As an entrepreneur and a marketing consultant I end up meeting several startups whose perspective on business and marketing strategy signals upcoming failure.

Sometimes a company won’t tell you about their long term strategy. Other times they may be figuring it out. More often then not, especially in funded startups or bigger corporate clients upper management is simply being incentivised to show that they reached a certain metric, which may have no link whatsoever to real revenues.

The kind of companies I am most wary about are those who are simply trying to find a marketer to increase traffic. In almost all cases one or more of the following are true about these companies. Read and see if one of those describes you.

Assuming product is exactly what the customer wants

Such companies want to limit marketer influence over other parts of the product. Feature and product suggestion come from either one function within the company or upper management that has worked for a big brand name in technology (but often unrelated to the business at hand) and has a specific unsubstantiated by customers vision of where the product should go. With the later you can very easily place where they are coming from because they are not trying to facilitate conversations between those interested in their product, rather they want consumers of what they build. The result is a product with few social networking elements and often a design that does not show an understanding of behaviors core to the human experience.

Focus on tactics not strategy.

In my years in traditional marketing I sat through many boring, useless, ego-pumping presentations on the excellent execution of tactics that did not explain exactly who these tactics were reaching and how they tied into the overall strategy of the business. When I first moved to technology, I thought surely with the strong analytics I am finally free of that thinking. But unfortunately no. The only thing that has changed is the vocabulary. Anyone who has spent a week in the tech world has online marketing tactics rolling off their tongue–blogging, SEO, Facebook, Twitter. But what and how this fits into company strategy is rarely discussed. Not all tools are effective for your business. Also the effectiveness of a tool depends on a variety of other factors which include the audience you are trying to reach and the level at which you are engaging them.

Thinking of marketers as a necessary evil.

One of my most surprising things I have ever heard from a  client who was courting me as a consultant was–”our product development is going full speed ahead since we don’t have a full-time marketing person to derail us.” My thoughts–right buster, are you forgetting that you called me? But on a more serious note this unfortunately reflects the feelings of many startup founders. Beyond being a pejudice against marketing and marketers this comes from an egotistical need to create the product you want rather than one your customer wants. Online marketing at its best allows you to get minute and specific analytics regarding your customer’s reactions to your product. If you don’t want that feedback then please DO NOT contact a marketing consultant. You cannot get a thorough understanding of marketing from a single unpaid consulting session.

So what should you look for when assessing a potential marketing consultant

• A basic understanding of a social media listening and customer research strategy and the timeframe this will take
• A few scenarios for social media engagement strategy depending on what they feel the results of the above may be, often based on cursory research (do not confuse this with complete strategy, you aren’t paying them yet so this is far from comprehensive)
• A few ideas on kinds of site analytics metrics, other customer research, and competitive analysisthat you will need to develop a product strategy that allows you to increase customer engagement, user friendliness, and a refferal loop for customer acquisition

Hope this gives you a basic idea of what a marketing consultant does and how this may fit into your product strategy. If you have any other quick questions or would like me to refer you to someone contact me on twitter @traffichoney

Happy Marketing!

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