Typically, a small business or local business marketing consultant is an outside advisor who can work with the local Hong Kong small business companies to create and implement marketing strategies. He may be a single person, or they can be a team of people.
The consultant is required to come up with a viable plan which is specific to the need to a client small business. The plan should be a detailed marketing plan which there is the determination of the default marketing messages of the local business, and the identification of the suitable marketing mix in order to get the message out to the target market or target audience.
But when is the right moment to recruit a marketing consultant for a specific Hong Kong local business? It depends. An example is that a small business in HK has previously launched a company website. The problem is that for the past years, the company website was able to receive very little traction (or visitors) organically from search engines. The type of consultant is mostly an SEO (search engine optimization) consultant, or if it is a group or entity, it is a Hong Kong SEO company.
The role of the consulting is to provide specialized skills and expertise that the HK small business company lacks. In this case, it is the technical skills, strategic insights, and past experience in the work of search engine optimization (on Google, Yahoo, etc). The consultant/agent may be able to offer an external viewpoint to internal challenges, prompt a new perspective on customers and/or search engine marketing strategies, and allow the HK small business to focus on product development and overall operations without getting distracted by overall marketing.
The consultant or agency may even be expected to involve to implement the overall or integrated marketing strategies that consist of mainly in the digital area. The local Hong Kong company would expect the agency to set up the required tracking tools, and monitor the performance (or results) of the SEO campaign and other marketing activities.
These days, the SEO agency is usually expected to be able to cover many more different skills that are regarded to be connected to integrated marketing, such as:
- Reputation management and brand management
- Social media marketing (including social marketing ads such as Facebook Ads)
- Copywriting and content marketing
- Search engine marketing (i.e. search engine paid ads)
- CRM, email marketing, and automation