How to Become a Successful Digital Marketing Consultant or Digital Marketing Freelancer

The most important question to ask yourself is whether you want to be a specialist or a generalist? Only then will you be able to establish what skills you can bring to the function.

In broad terms, you may decide to try and offer all of the following or specialise:

Search engine optimisation

Having a strong working knowledge of SEO is essential to carving out a successful career in digital marketing. Knowing how to get the most from SEO to improve the visibility of a website and generate an uplift in website traffic and conversion through the various search engines is a critical step in providing a digital marketing consulting offer.

Social media marketing

To be considered a valued digital marketing consultant or freelancer you’ll need to know how to design social media activities that drive engagement, send targeted traffic from social networks to websites and generally improve brand awareness. It’s a fast moving part of the marketing mix that requires constant “test and learn”.

Content marketing

Most digital marketing freelancers and consultants are involved in content creation of some form. This can be website content (such as blog posts, case studies, etc), ad copies, social media postings, or content to be published on other websites as guest posts or sponsored content.

To successfully handle all the content needs that may come your way, you should know how to create a well-planned content strategy. A content strategy is crucial to modern marketing.

Email marketing

Building a highly engaged email list is something that many marketers fail to do effectively. If you can help customers get better results from email marketing – building newsletters, nurture and nudge funnels and event triggered email communications – you’ll see a demand for your services. Working knowledge of software and automations is important here.

Pay per click advertising

As a digital marketing consultant, you are likely to be increasingly relied upon to design and manage pay per click campaigns for customers.

And as social media platforms begin to place more emphasis on paid content, it’s a great way to get more eyes on content and build trust through frequency and quality.

Conversion optimisation

Conversion optimisation on a website is the way to generate more revenue for a company without increasing traffic.

By becoming an expert in conversion optimisation, digital marketing consultants can bring immediate benefits to a business and consequently charge higher fees for the privilege.

Analytics

Being able to understand and interpret data and use it intelligently to improve performance is a key skill. This includes keeping on top of changes – like the pending closure of Universal Analytics and arrival of Google Analytics 4.

Being comfortable with data elevates your positioning and value and potentially who you are dealing with.

Building a digital marketing business is surprisingly simple. Start with defining your main area of expertise and position yourself using achievements from work with other customers to secure more of the same type of work.

To build an enhanced market positioning, also consider setting a specific type of customer.

If, for example, you can decide to provide SEO services (niche) to small manufacturing businesses (type), this is going to reduce the amount of competitors you’ll face. It will also help you tailor and target your content – offering relevant learnings, share the most relevant case studies and target the most appropriate prospects.

As a digital marketing consultant it is important to practice what you preach.

As an example of deploying a joined up personal brand strategy, a digital marketing consultant seeking to offe