Is working with a freelance e-commerce consultant really worth it? I’ve been asked this exact question many times before working with a new client.
What value can an e-commerce consultant bring to your business? Well, allow me to explain.
Why hire a consultant?
As an entrepreneur, taking the time to develop your products and build your business is hard enough. There doesn’t come a day when you wake up and suddenly know how to do everything else. Instead, it’s important to focus your time on the things you do best. Since e-commerce is becoming increasingly important as a mechanism for selling products to a larger target audience, this is expertise that can significantly grow your business. A freelance e-commerce consultant can provide this expertise much more efficiently than you’d be able to learn yourself. This means quickly bringing your business up to speed on the specific strategies, tactics, and skills that you need to sell your products. This saves you a lot of time and money, compared to the time spent figuring this out on your own.
What does an e-commerce consultant do?
An e-commerce consultant can help you with a wide variety of e-commerce related services, from store setup, to the setup of high-converting advertising campaigns. Here’s a few areas you may not have even considered where a consultant could help:
- Store setup (e.g. Shopify)
- Adding products
- Optimizing product pages
- Competitor research
- Online marketing strategy
- Basic technical SEO setup
- Conversion-oriented SEO strategy
- E-commerce conversion optimization
- Google Ads campaigns
- Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns
- Remarketing campaigns
- Email automation flows
This is the basic toolkit of an e-commerce consultant. But a good consultant should always start by learning about your business and ideally, should have some affinity with the products you are selling. Based on what they learn during this intake conversation, a more bespoke strategy can be developed for your webshop, and really start increasing your ROI (Return On Investment) ASAP.
The ROI of a freelance e-commerce consultant
When running an e-commerce business, there are generally two options to ensure on-point marketing, and sales generation.
You might have the time and basic knowledge to learn about e-commerce marketing yourself and implement it.
Or, you hire someone who already knows e-commerce marketing, to then focus on what you do best.
Let’s briefly dive deeper into both options.
Learning e-commerce marketing yourself
The internet is full of great courses, articles, and videos about e-commerce marketing. Some great resources are Udemy, Google Skillshop and Facebook Blueprint.
If you have time on your hands and are eager to learn all the skills it takes to master e-commerce marketing, by all means go for it. These will be very valuable skills to have.
Hiring an e-commerce consultant
If you have no time to spare and/or really want to focus on what you do best, great! When I started out as a marketing consultant, I also tried to do everything myself. It took me a couple of years to learn that this isn’t where my time is best spent. At some point, I realized the true value of bringing in talented experts for the skills that I simply didn’t possess, or didn’t have the time to develop.
Bringing on an expert, be it for e-commerce or any other skill, they’re usually providing an instant return on investment for a couple of reasons.
- They have a broad view and broad experience on all kinds of different marketing possibilities. This guarantees they’ll select the best strategy with the highest ROI, specifically for your business.
- They’ve probably failed… a lot! And this is good. Every time we fail, we learn something. It’s part of the game, and it’s a necessary cost for gaining experience. This also means that they won’t make these makes on your project. Meaning a higher ROI, faster.
One of the greatest things we can learn as former children, is to use our resources wisely. It doesn’t mean shouldering the burden for every single thing, just because we’re an entrepreneur. We’re living in a time that allows us the flexibility to call on experts with the right advice we need, for the time we need them, and allow ourselves to focus on the bigger picture. The part that we do best.
So, now that you made it to the end of this post, what do you think? Do you have something to add? Have I missed something? Feel free to let me know. I look forward to chatting with you!
