Marketing consultant for owners and leadership teams

Should you hire a marketing consultant or a marketing agency?

A marketing consultant’s job is to decide what’s worth doing, in what order, with what budget, and how you’ll know if it’s working. An agency’s job is to do the work well. Plenty of agencies also do strong strategic work, and plenty of consultants sell analysis you didn’t need, so the label settles less than people think.

The better question is which responsibility you need filled. If you don’t know yet what you should be doing, you need advice or ownership first. If you know exactly what needs producing and just need it produced, you need execution, and a good agency is the right call. Most companies end up needing some of both. The trouble starts when nobody is clearly responsible for the first set of decisions.

Cost depends on how much of the consultant’s attention the work needs and how much rides on it. I’ll get to what drives that below.

What a marketing consultant actually does

From the owner’s chair, the work looks like this.

Deciding where the money goes. Say you’ve got five things you could do. Compare what each one costs, what it could plausibly return, how long until you’d know, and what has to be true for it to work. Without that comparison, budget tends to follow whoever makes the strongest case internally.

Making the calls that come before channels. Sometimes the important decision sits upstream: which customers to go after, which offer to lead with, or whether the company can take on more demand at all. A channel plan built on the wrong answer to those just spends money faster.

Tying activity to a company goal. There should always be a straight line from anything marketing is doing back to an overall company goal. If someone can’t draw that line for a campaign, it’s worth asking why you’re paying for it.

Setting up the test. Good marketing, in my opinion, is having a hypothesis, running tests, setting a date to measure, being clear-eyed about what you expect to see, and knowing when to stay the course and when to pivot. Nobody has a magic bullet.

Reviewing the work. The plan is only as good as what gets executed against it. I look at the decisions and the work as well as the reports.

What you get out of it is a short written plan: the few priorities, the budget behind each, who’s responsible, how we’ll measure it, and when we’ll look. It gets revisited on those dates, and it changes when the evidence says it should.

What the first month looks like

The first month combines learning the business with the decisions that need attention now. Same hours, same fee. I review the numbers: revenue by service and customer type, what marketing has spent and where, and what the CRM says about where good customers came from. I meet the people who sell and the people who deliver, because they know things about your buyers that never make it into a marketing brief. And I look at the work your vendors are doing as well as their reports.

By the end of it, we agree on the few priorities that matter, the hypothesis behind each one, how we’ll measure it, and the date we’ll look at it together. In Advisory, those are priorities you and your team carry with my help. In Ownership, they’re the ones I own.

How budget and measurement decisions get made

If I could get every owner to ask one marketing question, it would be this: where is everyone’s actual attention right now? Then go put yourself there. That’s the starting point. Attention on its own doesn’t justify spend, though. Your buyers might spend hours somewhere that’s expensive or impossible to reach them, and a small audience in the right place can be worth more than a big one. So the real question gets narrower: where do the buyers you want discover options, check credibility, and decide who to contact, and what does it cost to show up there?

A lot of plans are built on where attention used to be. The trade show that worked ten years ago. The blog that brought in leads before AI Overviews started answering the question on the results page. The email list that’s mostly people who’ve changed jobs. None of that is wrong to keep, but it should earn its budget against where your buyers are spending time today.

And the path a B2B buyer takes is rarely tidy. Someone sees a video on social, comes across a paid ad, reads a LinkedIn post, then searches your name a month later and lands on your homepage. If you judge each channel only by the leads it hands over directly, you’ll cut the ones doing quiet work. That’s one reason I’d rather set a hypothesis and a review date for each piece than chase perfect attribution.

A review date isn’t automatically a verdict date. When it comes, we ask a few things. Is there enough volume to judge? With a long sales cycle or a handful of deals a quarter, often there isn’t, so we look at earlier signals like the quality of conversations and who’s asking for proposals, and set the next date. Is the channel helping the others, even if it isn’t closing anything itself? And would the evidence we have justify putting more in, holding steady, or stopping?

Stopping something takes more than a weak attribution report. When I recommend cutting a channel or a vendor, it’s because nobody can connect it to a company goal and there’s no sign it’s helping anything around it. That does come up in the first months more often than you’d think, and it’s cheaper to stop early.

