Hire a Marketing Consultant

Even the best product will see no profits if the business behind it doesn’t have a marketing strategy of some sort. Driving brand awareness is essential to every business, big or small, because how can you get customers if nobody has heard of you?

Creating and implementing a marketing strategy, however, is no easy feat. It requires skill and understanding of what works and what doesn’t; what makes a good impression and what could drive possible customers away.

The best way to create a winning marketing campaign? Outsourcing to a professional.

Here is my list of the best websites to turn to when you need to hire a marketing consultant.

Read our guide on the best freelance websites for marketing to find and hire talent to grow your business.

Best Websites to Hire a Freelance Marketing Consultant

1. Mayple

Best for the top digital marketing experts

Mayple is a freelancing site that thoroughly vets each of the marketing consultants that it allows to create profiles.

After the extensive process of making sure that the freelancers who have applied to their site are talented and highly skilled, they will rank each of them based on how adept they are at digital marketing.

To help you find the right marketing consultant, they first give you a long questionnaire that helps them understand your goals and needs. This questionnaire will cover things like how much you need your marketing consultant to work, what kind of business you have, what your current marketing strategy looks like, and more.

With this information, Mayple then uses AI technology to search through their database and find a marketing consultant that can suit your needs.

• Read our Mayple review

2. GrowTal

Runner up for finding and hiring top marketing experts

Since your marketing consultant is someone you will be working with on a regular basis, they must be a person that you enjoy working with. GrowTal uses this as the center of every freelance-client relationship that they create.

GrowTal starts its process by meeting with you for a 15 or 30-minute Zoom call. During this call, they get to know you, your company culture, your marketing goals, and what kind of marketing consultant you’re looking for.

After getting a feel for who they think would make a good match with you, within two business days they contact a handful of marketing consultants to see which ones are available and interested in working with you.

They will present you with three to five marketing consultants that you can choose from.

• Read our GrowTal review

3. MarketerHire

MarketerHire ensures the quality of their marketing experts by only accepting less than 5% of the digital marketers that apply to their site.

Aside from their picky process in picking freelancers from applications, their talent team is also proactive in recruiting top marketing consultants to join their site and work with their clients. They also have each marketing consultant perform pilot or test projects before signing them on.

After matching you with the right marketing consultant with your company within 48 hours, they will typically get started on your project within a week.

After that, they will check in with you every two weeks to make sure that everything is going well between you and your marketing consultant.

• Read our MarketerHire review

4. Upwork

Best overall freelance website for finding marketing talent

One of the most popular freelancing sites is Upwork, and it’s also one of the best places to find a marketing consultant.

On Upwork, you have the ability (and responsibility) to choose a marketing consultant for yourself.

You simply post a job listing exactly what you’re looking for. Specify if you need a marketing consultant for a long-term relationship, need someone to do a complete overall of your marketing strategy, or just need someone to help you boost the marketing strategy you’ve already created.

I like Upwork because you can get multiple applications within minutes of posting a job, so it’s a great option for people who need a marketing consultant on their team ASAP.

• Read our Upwork Review

5. Fiverr

Fiverr is another large, popular freelancing site that thousands of companies use to find marketing consultants.

On this site, you actually browse through the profiles of marketing consultants and reach out to the ones that you’re interested in. Being able to hand-pick your marketing consultant puts you in power.

When you search for a marketing consultant on Fiverr, you can check out what specific skills they have listed on their profile. You can search specific tags to find a marketing consultant that specializes in your company’s industry, someone who can coach you on how to handle your own marketing or someone who can just come up with a concept for you to implement.

• Read our Fiverr review

What is a marketing consultant?

A marketing consultant is a professional digital marketing expert that a company brings on to maximize the effectiveness of its marketing campaign.

They look at the big picture and use their knowledge of best practices to create a winning strategy to drive brand awareness and profits.

What does a marketing consultant do?

A marketing consultant first takes a look at what a company’s current marketing strategy looks like. They get to know the brand’s voice, the target audience, and what the company’s goals are.

After analyzing the existing strategy to see what works and what doesn’t, they come up with a new plan to utilize marketing techniques (like SEO, social media marketing, and even word-of-mouth) that boost the visibility of your brand and connect you to your target audience.

They can then help you implement this plan by creating and launching new marketing and advertising campaigns.

How much does it cost to hire a marketing consultant?

The cost of hiring a marketing consultant depends on many different factors like the location of your company, the amount of work you expect of the marketing consultant, the level of expertise that your chosen marketing consultant has, and what industry your company is in.

The range for hourly rates listed by freelance marketing consultants across these sites is a large one, with marketing consultants charging anywhere between $12-$250 per hour.

On average, the rate for a marketing consultant is $85 (this number was generated based on data scraping popular marketing consultant profiles across multiple platforms and locations).

How to hire a marketing consultant

Here’s a step-by-step guide on how exactly to go about hiring a marketing consultant.

1. Identify your needs – How much do you need your marketing consultant to work? Do you have no marketing strategy at all and need to start from scratch? Or do you just want some tweaking of your current plan to grow brand awareness?
2. Create goals – Think about what you ultimately want from your marketing consultant in something quantifiable. Set up a goal like “I want x amount of new customers in three months” or “I want my site to get x amount of new visitors.”
3. Define your budget – Know exactly how much you can afford to pay a marketing consultant (using this guide is a good reference).
4. Explore best websites for marketing consultants – Since there is such a wide range of specialties that marketing consultants could have, go with a site that provides the right marketing consultants you need within your budget and your specific marketing goals.
5. Create test or pilot projects to see if they’re a good fit for your culture – Asking questions like “what is my brand’s biggest area of weakness right now” can give you an idea of what depth of analysis they can do for your brand and how well they can communicate the plan to you.