The short answer
Marketing consultation is paid advice on what to sell, who to sell it to and where to spend to reach them. AR Digital Solutions runs campaigns daily across search and social, so the recommendations come out of live accounts rather than theory. Brisbane based, 32 staff, rated 4.9 from 96 reviews.
What a consultation covers
- Your offer and positioning, read the way a stranger comparing quotes reads it
- A budget model built from your own margins, not an industry average
- Channel mix, including which channels your market isn't on
- The numbers you're missing, including the ones your reporting hides
- A competitor read on who's bidding and what they're promising
- A written plan with the cost and sequence against each move
Work out your budget from the customer backwards
The question we're asked most is what to spend. Underneath it sits a different question, which is what everyone else spends, and that one has no useful answer. Two businesses on identical revenue can sit at 60% margin and 12% margin. One can pay six times more for the same customer and still come out ahead. An industry percentage tells you what an average of strangers did.
The calculation that does work takes two numbers off your own books and one decision.
Start with what a customer is worth, not what a sale is worth.
Take your average job and the gross margin on it. A workshop with a $3,000 average job at 35% margin makes $1,050 gross profit per customer. If people come back, count the repeat work, because a customer who returns twice is worth double to the budget. That gross profit figure, not the $3,000, is what marketing gets paid out of.
Then decide what share of it you'll hand over to win the customer.
A third is a reasonable place to sit if you want growth without eating the margin that funds everything else. On $1,050 that's $350 as the most you can pay to acquire a customer. A ceiling, not a target, and it came from your P&L instead of a blog post.
Then decide how many customers you need.
Not "more". Twelve a month, because twelve fills the second van. Twelve at $350 is $4,200 a month, and that's your budget. It stopped being a guess about three sentences ago.
Then work back through the funnel, because you don't buy customers, you buy leads.
If four in ten quotes become jobs, twelve customers needs thirty quotes. If six in ten enquiries reach the quote stage, thirty quotes needs fifty enquiries. Fifty into $4,200 gives you $84 as the most you can pay per enquiry.
Then check that ceiling against what the channel costs.
Say clicks in your category run around $6 and your landing page converts at 6%. That's $100 an enquiry, above your $84 ceiling, so the plan doesn't work as written. Now you have real options instead of a vague worry. Get the page converting at 7.5% and the cost falls to $80. Lift the average job or the margin and the ceiling rises. Or accept that paid search is the wrong opening channel here.
Two caveats. If you don't know your quote to job rate, that's the first finding of the engagement, and it usually falls out of a marketing audit before anything is worth modelling. And cash flow sets a second ceiling that margin doesn't, because a business paid monthly over three years can afford far more up front than the maths suggests, but only if it can fund the gap. Plenty have grown themselves broke on a perfectly correct acquisition cost.
How a consultation runs
A call before anything is billed
Twenty minutes on what you sell and what the last twelve months looked like.
We get into the accounts
Analytics, Search Console, ad accounts and enquiry records. We'd rather read the data than be told about it.
We build the model with you
Your margins, your conversion rates, your customer target. You leave understanding the arithmetic, not just the answer.
You get it in writing
Findings ranked by what moves first, with a cost against each.
Who this suits, and who it doesn't
It suits owners spending real money with no clear read on the return, and anyone weighing up a proposal they can't judge on its merits.
It's a poor fit if you want a document to justify a decision that's already made, or if the honest answer is to answer your phone faster rather than buy more traffic.
Why advice from operators is different
We run campaigns every day.
Our SEO, paid media and social teams sit in the same office, so the person advising you can open a live account to check an assumption instead of quoting a benchmark.
A dedicated account manager.
One person holding the context, so you're not re explaining the business each quarter.
No lock in contracts.
Take the plan and run it in house or hand it to another agency. Either works.
"Won't you just recommend your own services?"
Sometimes the model shows the channel we sell is the wrong one, and we say so. Smaller invoice, client who comes back. The marketing page covers what we'd actually be recommending.