In a nutshell, Digital Consulting is an activity that connects business strategy to implementation across different digital fields (think web design and development, marketing, PR, server scaling, branding).
Digital Consulting Resources
Learn more about the art of digital consulting
How to build an effective marketing strategy – the difference between inbound and outbound marketing and when to incorporate them.
How to market yourself as a public speaker – great digital consultants and entrepreneurs build their brand and speaking is the #1 step.
How to consistently produce great content – high-quality content is a source of training materials, internal guides, and lead generation (plus more).
My strong suit is tech. Some come with a design background. Or marketers who became growth hackers on the way.
As a result, you can achieve better results and speed up the growth acceleration of the business with just a few hours a month which is super lucrative.
Here’s a more refined overview of this video.
Highlights
00:01:54 -How A Digital Consultant Can Help Businesses
00:03:49 – Types of Businesses That Need Digital Consultants
00:04:37 – They Bring a Diverse and Broad Industry Expertise
00:05:31 – The “One Man Army” Approach
00:06:00 – High-End Digital Strategy
00:07:01 – Paving the Marketing Road for Your Business
00:08:11 – Amplifying Your Brand Through Their Network
Transcript
What is a digital consultant? Now, when I present myself in front of an audience during a talk, networking events, I say that I’m the CEO of DevriX and a Digital Consultant. Lots of people come and ask me, “What is this digital consultant for? What do you do for a living and all that jazz?”
In fact, when I was looking for the type of service that I go through on an ongoing basis with consulting with clients, I did some research, trying to figure out what is the right entity and what is the right name for that position. I went through a similar effort back when I established myself as a WordPress architect several years ago. Because it’s a little bit more special, it involves a few additional specialties, so to speak. Therefore, I needed a designation type in order to do that.
Once I kept reading and looking for different people dealing with what I do for a living as well, I found out that digital consultancy is precisely what I’m actually entitled to do, when doing consulting activities with different clients.
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What is Digital Consultancy
Now, in a nutshell, digital consultancy is an activity that really helps in connecting business strategy to implementation across different digital fields. Meaning that when you think about web projects, something that happens in the digital space, it usually involves a wide set of activities. This could be web development, design, marketing, branding, strategy, monetization, memberships and a bunch of other things that happen on an ongoing basis.
Most businesses, especially those that are not large corporations with thousands of people, they always have missing pieces of the puzzle. They may have departments dealing with development, with design, with marketing but often times, there are small departments where they can’t really figure out what is the right link and what’s the right symbiosis in order to make it work.
How A Digital Consultant Can Help A Business
Digital consultants do unify the corporate brand or business. We can’t assess and gauge what really needs to be improved. Are there any discrepancies between what you can see online and offline and across different outlets of a business? This means to assess the design assets and picking the right technological solutions for a given platform, such as picking the right solution for an e-commerce and their website and the backend system and the POS terminal and a bunch of other things, helping with building the short-term and the long-term marketing strategies.
This means hitting short-term goals and also how this aligns with the long-term development of the strategy is nutshell, helping out with inbound marketing efforts or outbound depending on the specialty of the consultant, suggesting different tools and services that could be used for automation such as, I don’t know, let’s say Buffer or Zapier or whatever it is for a business because different businesses, some need ERPs or CRMs or marketing automating softwares, helping out with PR, marketing and networking activities because we are quite active online.
We do have a network of journalists, PR experts, editors of different magazines and essentially just bundling all that together is something that we do, more or less, for a living in our capacity as a digital consultant.
I can recollect a bunch of onsite meetings, where we do sit on a specific table, meeting a client in a consulting capacity and then, you have people from different departments. A designer, a developer, devops guy, a PR, a marketer, whatever it is, a bunch of different people discussing their goals and their strategy but being unable to find the right fit for how to connect a bunch of different pieces of what is the right symbiosis between their ideas and which ideas could be implemented properly within their organization and how to actually make it work together as a whole, as a team.
That’s in a nutshell what a digital consultant does.
Types of Businesses That Need Digital Consultants
There are, especially for small and medium sized businesses, talking a business of 50 people, 100 people. 200 people and sometimes, we actually work with some small enterprises of about 50 people who generate 8 figures of revenue. This could be a very successful business, just bootstrapping a specific vertical and trying to differentiate trying to scale horizontally, aiming for a new niche or trying to penetrate a new market space.
