How it is to be a Consultant in the Internet Marketing Industry
Most internet marketing experts can probably tell you the best way to optimize your site for certain keywords. They could probably tell you the pros and cons of PPC vs SEO or give you a better understanding of how to conversion optimize your landing pages so that visitors buy more frequently from your website. You might think SEO consultants spend day and night in front of a computer running web marketing campaigns for different clients. However, Depending on the size of each company, the amount of time that a web marketing consultant spends dealing with actual marketing campaigns is probably less than you think.
A typical SEO Consultant’s day
The first thing I do when I get up is read a few articles from my RSS telling me the latest on the internet marketing world. I then probably take about two or three hours directing my developers and answering any questions they have. This is followed by a couple of hours of talking with my clients to update them on the latest developments of their various campaigns. Talking to my clients regularly is extremely important as even if there are absolutely no developments on my client’s campaigns, I find a way to think of something to tell them. If a client goes more than a week without hearing from their marketing firm, negative thoughts will start to creep up about their experience with this company. I then spend the rest of my time running the SEO, PPC, and Social Media Campaign for my own company website. This helps me gain first hand experience and not look out of place when talking to a client about their campaigns.
The Evolving SEO Consultant
Web marketing experts probably spend more time advancing and marketing themselves than doing the marketing for their clients. With debates raging on over the value of social media campaigns, PPC and even search engine optimization, these days it’s harder than ever to convince a company’s marketing department that they would get the highest rate of investment by hiring an internet marketing firm. SEO consultants, therefore, must act as both consultants and salesman.
Example: Client X asks me whether he can save money by selecting a package that does not include a social media option. I could tell my client how much time it takes for a typical Facebook fan page campaign to gain traction and get real results in terms of sales. I could get even more detailed and say that in some cases, the cost of each Facebook fan may cost up to $2 per fan and that less than 10% of these fans end up buying products. Of course, clients don’t usually like to hear these numbers because 10% seems like a really low number. What is hard for some clients to grasp, however, is that 10% is at least twice the conversion rate they are getting from other marketing channels. This 10% leads to some serious cash. What I tell client X is that someone who is friends with a Facebook fan of a certain website is a million times more likely to buy from this website than a competitor. This is called peer-approval. Knowing how negative 10% can seem to a company decision maker, I left that part out and told him what he needed to hear to understand how much Facebook will do for his company over time.