Since I’ve been reviewing my Digital Business Consultant page over the past few days and have had to give this subject some serious thought, I figured it would be a good idea to talk a little more about this job.
Or, at least, about how I see this profile, which is far more hybrid than it might seem at first.
That’s why, in this post, I want to explain what it takes to deliver good consulting in the digital field.
But first, I want to show you some data and trends so you can better understand their importance.
By the way, here’s the video summary in case you’d rather watch and listen than read:
Here is the full article.
Índice de Contenidos del Artículo
Trends and Real-World Data
Figures—like the cotton pad in those old cleaning adverts—rarely lie. So I’ve pulled together data from some of the world’s leading consultancies. They became leaders partly because they understand where the market is heading:
Expansion of the Digital Consulting Market
Data: According to Statista, the global digital consulting services market is growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of between 10% and 15% from 2021 to 2025.
This growth reflects the demand for digital business consultants who can help companies with the areas mentioned above: technology, marketing, and processes.
Source: Statista, Digital Transformation Market Reports (2021).
Growth in Digital Transformation Investment
Data: According to IDC, in 2020 global investment in digital transformation exceeded $2 trillion..
This increase is driven by companies’ need to modernise their technology, marketing, and processes in order to compete in today’s digital environment.
Source: IDC, Global Digital Transformation Spending Guide (2020).
Improvements in Operational Efficiency and Profitability
Data: McKinsey & Company (whom I had the pleasure of working with while building Grupo MásMóvil) has reported that companies adopting effective digital strategies can improve operational efficiency by 20–30%..
This figure highlights the importance of having a digital consultant who not only implements technology and marketing, but also optimises processes to maximise return on investment.
Source: McKinsey, Digital Strategy Insights (2021).
The Post-COVID-19 Acceleration
Trend: The COVID-19 pandemic forced many companies to digitalise urgently, boosting demand for digital consultants.
Both SMEs and, above all, large companies have accelerated their digital transformation projects to adapt to a market that is constantly becoming more digital.
Specifically, more than 70% of companies worldwide have stepped up their digital initiatives since the pandemic.
Source: Deloitte, Digital Transformation Trends (2022).
So there you have it: I’ve given you several sources from reputable consultancies that I found while digging around online, so you can see this is a global trend. But clearly, you already see it every day in your job, your company, and your sector—and have done for years.
In fact, I’ll discuss how the role has evolved later, so you can see what people talked about in the early days and what they talk about now. But first, I want to bring those figures down to earth and explain what they really mean for the profession.
What This Growing Trend Means for the Profession
Basically, it means evolution. More specifically:
Diversification and Broader Skill Sets
We’ll go into this in more detail below, but for now I want you to take away the idea that growing demand for digital consulting means a consultant must not only master isolated areas such as technology or marketing, but also have a broad, analytical and strategic perspective, and understand how costly change management can be for an organisation..
Alongside the usual knowledge of technology, marketing, and processes, we now have to add data analysis, agile methodologies, and artificial intelligence.
Of course, all of this sits on top of the most basic layer: business. Because without a solid foundation in business knowledge, you’ll struggle to become a digital business consultant.
Of all the skills mentioned so far, this last one is the only truly essential one.
Greater Specialisation
Because there is another trend too: increasingly deep specialisation in a specific area of the digital channel.
Specialist consultants are emerging in:
- Technology: including specialists in software (web development, ERP, CRM, AI…) and hardware. Cybersecurity, warehouse and logistics robotics…
- Marketing: we could talk about consultants for every channel (SEO, SEM, email, social media…), as well as content experts, outbound specialists, copywriters…
- Digital product: digital product design, User Experience (UX), CRO… A whole world of its own.
- Ecommerce: another distinct branch, much more hybrid, requiring knowledge of all the areas above and a few more besides, such as operations.
- Analytics: from the basics—measuring what happens on your website—to as advanced as you like, using processes that require machine learning and enormous data lakes..
- Agile methodologies: when properly applied, they have proven highly beneficial for all kinds of organisations, especially those that are starting to reach a significant size.
- Data and legal compliance: I group them together because, although they deal with different matters, they have a great deal in common given the growing importance of data in companies and its regulation by organisations.