I’m not comfortable telling anyone to spend money and promising it’s definitely going to work. Marketing doesn’t work that way. What I can do is set the hypotheses and the goals, decide which indicators matter, track them, and be willing to bail on something that isn’t working. Before money goes in, we agree how much to commit, what evidence we need and when we’ll look, so that if something doesn’t work, you find out on a small budget.

When the answer wasn’t more digital marketing

I was in a strategy session with an engineering services company, talking through where to put their growth budget. As we went through their numbers, it became obvious that most of their best work came from referrals.

So I told them that for a business in their position, growing on referrals was a much more stable place to be than relying on digital marketing. And I said it as someone who owns a digital marketing company.

They didn’t need to stop marketing. The first dollars just needed to go toward protecting and growing the thing that already worked, with digital judged against that rather than treated as the default. The recommendation followed where their best work was coming from.

It’s also not a one-off. I’ve talked companies out of working with my own agency, and I’ve helped clients build their own internal marketing teams, knowing full well it meant less work for us.

Consultant, agency or Ownership: how they fit together

I’ve run an agency for about sixteen years. Agencies are built to produce, and the good ones produce very well, and some carry strategy through execution: my team at Connective did exactly that for Focus Solutions. A production retainer can create a pull toward keeping the scope in place, though, and that’s worth talking about openly with any agency, mine included.

Consultants have the opposite risk. A plan can fall apart if it ignores the team’s capacity, the budget, or what anyone can actually execute. Plans written without any feel for execution tend to be plans nobody can run.

So look for someone who can do the thinking at the leadership level, has actually run the work, and is clear about their incentives. Mine: my fee covers my time and is separate from execution fees. I own Connective, so I have a financial interest if you hire it. You choose who does the work, and agency and specialist work is scoped and approved separately.

The coordination cost matters too. Someone has to brief the vendors, review the work and chase the deadlines, and if that someone is you, it’s a cost even if it never shows up on an invoice. That’s the line between the levels. If you’ve got a capable marketing lead who needs a senior sounding board, Advisory. If nobody owns marketing and you need someone to run it, Ownership.

What should a marketing consultant cost?

What moves the number, for me and for anyone you’re comparing:

1. How much of the consultant’s attention you need. A few hours a week of advice is different from someone owning marketing eight to twelve hours a week.
2. How much rides on the decisions. A budget that’s a rounding error is different from one that’s a meaningful share of revenue.
3. How many channels and vendors are in play. Each one adds review and coordination.
4. Whether the consultant also does some of the work. If they’re running SEO or a campaign themselves, agree up front whether that sits inside the retainer or runs as a separate project, so you can see what you’re paying for.
5. How mature your measurement is. If acquisition costs are unclear, part of the first month is working out what can be calculated now and what tracking needs to improve.

Speaking of which, if you don’t know your CAC, start there. It changes almost every budget conversation.

My own levels and fees are on Work With Me. Wherever you look, ask what assumptions sit behind the fee and what would change the scope.

How to tell a good marketing consultant from a bad one

A few questions I’d ask in the first conversation:

• “At my budget, what can I realistically expect, and by when?” A good consultant gives you a range and the assumptions behind it, and is comfortable saying what they don’t know yet.
• “What would make you tell me to stop?” If they can’t name the conditions, they don’t have a hypothesis.
• “Who’s going to do the work, and do you have a stake in any of it?” You want a plain answer about incentives.
• “What’s the first thing you’d want to see?” Good ones ask for your numbers, your CRM and your sales team before they talk tactics.

When you don’t need a marketing consultant

If you have a strong marketing leader who already owns the plan and the measurement, you probably don’t need an ongoing engagement. If the problem is that nobody has time to execute a plan you already trust, you need hands, and a good agency or a hire is the better call.

Whatever the level, the work needs access to leadership and an agreement up front on goals, budget and what I’m allowed to decide. In Ownership I take a lot off your plate, but I still need someone in the room who can make the company-level calls.

I’m based in Houston and work with companies across the U.S. If you’re hiring an agency and want help choosing one, there’s a page on hiring a marketing agency. If the question is bigger than marketing, my business advisor page covers that.

Based in Houston, working nationwide

I’m based in Houston, and I’ve run Connective since 2010, so a lot of my work has been with Houston companies in energy, industrial, engineering, healthcare and many more, often where the sale is long and the buyer is technical. If you’re local, the planning sessions can happen in your conference room. Most of my clients are elsewhere in the U.S. and work with me over video, with a visit when the decision warrants one.