What Is a Marketing Consultant? + How To Become One

Marketing consultants work with a company or brand to devise campaigns and implement strategies with the goal of increasing sales and reaching more customers. To become a marketing consultant, you typically need excellent customer service skills to maintain and build relationships with those to whom you’re selling a product or service.

Learn more about what a marketing consultant is, their daily tasks and responsibilities, and how to pursue a career in the marketing field.

What is a marketing consultant?

A marketing consultant is someone who advises companies on how to reach consumers in a target market and convert them into paying customers. The marketing consultant role is similar to that of marketing coordinator and marketing manager in that professionals in all three roles usually need a degree in marketing or a related field, relevant experience, and key marketing skills.

Even with these similarities, you may keep some important distinctions in mind as you explore your marketing career potential:

• A marketing coordinator is responsible for helping to coordinate a company’s marketing efforts, and can be responsible for conducting market research, creating content, and monitoring ad campaigns. Coordinators may report to a marketing manager.

• A marketing manager often works as a leader within a marketing team, developing marketing plans and overseeing their implementation.

• A marketing consultant is typically an outside party hired by a company to advise on the next steps. 

What does a marketing consultant do? 

Depending on a company’s needs, marketing consultants may take on the following responsibilities: 

• Gather information and key metrics, including target market insights, website traffic, social media engagement, and more, to evaluate the effectiveness of a company’s marketing efforts

• Train a company’s marketing team to carry out a new strategy

• Monitor the results of a marketing strategy once it’s implemented and recommend ways to optimize it for better results

• Recommend new methods for reaching customers

Marketing consultant salary

According to data from Glassdoor, as of December 2024, the average annual salary for a marketing consultant was $78,252 [1]. Your average annual earnings as a marketing consultant may vary based on factors such as your employer, the industry you work in, and your experience level.

How to become a marketing consultant

A career as a marketing consultant may be a good fit for you if you are ready to build marketing expertise and advise businesses and individuals on how to market their brands effectively. Follow these steps to streamline your efforts.

1. Reflect on different employment scenarios.

Depending on your passions, interests, and career objectives, you may consider pursuing several employment scenarios. Consider the following examples to clarify what you want to achieve: 

Staff employment

• Find a position with a marketing consulting agency, a company that offers marketing services to start-ups, small businesses, and large enterprises. In this scenario, you’ll likely be one of the consultants on staff, working independently or on a team to develop and execute marketing strategies for the agency’s clients.

• Find a position with a company that offers products and services unrelated to marketing. As the consultant (or one of several) on staff, you would likely deliver marketing solutions for your employer or its external customers.

Freelancing or building your own business

• On a temporary basis, help start-ups, small businesses, and large enterprises to achieve their marketing needs. In this scenario, project size, contract duration, and tasks may vary, and you may take on multiple clients at once.

Read more: 10 Steps to Starting a Business

Taking on freelance marketing consulting projects could be a rewarding alternative to long-term employment or could set you up to find the job of your dreams. Be open to the range of possibilities available to you as your career evolves. Below, find some examples of projects you might take on when helping other companies with their marketing efforts:

- Setting up a customer relationship management system (CRM)

- Creating social media accounts and building a following

- Improving a website’s copy and using SEO strategies to attract more traffic

- Creating and executing an email marketing campaign

As you complete marketing consulting projects, be sure to add them to your resume, portfolio, or LinkedIn profile.

2. Consider earning a degree.

Earning a marketing degree can be an asset when applying for jobs or when gaining freelance clients. According to Zippia’s data, 75 percent of people in this role have a bachelor’s degree and 13 percent have a master’s degree [2]. Common majors for marketing consultants include business (25 percent), marketing (21 percent), and communication (11 percent) [2].

As a marketing major, you’ll likely learn the theory and practice of this field as well as foundational skills like conducting market research, analyzing consumer behavior, and developing marketing plans. 

3. Gain marketing experience.

Before getting a marketing consultant job or launching your own consulting brand, it’s important to gain experience solving real-world marketing challenges. With experience comes authority that can be an asset in a consulting role, as companies and individuals may look to you for guidance. Discover ways to gain experience: 

• Find an entry-level marketing job or internship and practice foundational skills.

• Find an advanced role in marketing, such as marketing coordinator or marketing manager, and build leadership and advisory skills.

• Look for freelancing opportunities and take on increasingly challenging projects.

3. Build marketing skills in key areas.

At the same time that you acquire real-world experience, be sure to build marketing skills that are in demand. For example, according to Zippia, skills that appear most frequently on marketing consultant resumes include customer service (11.6 percent), web content (9.9 percent), media sales (9.6 percent), digital marketing (8.4 percent), marketing campaigns (6.1 percent), Salesforce marketing cloud (3.9 percent), and PowerPoint (3.8 percent) [3]. 

You might find it useful to specialize in a particular area of marketing. For example, you could present yourself as any of the following and potentially get the attention of employers or freelance clients looking for someone who can perform specific tasks:

• Small business marketing consultant 

• Email marketing consultant 

• SEO marketing consultant 

• Inbound marketing consultant 

• Facebook marketing consultant

• Social media marketing consultant

• Digital marketing consultant (also referred to as web marketing consultant or internet marketing consultant)

4. Update your resume and online presence.

As you add more qualifications to your repertoire, update your resume and online presence to represent your qualifications. Explore some approaches you may take:

• Post marketing projects you’ve completed to an online portfolio or website, especially projects in which you advised other businesses and entrepreneurs. Include a description of each project and the results you delivered, along with testimonials you’ve gathered from satisfied clients.

• Post relevant content to your own social media accounts, especially material that showcases your ability to provide marketing advice.

• List all marketing experience on your resume, using action words to describe tasks and projects you completed, and quantifying the results of your work.

5. Explore the marketing consultant career landscape. 

When you’re ready to take on a marketing consulting role, explore the career landscape to find opportunities available to you, from job openings at different organizations to freelance gigs. For example, as of December 2024, you may find marketing consultant job openings in industries such as media, finance, health and medicine, manufacturing, the public sector, and energy and environment.

Narrow down the opportunities you want to pursue based on your goals, the industries that you find most interesting, the marketing campaigns you’d most like to help companies launch, etc. Then, begin applying to positions or pitching to potential freelance clients using your updated resume, portfolio, and other materials.

Read more: 8 Common Marketing Interview Questions and Answers

Improve your marketing consultant skills with Coursera

As a marketing consultant, you can help companies grow their business and reach new customers by consulting data to implement successful strategies. Taking online courses can be a great way to explore your potential as a marketing consultant. Sharpen your skills in social media strategy, building online stores, measuring marketing performance, and more in Coursera’s Professional Certificate programs, offered by industry leaders such as Google and Meta: