Insider tips: Marketing Consultant

It’s getting close to the end of first semester. Are you busy with assignments or studying for final exams at the moment? Good luck guys! Also, don’t forget we have our consulting project first draft due in a week. Keep reading to find out some insider tips for working as a marketing consultant

Fast learning, strategy setting, seeing the big picture... Marketing consulting is definitely an interesting field to work in.

As students pursuing a Master of Marketing degree, we have sufficient academic background to share knowledge about product marketing, industry context etc. But when helping a company to expand their business in a real case, there’re more complicated situations we would need to tackle. For example, how can we manage to work well with the client, and how can we help the company as a marketing consultant?

So to get some answers, we interviewed Maysoon El-Ahmad, a senior marketing consultant, to give us a some insight into this topic.

The key role of a marketing consultant is to come up with solutions, which could tackle complex problems and help organisations move forward with innovative capabilities.

Clients would come to you because either they don’t have time to figure out the solution or they expect you to use your expertise to find out the real problem behind of the story.

However, as a professional marketer in the consulting sector, various difficulties and challenges must be conquered.

Difficulties and challenges

1. Be a specialist in the organisation
2. Stakeholder management 
3. Creating value

You need to have the full picture about what the problem is in limited time. In the meantime, you have to be capable of working alongside people who have different needs and roles in the organisation, and you need to connect with your clients and other types of stakeholders.

In the second stage, you have to come up with the right questions to understand the key problems and approach your solution strategically. Then, you need to manage the expectations of your clients by creating real value, instead of delivering what they already know.

Even though this role can be very challenging at times, there is always something interesting to keep us motivated. Besides, during this stage you will be able to transfer what you learnt from one client to another, even if it is across different industries. 

The fun part of being a Marketing Consultant

1. Always tackling challenging problems and coming up with creative solutions
2. Meeting different types people
3. Working across different industries
4. Cracking challenging problems for clients

Maysoon’s Tips for students

 

• When approaching your clients’ projects, you need to ask the right questions and let your clients explain the difficulties and challenges they are facing. By understanding the key problems, you can come up with solutions that strategically benefit all the different stakeholders.

• Try implementing psychological management techniques to manage the expectations of your clients properly. 

• Be clear on what you are trying to deliver to clients in a transparent and comfortable manner.

Maysoon El-Ahmad holds a Bachelor of Economics and a Master’s degree in Commerce (Marketing, Strategy and Innovation) from the University of Sydney. She is currently a marketing consultant working with a boutique management consultancy in Sydney called Growth Mantra. She specialises in finding strategic solutions grounded with a deep understanding in consumer behavior and motivations. 

Bowie Chen and Hazel Chen

Current students from the Master of Marketing program at the University of Sydney Business School.