When It’s Time to Bring in a Specialist to Achieve Your Marketing Goals

​​Is your company thinking of trying something new? Maybe it’s a new marketing function like demand gen, program management, or community management. Perhaps your company is expanding to new markets or pivoting to a new selling motion. It may be time for a rebrand, a new website, or a new creative campaign.

Is there anyone at your company with the specific skills and experiences needed to plan, launch, and scale up this new endeavor? Whether you are in a growth-stage startup or a global enterprise, it’s likely you are missing the exact person you need to get your planned initiative off the ground and flying high.

You have options: hire a new employee; let existing staff give it a try; or import high-level, short-term talent to get your new project off the ground. Only one of these will provide you targeted expertise and solid execution in a short timeframe.

Your Secret Weapon to Get Stuff Done

It’s EM’s raison d’être to connect you with this type of marketing talent. We call our consultants GSD – get stuff done – types because they are not only seasoned experts but also phenomenal executors.

Whatever you’re thinking of doing for the first time, our consultants have done it before – probably many times, and for some of the biggest and most innovative companies out there. This means they’ll bring expertise to help you craft a strategy, make your plans a reality, and educate your team to ensure buy-in across your company. They can even serve as a program manager for bigger initiatives to make sure that all the pieces and stakeholders are aligned. And after launching the new project, they can help you set it up for long-term success, even by hiring the long-term employee to run it and managing the hand-off.

They can do all this fast and efficiently because they can start right away and have the level of experience needed to hit the ground running. This is why GSD consultants are your secret weapon for launching something new.

At EM, we’ve built a successful company based on their contributions, some of which have helped businesses in exactly this way. Consider these examples.

Treasure Data

Japanese company Treasure Data needed an entirely new content strategy after relocating its headquarters to Silicon Valley and pivoting its product offering to expand into the international market. An EM Marketing consultant conducted a content audit, developed a robust content strategy, tested messaging and worked up new brand positioning, hired a team of writers to develop a large volume of marketing collateral, designed infographics, and executed the content plan for Treasure Data’s retail, gaming, and automotive verticals. Treasure Data was acquired within a year after this initiative.

Clover

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, point-of-sale platform Clover was just rolling out a plan to introduce online ordering, but for many of its customers – mostly independent restaurants – survival depended on getting this service ASAP. EM Marketing provided a product marketing consultant to fast-track the launch of Clover Online Ordering, helping get it out to customers five months earlier than planned. The consultant created and deployed a website, landing pages, online content, tiered email campaigns, sales enablement assets, videos, PR, and more. More than 45,000 restaurants switched to online ordering, allowing Clover to generate tens of millions of incremental dollars from the new system in the first four months after launch.

Coursera

During the Covid-19 pandemic, online course company Coursera, a long-time EM client, needed help to launch new enterprise initiatives aimed at government entities and universities. EM placed an expert product marketer who crafted and executed a go-to-market strategy incorporating everything from buyer personas to sales decks to a specialized trade show. The outcome was phenomenal: More than 30 countries and 25 states signed up for the Government Workforce Recovery Program to reskill unemployed workers, and more than 3,800 colleges and universities took advantage of the campus initiative, providing 1.2 million students with 15 million learning hours. The project exceeded its lead generation goals by 541% in Q1 and 2034% in Q2 after launch.

Hit the Ground Running with the Expert You Need

In each of these cases, the company needed an expert who could start immediately, provide high value, and then depart after meeting the goals. The company could then hire more affordable, permanent employees to manage the new program or initiative on an ongoing basis.

Senior-level, strategic consultants are not meant to be hired as full-time employees; their level of experience would make them unrealistically expensive for many roles. And while their hourly or per-project rates are higher than those you pay employees, there are many cost savings that come with hiring them. Namely, you do not need to spend the time and money to search for a consultant (since EM can do it for you), pay them benefits, train or onboard them, hire them for full-time hours, or commit to keeping them for any particular length of time. Additionally, they start immediately, hit the ground running, and get results fast.