Sometimes we do have successful businesses, for example, outside of the WordPress field, meaning that they’ve been wildly successful in eCommerce or with another CMS or hosting solutions, but they can’t really enter the WordPress market.
Those are just some of the ideas of types of businesses where digital consultants can be applicable and can be really helpful for.
They Bring a Diverse and Broad Industry Expertise
The first reason why digital consultants are helpful, without aiming to do any sort of self-promotion – I’m talking about the field as a whole is the broad industry experience. The whole idea of offering digital consultancy means that people dealing with that, they have wide expertise across several different verticals.
You can get a marketing guy or a gal, who’s very prolific in design as well. They also know the technical foundations of different things and have worked in several tech corporations where they can use their marketing knowhow and know how to sell it, how to promote it intertwined with PR activities and whatnot.
Or, you can get a system of guys, someone dealing with networks or servers, who happens to be a great speaker, so they have this event management skills and they also have a large network of people in different industries. You get the drill. The point is that you get one person with several specialties, understanding the white space.
The “One Man Army” Approach
Second one is cost-effective mentorship. Like I said, most meetings that I tend to attend, they have 5, 6, 7, up to 10 people on the different end, meaning on the client’s end from people with different specialties. I’m fairly comfortable conducting meetings myself because I can comfortably talk about a bunch of different topics and put the pieces together since I’ve dealt with most of them myself with the exception of design and a few other activities where I don’t feel that comfortable myself.
High-End Digital Strategy
Then, there’s is the high-end digital strategy. Whenever you’re suggesting high-end strategy in the first place, again, you need to put all the pieces together. You say, “Okay, we need a web platform but this platform probably needs to go with a underline layer that deals with this.
This all has to be aligned with the corporate branding strategy. They need to do this. We need to connect it to the marketing automation software that’s used by other department in this industry.” Basically, putting the pieces together. Sometimes, it’s web design and development advice.
Again, this depends on the core skill sets of a digital consultant because some people have strengths in certain areas, others have in others. This kind of complement one another. With that matter, you may say, “Well, this is a great platform,” or, “This trend is outdated,” or, “This trend is actually better because your customers, your buyer personas, your target audience is actually more outdated, so the sites they visit look like this, so we don’t want to look too differently from them because it’s going to be confusing.” Probably you’re talking to a different audience if you’re branding yourself in that manner.
Paving the Marketing Road for Your Business
This is also touches on marketing road. As digital consultants, what we normally do is we work with a large set of clients in different industries, in different niches. We gather ideas, we educate ourselves from different fields of study and this helps us apply ideas from one field to another field.
Just as an example, one of the fields of artificial intelligence that’s really popular in strength to get more up to speed is transferable knowledge or transferable learning, which is understanding something from one industry and being able to apply it to other industries or niches. Right now, robots simply cannot do that very well because they need a training set of data for industry and a vertical.
There’s also the ongoing strategy review. I do have some clients that call me once a month or once a couple of month. We set the strategy, we do some KPIs, we do some reviews and once the business keeps scaling, we just measure those, see what went well, what went wrong, what are the fields that will have to be pushed forward with additional resources. Where do we need to realign the strategy work, what work, what is the feedback and the customer support and a bunch of other things.
Amplifying Your Brand Through Their Network
The last bit which is something that I called amplified influence. Again, digital consultants, we get all of our business online, meaning that we need to maintain a reputable online presence. As a result, we have grown a network of, like I said earlier, journalists, editors, just media participating in some form of a community and growing our network organically.
Sometimes and some of the things that our clients and my own clients really enjoy is the ability to have partnerships in place or just contacts of people who are very, more or less, influential in the industry. For example, let’s say in the WordPress space, it could be plugin authors or owners of hosting companies or other pieces of the puzzle that you can really help with. You can make an intro, you can probably get some priority support or something else that’s kind of really helpful for the business.
Digital Consulting In A Nutshell
That’s, in a nutshell, digital consulting.
It really entails a broad set of activities. Some people do often compare it to entrepreneurship simply because it’s really diverse. It means that you need to understand how businesses work.
You need to understand business strategy and digital consulting and a few other fields like marketing or design or development – not necessarily all of them, but a bunch of them. As a result, again, you can achieve better results and you can speed up the growth strategy of a business with just a few hours a month, which again is super lucrative.
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