Being a marketing consultant can be a very lucrative career. Starting billable hour rates range from $75 to $150. Experienced marketing consultants can easily charge $300 to $500 or more per hour, depending on your client base and your reputation.
Of course, to charge these kinds of rates your clients have to actually boost their profits by a lot more than what you charge as a result of your coaching.
So how do you get to that point? How do you get from no clients, no revenues and possibly no contacts to being able to make a hundred dollars or more an hour? Here’s how to get started.
==> Choose Your Specialty
There’s no such thing as a generic “marketing consultant.” Marketing is so broad that it really encompasses many, many sub-industries and sub-niches.
Start by choosing what specialty you want to work in. Choose this specialty based on your skills, your experience, the people you know and the people you have affinity for.
For example, if you’ve been in the restaurant industry for eight years and you’ve helped market half a dozen different restaurants, then it makes sense for you to be a restaurant or small business marketing consultant. If you’ve been doing SEO for the last five years, it makes sense for you to be an SEO consultant.
==> Create Results in Your Circle of Influence
The first step to establishing your reputation as a marketing consultant is to actually deliver results. You need real world examples of people who got more clients and generated more revenue as a result of your coaching.
You’re most likely not going to sell strangers on your service in the beginning. Instead, contact a few of your friends and acquaintances in your circle of influence.
Offer to help them either for free, on a commission basis, or for a significantly reduced rate. Do what you need to do to get them to accept your help.
Then over deliver on your results. Get them more clients than they can handle. Be a turning point in their business.
==> Moving Forward
Once you’ve demonstrated your competence with a few clients in your own social circle, it’s time to move beyond your own network of influence.
Come up with a marketing plan that’ll allow you to reach a wider number of people. You might use referral based marketing; you might place ads in trade magazines or highly targeted publications; you might use PPC marketing to target specific keywords to get people to your website. Try different methods of marketing your services.
If you’re good at what you do, it’s not hard at all to build a marketing practice. People will rave about you and send you tons and tons of referrals. Start with your own circle, over deliver, develop a marketing plan and let the snowball build from there.