Website, Content & Digital Marketing Consulting Services

What Consulting Is

Consulting helps executives make smarter decisions. It's a business service aimed at busy managers and company owners in which highly experienced consultants provide advice, guidance, and fast problem resolution.

What Consulting Is Not

To consult someone means to advise someone. Therefore, consulting usually excludes operational work. This means that a consultant is hired to provide advice on how to fix something, but is not expected to fix the problem herself. When a problem is identified and a solution devised, it's usually the other experts who implement the solution (designers, writers, programmers, digital marketing specialists, et.)

However, that does not mean that consultants never provide operational work themselves. Consultants often work as specialists and do provide operational work. Depending on the consultant's core competencies and the style of delivering her services, she might provide you with real wireframes, design, code, copy, content, documents etc. Sometimes it's easier for the consultant to get dirty with the work than to explain how to do it. 

Hiring a consultant does *not* mean that you're incompetent - goodness no! It means that you're dedicated to solving specific problems in the most cost-effective manner possible.

A consultant helps you make smarter decisions in a fraction of time it usually takes your team to agree on an activity.

When you can't make a decision, it's often because:

• you lack expert knowledge, and it would be too expensive for you to learn what is needed to make a decision
• you lack the time required to research possible solutions
• there are too many small decisions to make, and your attention is needed elsewhere in the company
• you're deadlocked because of the way your team usually makes decisions

You can solve the above problems by hiring new employees, but the cost of an employee who could match the experience of a senior consultant is often too high. Not to mention that this kind of experience is hard to find in a single person who also happens to be available on the job market.

You could try delegating new responsibilities to existing employees, but sometimes it would take them more time to come up with a quality solution (and their productivity would suffer in the meantime). Having an experienced consultant on the team working side by side with your best employees is a good way to make decisions fast and teach your employees new skills, new knowledge, and a new way of solving problems.

It depends on what you mean by 'value'. Most clients define value as some of the following:

• money saved
• money earned
• time saved
• productivity of employees increased
• reputation preserved
• deadlock broken
• peace of mind
• ability to make an important decision with confidence
• being able to count on someone else for management decisions

On our first call, we will make it crystal clear what value means to you, how you define success, and how you intend to measure success. We will recommend the minimum scope of our consulting services in which you'll be able to determine whether or not we were of value to you. In certain cases, one consulting session could prove enough to decide on that. In any other case we'll strive to minimize your risk.

If you're a new client, request to book a consulting session by clicking the "Request a Quote" button on this page or by contacting us. A senior digital marketing specialist will reply within 24 business hours to discuss your needs in more detail.

Acceptance

First we want to make sure that we can provide value to you. We do that by visiting your website in order to get to know your business or, if you don't have a website, by scheduling a call with you. We won't proceed further if we don't have experience with your issue: we're not afraid to admit that something is over our heads.

Preparation

Once we accept your project, we’ll ask you to prepare a list of questions you want us to answer and we'll ask a couple of simple questions about your desired outcomes. Your answers will give us an idea about how to deliver our solutions: whether on a call with you, in a written document, in an email, or something else. Call options are: Skype, Google Hangouts, calling your landline via VoIP, Viber. We can do a video or an audio call - whatever you prefer.

Next, we'll send you instructions about how to pay for the service.

Delivery

After we receive your payment, we’ll agree on the delivery deadline and then we proceed to delivering our solution.

Consulting on a retainer is an ongoing service which you consume every month, usually of a predetermined scope of several consulting hours. Retainer is ideal in two scenarios:

• You have a small marketing team which already perfoms marketing activities regularly, and now you're looking to strengthen your team with expertise you currently lack.
• You're a one-man band who could use a marketing manager, but your business is not yet able to hire one full-time. 

If you're a new client, click the "Request a Quote" button on this page or contact us. A senior digital marketing specialist will reply within 24 business hours to discuss your needs in more detail.

Acceptance

We'll first visit your website to get to know your business and make sure that we can provide value to you. If you don't have a website yet, we'll schedule a call to discuss your request.

We'll prepare an initial quote for your business needs. If you accept it, you pay for one month of consulting and we get to work.

90-Day Trial

We deliver your first three months of consulting. We work intensely on your challenges, issues, and everything you need help with.

If we did not create enough value for you during these first three months, just say so and you won't have to sign any long-term contracts.