And I’m sure I’ve left out some kind of digital consultant specialising in another field.
The point is that, in my view, none of these roles on its own represents a digital business consultant..
No, because this person does not have to be an expert in any one field, but does need sufficiently deep knowledge of all of them.
They need to understand the importance of each of these areas in a digital business and neither underestimate nor overestimate any of them.
Mind you, I’m not saying they can’t be an expert in one of them—in fact, most digital business consultants I know are experts in several—but it isn’t essential.
If you are, great. If not, make the effort to learn enough to handle yourself reasonably well in any of them.
And that is why a good digital business consultant needs a solid foundation of experience and knowledge. You don’t come out of a master’s degree ready for this, for one thing, because I haven’t seen any programme focused specifically on it.
You have to work in different roles and companies to understand its full scope.
And that brings me to the next point.
The Need to Stay Up to Date
In my view, this is the biggest implication of growing demand for these services.
They force you to stay up to date.
And not everyone likes that.
What worked yesterday is outdated today (hello, AI).
With technology changing at such a rapid pace, if you want to be a consultant you need to be prepared to keep learning throughout your career..
Taking courses, joining professional communities, and following leading experts are essential to stay current and offer your clients the most suitable solutions.
If the idea of studying all your life doesn’t appeal to you, don’t even consider this job.
The Evolution of the Role: From Digital Transformation to Digital Business Consulting, via Digital Marketing
You may have noticed that throughout this post I have always put technology first, ahead of everything else.
It’s not that I think technology plays a more important role—in my opinion, increasingly less so thanks to the democratisation of technology—but rather that this is how the role evolved historically. The digital channel as we know it began with a technological breakthrough: the arrival of the internet in people’s homes..
The Digital Transformation Consultant
That was the starting point. At the time, although only briefly, this field was almost exclusively the preserve of technical profiles.
That is why the expert who helped companies make the leap to the new channel was called a digital transformation consultant. And their work focused more on the new processes and tools made possible by the internet than on selling through the new online channel.
The thing is, there are plenty of very smart people in the world. And they quickly realised there was a (very) good business opportunity waiting in that channel.
At the same time, a new generation of workers who had not experienced the pre-internet era in companies entered the labour market.
They weren’t “digital natives”—as the next generation would be called—but they were close.
The Digital Marketing Consultant
And so we reached a stage when buying online began to become normal.
eBay, Amazon, and the Telepizza website allowed us to buy from any PC—smartphones would not arrive until a few years later—and naturally, the goal was to get users to do so.
This is where the first SEO specialists appeared, followed shortly by AdWords and paid media experts, then the Community Managers, as they were called at the time, and—though not the same thing, but related—the first usability experts.
This is where the role of the Digital Marketing Consultant was born, moving closer to the Digital Business Consultant we know today.
People began talking about sales, profitability, growth, investment… Metrics closer to business than those used in digital transformation, which in my opinion were perceived more as costs.
Today there are many Digital Marketing Consultants—far more than Digital Business Consultants. In fact, owners of traditional businesses often see them as the same role.
In reality, they are similar roles, but not identical.
Marketing is only one part—an essential one, but still just one part—of everything covered by digital business.
That said, it is very common for our work in online marketing to push us into expanding our knowledge into related areas such as usability or analytics.
If we go deeply enough into those areas, and even further into business or company management—strategy, operations, finance— I would say that moving from one type of consulting to the other is a natural step..
The Ecommerce Consultant
We take another small step towards a more hybrid role, because an ecommerce consultant or an Ecommerce Manager needs to understand technology and marketing, while adding other ingredients to the mix such as logistics or customer service.
I won’t go into too much detail here, since I already wrote an article explaining what ecommerce consulting involves. I set out my view of the scope of this work there.
The summary would be that an Ecommerce Consultant IS a Digital Business Consultant, but only for one specific type of digital business..
The Traditional Business Consultant
All right, but besides digital profiles there is another route to becoming a Digital Business Consultant: starting in traditional business consulting.
The kind that has been around for centuries and, until fairly recently, focused mainly on traditional companies with predominantly physical channels.
This role will continue to exist, because traditional companies do not seem likely to disappear.
But many of them have transformed, and the online channel is becoming increasingly important.
