It’s amazing how many companies have Marketing departments that are actually sales departments in disguise. There is a reason for this, as sales and marketing are really only recently separated Siamese twins.

A marketing consultant brings to your company the advantage of fresh outside perspective, as well as years of dedicated experience. A consultant may undertake extensive market research, looking at your clientele, their demographics, their needs and wants, their current relationship with your company or the industry in general, and ultimately, she will give recommendations or a concrete tool to boost your company’s image and sales.

Marketing consultants also help with best practices. Because these consultants have been around the proverbial block, they know how other companies use marketing to their advantages–or not, including your competitors. This expertise can bring a new edge to your company’s comfortable marketing team, arming them with new ideas and campaigns to strengthen your company in both the short and long-term.

Another job of a marketing consultant is to think long-term. Often businesspeople find themselves focusing on the short term: bottom lines, quarterly reports, one ad or sales campaign, etc. A consultant isn’t burdened by the short-term stressors because her goal is to provide you with strategies that will continue to work for you over the long-term. An ad agency may create one commercial for your company, but it is the marketing consultant who comes up with the clever tagline, the iconic persona, or the on-going storyline and messaging that will drive your company’s marketing campaigns and make the company name memorable to new and existing customers.

Your marketing team isn’t bad. In fact, they are probably very good. But they are too close to what they do; perspective and new ideas are everything in a business world now shaped and changed every second by the influx of digital data. Let a marketing consultant take you by the hand today and guide you into this brave new world.