Consulting Contract

If you like our work after your 90-day trial expires, we'll offer you to sign an annual consulting contract with us. We'll agree on the type of consulting you want us to deliver and the number of consulting hours you want to hire us for. The contract obliges us that we're at your disposal every month.

At the beginning of every month, you'll receive an invoice to pay for the current month. You'll also receive a short report on the services rendered in the past month.

Clients hire us for expert assistance on projects such as these:

• website redesign
• rewriting website content, partially or fully
• improving sales and marketing capabilities of the website
• adding major features to the website, such as customer support centers or e-commerce features
• launching a digital marketing campaign

Those projects usually have a beginning and an end. Most projects are months-long and we're usually expected to deliver our consulting services during the entire duration of the project.

If you're a new client, start with clicking the "Request a Quote" button on this page or contact us. A senior digital marketing specialist will reply within 24 business hours to discuss your project in more detail.

Acceptance

We'll first visit your website to get to know your business and make sure that we can provide value to you. If you don't have a website yet, we'll schedule a call to discuss your project. We'll assess the following aspects of your project:

• the results you expect
• project scope (how many consulting hours do we have to put aside for you)
• areas of expertise you're hiring us for (creating redesign documentation, planning a website, website content, landing page / website page architecture, digital marketing strategy, website project management)

We'll prepare an initial quote which makes sure your needs are fully met. If you accept it, you pay for one month of consulting and we get to work.

Monthly Work

Every month we work together on your project until it's finished. Typical project work consists of online meetings, working with people on tasks, creating documentation, making sure the project is on schedule, creating website pages, drawing wireframes and mockups, analyzing data, helping you make decisions, helping you hire agencies / freelancers / other consultants, etc.

End of Project

You decide when you no longer need our consulting services. It could be in the middle of the project or after the project is finished. For example, if you hire us for website planning consulting, our services will mostly be be needed before the developers start building the website. If you don't need us while your website is being built, you can stop the service.

It's possible to retain our services after the project has been finished, for a different set of activities. For example, clients who hire us as consultants on a website redesign project may want to retain us for content marketing consulting.

That's OK :) This should help you decide:

CHOOSE 'ON DEMAND' IF:

• This is the first time you've considered hiring a digital marketing consultant, and you don't know what to expect.
• You want to get a feel for our consulting style and test-drive our expertise.
• You have a very narrow problem you want to fix. 
• You have a single issue to solve, one that demands more than a YES/NO answer and probably requires research and preparation on our part.
• You're in a hurry and need a solution to your problem asap.
• You need a second opinion on certain practices of yours.
• You need a quick review of a single website page or another digital marketing asset (such as an email newsletter) and you prefer to receive that review asap, in person, on a consulting call. 
• You have prepared a finite list of questions which are relatively straightforward and don't require extensive research.
• You need quick consulting not more than a 1-6 times a year.

CHOOSE 'RETAINER' IF:

• You need a digital marketing specialist to become a regular member of your team, but you prefer to outsource this role to an outside specialist (rather than to hire a full-time or part-time employee).
• The project for which you want to hire a consultant has an uncertain or unlimited duration or scope (as opposed to projects with specific deadlines and a very clear list of activities).
• You have long-term plans, i.e. you want to bring your digital marketing to a higher level, or want a more strategic approach to your daily marketing activities.

CHOOSE 'PROJECT-BASED' IF:

• You need outside help on a project with a specific end date and a very clear list of activities. When the deadline is reached, you probably won't need consulting services anymore. (And if you do, you can always request another round of project-based or retainer-based consulting).

We deliver solutions in the following formats, or any combination thereof:  

• email conversations
• voice calls (usually over Skype or a similar instant messenger)
• written documents / reports / files
• visual mockups / wireframes / maps

We choose the format which best fits your situation, puts the least burden on you, and represents the most cost-efficient use of our time. 

It depends on the type of service. 

We offer both consulting and operational work in the following areas only:

• website planning
• website content writing / website copywriting
• digital marketing strategy creation

If you hire us for operational work, the recommended number of consulting hours will already be included in our fee, which means that you don't have to hire us both for consulting AND for operational work. 

Hire us for consulting if you already have people who would implement our advice.

Hire us for operational work if you don't have anyone to do the work we advise you to do. We'll let you know in advance where the limits to our services are.

What we don't offer are the following services:

• website design
• website programming
• digital marketing campaign management

(We do provide the above services to our existing and legacy clients, but we don't accept new clients in those areas anymore.)