So when they request consulting and audits, they want professionals who understand the whole business, not just one part of it.
Here, the traditional consultant has three options:
- Update their skills and train in digital.
- Partner with someone who complements them.
- Do nothing and watch their business shrink as the number of companies seeking their services also declines.
All three are, of course, respectable. But while the first two can work perfectly well, the third leads towards obsolescence, so it is not the one I would choose if I found myself in that position.
If they choose the first option, the traditional consultant will need training in certain skills and attitudes.
The Essential Skills
Let’s start with skills.
Below, I’ll explain the ones I consider fundamental. And note that they are necessary for any kind of Digital Business Consultant, whether they come from traditional consulting or the digital side.
Technical and Digital Knowledge
It is essential to master tools and concepts related to digital marketing, SEO, web analytics, web development, UX, and technology trends such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, cloud computing, and so on.
Without this knowledge, you will struggle to design proposals with effective strategies and solutions suited to each business.
Analytical Skills
A consultant must be able to interpret data and metrics to assess the performance of proposed and implemented strategies.
This includes the ability to use analytics tools and extract insights that support data-driven decisions, which is essential for optimising processes and maximising return on investment.
But it also includes something that is sometimes overlooked: developing an analytical mindset. And that is the most important part of all.
Because this mindset is what allows you to understand different business models and adapt to the various tools and data sources they have implemented.
Translating everything into numbers —business numbers wherever possible—shows far more clearly which areas should be prioritised in the organisation, whether marketing, development, customer service, or logistics.
Strategic Thinking
A consultant must understand the business’s competitive environment, customers, market, and sector; identify opportunities; and design plans that drive growth or the agreed objectives, which may be different, such as profitability.
This means having a global, analytical perspective and knowing how to adapt strategies to the particular circumstances of each company.
Problem-Solving
Your client’s problems, not your own.
This is a skill that distinguishes specialist consultants from business consultants..
I have seen consulting proposals made to clients on more than a few occasions for issues that interested the consultants more than the clients.
Examples:
- Marketing: proposing discount campaigns or free-shipping promotions without considering the action’s real profit. Or talking about ROI while counting only advertising spend rather than the total cost of the sale.
- Technology: using a new CMS for its promised advantages—the excuse—and to learn how to use it—the reality—despite it never having been tested before, instead of sticking with the usual options.
- Tools: proposing changes based only on improvements and not on everything the change entails, leaving the actual differences negligible, whether for a CRM, ERP, or email marketing tool.
- Redesigns: of websites, apps, or branding, when simple improvements to what already exists are often much better.
- Analytics: adding a thousand and one fields to the data layer “just in case,” only to neither use nor exploit them.
Some of those sound familiar, don’t they?
They are very common. A business consultant should know how to separate the wheat from the chaff in every one of these cases. It is about knowing what creates real value for the business and offering it. Full stop.
Communication and Presentation Skills
If you want clients, explaining complex concepts clearly and accessibly is a must. If they do not understand you, they will neither buy from you in the first place nor listen to you afterwards.
Good verbal and written communication helps convey ideas, recommendations, and results more effectively to your different audiences: from internal teams such as marketing and IT to CEOs or C-suite executives..
Empathy and Interpersonal Skills
You will need information and support from your client.
Understanding their needs, concerns, and objectives in the first meetings will make your work easier.
Empathy, active listening and the ability to build relationships of trust make collaboration and success easier, both during the sales process and while carrying out the work.
Leadership and Teamwork
Although consultants often work independently, they also need to coordinate with internal and external teams.
Leadership skills inspire confidence in the person hiring you and help guide teams through the tasks that need to be completed.
Sales Skills
Unless you want to work as an employee at a consultancy—and even then too, because you will have to sell proposals or projects and also “sell” your conclusions—this skill is rarely considered part of a consultant’s skill set.
For me, however, it is one of the essentials.
Creativity
Finally, proposing new ideas when the usual ones do not work will get us out of apparently dead-end situations.
Again, continuous learning, experience, and the ability to connect the dots allow us to identify options others might overlook and present alternative solutions.
And with that, we close the skills section. But before moving on to attitude, let’s discuss another aspect.
