subject: What Is Marketing Consultancy? [print this page] What Is Marketing Consultancy? What Is Marketing Consultancy?
Marketing is quite a broad area covering a variety of disciplines. For those people that are not really involved in marketing, the jargon can be confusing.
Marketing actually spans around 25 different disciplines' and has over 25,000 companies offering a wide range of services.
One particular form of marketing is marketing consultancy that normally brings some confusion as to what it does and how it does differ from other marketing services.
The idea of a marketing consultancy is as a resource that businesses can outsource their marketing to. A kind of 'remote' marketing department they would act as a focal point for you to manage.
The options would be:
Use individual marketing companies to handle the different areas of your marketing (brochures, web, direct mail, advertising)
This is fine, but it is time consuming managing each of these, talking to each of the marketing companies about the campaigns, results and improvements etc. You are also tasked with getting different invoices from different marketing companies, and when you come to review your marketing you then have to get quotes and prices for all different areas of marketing.
Use a full service marketing agency to handle all the marketing projects you have under one roof.
This is also fine, however you may not get as good a deal as regards the price (as one company is billing you as opposed to you getting different ones shopping around) but also only one company is giving creative input (as opposed to different ones).
Use a marketing consultancy to handle the various projects managing different suppliers and getting the best deal for the money.
Many businesses use a marketing consultancy, by allocating them the marketing budget and tasking them to get the best deal for the allocated funds. The marketing consultancy would also manage the admin and the results, feeding back to you the good and bad news along with looking for cost savings where possible.
The advantage is that you can hold the marketing consultancy accountable for the results of your campaign. Tasking them with looking for cheaper and more effective marketing solutions saving you the time in calling around or researching cheaper marketing suppliers.
