients informed about all the work you’re doing for them – and more importantly – making them understand the importance of your work, and therefore your worth for them, is an eternal struggle for many marketing consultants. With the world economy not looking to get any better anytime soon, companies are trying to cut their expenses and contractors are often the first group to get under scrutiny.
Having a stable set of clients is vital for both your reputation and work effectiveness – everybody knows that no matter how good the product or the consultant, it simply takes time for the marketing professional to get himself aligned with the business and fully understand all its aspects – all the more if the company already has a robust marketing strategy at work.
To secure your position, it’s crucial to make sure your clients know what you’re bringing to the table. With marketing being a very broad discipline, the work you’re doing may look very fragmented and therefore its impact is not always clear at first sight (or at many more sights, for that matter). You set up this and that, improved this thing and that thing, optimized a couple of other things, then made them “work” together, etc. – and all this in multiple marketing areas. It’s very easy for your true contribution to be overlooked if it’s not presented as one piece.
So what you want to do is demonstrate how are all your activities integrated and how they impact the overall marketing strategy. This will show your client that your work isn’t just a number of standalone contributions that may be easy to delegate to somebody else.
The ideal solution is to create a customer journey map that involves all milestones of the customer’s journey and therefore reflects the whole marketing strategy of the company. Afterward, it’s easy to highlight which journey milestones are your brainchildren and your responsibility. It will put the impact of your work on full display.
Creating a customer journey map will also require your close cooperation with other marketing people (provided that you’re not the only one in the marketing team) which will help you to dive even deeper into the company’s marketing strategy and force you to think about it in a more structured manner which could in turn even help you to generate new marketing ideas, which would be a win in itself.
Coming up with and creating such a tool would make you look instrumental to the overall marketing strategy because you’d actually be the one laying it all out in front of your client.
But there’s a chance your client is a data freak and won’t be very interested in a lot of talk if it lacks hard evidence that can’t be manipulated. That’s not going to be a problem. A customer journey map is among other things an ideal way to present performance data of campaigns – since one milestone on the map follows another, it’s a neat way to visualize how are different marketing campaigns performing and how effective they are in the big picture. If one of the well-performing campaigns happens to be yours, don’t forget to highlight them!
The members of the marketing team will probably be very thankful, too because their work would get much easier with having all their efforts visualized and organized. So if the client himself still won’t be able to fully understand your value, maybe it will be the marketing team members who will vouch for you in case their boss wants to take you out.
