What will you get if you hire me as a creative consultant?
Are you ready to make your business and skill set a priority? As a creative consultant / coach I do a lot of different things for my clients. Some is kind of rolled into existing projects. Other bits are stand alone services that they pay for. Think of it as having a creative director and marketing adviser on staff. I’ll work with you as a partner to make sure your branding and messaging stay on point and in focus.
I’ll break this down into three scenarios for you: design consultation, social media consultation and skills coaching. Keep in mind that these are not the only creative consultant scenarios that exist within my services. If it’s related to design and digital marketing, I can probably give you some valuable, actionable solutions.
1. Design Consultation
This is what most people think of when they hear creative consultant. You have designed a “good enough” logo and you’ve got a basic DIY web page. You can’t afford to pay thousands on branding because, well … money. That’s honestly not a problem.
You want to know if this logo and your web page design are up to par and will do their job until you can make a little bank to pay me for a proper branding solution later. Cool!
We will set a date to evaluate both designs. Of course, before this meeting, I will have already had a good look at both elements. I’ll show up to our consultation with a few things:
- My thoughts on how you can improve your designs
- A report with all of my thoughts, additional resources you might find helpful (free and otherwise)
- An estimate to have me do the work if you have a few bucks to spend
I don’t expect you to understand all of it or know exactly how to get it done. That’s why we’re sitting down in person (or via video chat) to go over it. You can ask and I’ll tell you exactly where to go and what to do.
What’s the investment?
It honestly depends on the depth of the project. This exact scenario where I don’t do any of the design work and it’s one consult would probably run you a straight $90 consult fee. For my critique, solutions, in-person consult, resource list and twenty years of expertise.
2. Social Media Consultation
As a creative consultant, I don’t strictly work on design with my clients. You also need to know how and where to use your imagery and other creative content. In this scene you have just launched a brand and aren’t sure which social media channels are most useful, how to leverage them to build an audience, best practices or even how to navigate all of their features.
You will fill out my branding questionnaire. It’s the same one you would fill out had you hired me to design a logo or website. You get to keep this for yourself and it will give me all of the info I need for our consultation.
At our session we will discuss your goals, strengths, weaknesses, audience and challenges. We’ll discuss which social media channels might be the best fit for you as well as rough out a preliminary strategy for the content you’ll release on these outlets.
So, we decide that Instagram and Twitter are what you’re most comfortable with and we decide that each of these will be home to two different types of content. I can either leave you with that info (and a written report on our findings within a week of our meeting) or we can schedule a second session where I will walk you through using these channels, best practices and integration with your other marketing (website, email list, etc). This session may also yield some short video tutorial clips specific to your situation if we find a certain aspect of the process difficult for you to manage.
What’s the investment?
This could turn into a series of sessions where we flesh out image editing resources or the use of other resources to make the most out of your chosen channels (link shortening, graphic design apps, etc). This specific scenario with two sessions, report and some video tutorials would run somewhere in the neighborhood of $300 – $400. Again you get more than just a private Q&A session. I’ll give you actionable solutions, a list of real resources to do the job yourself and, as always, my professional know-it-all status.
3. Skills Coaching
Skills coaching is probably my favorite kind of creative consultation session. It’s less like a consultation and more like a private workshop. Here’s our skills coaching scenario.
You want to start using email marketing. You’ve done some research and you’re still not sure where to go or how to start. Lucky for you I have a favorite email marketing platform (MailChimp) and I’m very well versed in how to use it as well as integrating it into other forms of marketing (social media, website and even print). Afterall, I use it myself.
First, you’ll answer some questions about your business via that questionnaire I mentioned. We’ll schedule our session date and I’ll pull together a list of resources I think might be helpful. Before we meet, we’ll work together to get your account started and you’ll get together any imagery (photos, logo, etc) in a local or online folder and email addresses you’ve collected to get started (remember you need to have explicit permission to add a contact to an email marketing list). When we meet we will start from the beginning, with account setup, adding email addresses, branding … all the way up to drafting your first email.
We’ll also cover creating a signup form, integrating your email collection with your website (which may require some additional work after our meeting) and what types of content you’ll create and how much. MailChimp offers other stuff like landing pages, print ads and loads of other features. Some are paid features, but lots of them are free. So, we’ll go over those quickly so that you know they’re there for you to use. This consult can be a little more in depth (2-4 hours) and sometimes we break it out into two meetings if we need to.
What is the investment?
This scenario as described would run $300-$400. It’s really straight forward and it’s rare that we run into any snags since I’m so familiar with the platform. Other skills coaching could be WordPress, social media channels, digital photography or any other skill I use professionally that you could use yourself (with a little direction). If you’re not sure whether I can help, it never hurts to ask.
How to schedule your first session with your creative consultant.
That’s easy. Contact me and we’ll get started right away. Where will we meet? I can meet with you in person or virtually. It can be your location, your favorite coffee joint or I can make us coffee here on the lake and we can settle in with my fur babies. We can even meet virtually via your favorite video chat app, as long as it supports screen sharing and you have a sufficient internet connection.
If you have any other questions about my services you can tell me about what you need here and I’ll get back to you within 48 hours.