Tools
To close this section, here is the list of tools I consider essential for this kind of consulting.
- Browser: knowing how to make the most of it, including its capabilities and different extensions that let you audit websites, for example.
- Office suite: it does not matter whether you use Microsoft, LibreOffice, or Google’s suite. You will need Word or PowerPoint for reports and presentations, and Excel to combine data from different sources, display it, or create pivot tables, charts, and dashboards.
- SEO: RankTracker, SEMRush, Sistrix, SimilarWeb, DinoRank, Google Ads Keyword Planner, Keyword.io, Google Search Console… You will need to know and use several of them.
- Paid: campaign managers for Meta, Google, and TikTok at a minimum.
- Email marketing: whichever one the client uses. There are many, and they all provide the most relevant data. You do need to distinguish between bulk-email tools such as MailerLite, AcumbaMail… and marketing automation platforms such as Probance, Sales Manago, or ConnectIf.
- Analytics : Google Analytics is essential, because you will find it in 99% of projects. In second place come Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar for studying user experience. GTM and Looker Studio will also come in handy.
- Web development: I would say a basic knowledge of WordPress is essential. It would not hurt to look at PrestaShop and Shopify if you work in ecommerce.
- Management: Notion, Trello, or Asana, for example, together with good use of folders or labels in your email manager, such as Gmail, and your calendar or diary.
- AI: it makes life easier on several levels, whether for writing, analysing data, or researching a topic in depth. I mention ChatGPT because it is the best known, but there are several others.
These tools, and a few others, are what I have fun with every day.
In any case, if you already know them or think the list is too short, here is a general list of the best free digital tools as well as some for specific areas:
And now, let’s change direction.
The Necessary Mindset
I believe attitude is more important than skills.
The reason is that, although you cannot work as a consultant without the necessary skills, the truth is that they can be learned.
But without the right mindset, it is much harder.
Yes, mindset can be changed, but it is far harder for us than learning a new skill. That is why I always say that in this job, attitude beats aptitude.
Furthermore, attitude determines how we, as consultants, relate both to clients and to the challenges they set us.
And you should know that every new client or project is a challenge.
So if you like comfort… you are not going to enjoy it.
Results Orientation
Be clear about this: when someone hires a consultant, they do so to get results.
Business results, obviously.
They are not hiring you to learn—that is what a mentor is for—or to be entertained, but to solve or improve some aspect of the project.
That is why the first step is to set clear objectives and ALWAYS work towards them. Everything else is secondary.
Flexibility and Adaptability
There is not much to say here: the digital sector is constantly changing. Accept it, come to terms with it early, and adapt to changes as quickly as possible.
That said, there is no need to be seduced by every new fad, such as SEO for virtual assistants or social networks like Clubhouse, which disappear almost as quickly as they arrive.
Proactivity
Being proactive in identifying obstacles, anticipating problems, and looking for opportunities to improve—without waiting for situations to arise on their own—will build trust in the quality of your work.
That confidence comes from being able to propose solutions or alternatives. And that ability comes from training and experience.
Resilience
As I said earlier, every client is a challenge.
And on large projects, there will be moments when you have no idea where to begin..
No matter how much experience you have, impostor syndrome will appear.
But do you know the good news? The answer is always, always, always more work.
Yes, by putting in more hours—analysing or carrying out tasks—but eventually you find the answer.
Keep that in mind when new obstacles appear, learn from your mistakes, and see every challenge as an opportunity to improve..
Self-Confidence
This helps with the previous point. Confidence in your abilities and knowledge will help you through the project’s worst moments and, at the same time, convey credibility and build trust with the client.
Curiosity
Everything can be improved.
An inquisitive mindset that drives you to explore new ideas, tools and technologies, business models, processes… will make your work easier.
There is always a better solution.
Humility
Alongside curiosity, we need to recognise that there is always more to learn and that, however brilliant we think we are, someone is always better—someone who has faced the issue before and probably solved it better.
Stay close to those people. Value the people you learn from.
There is always something that would be useful for you to learn.
Commitment to Continuous Learning
I explained it above: you already know how the digital world works—something new appears every day.
And you will have to put in the hours to learn it.
On the other hand, providing training will also help you structure your ideas better. As well as earning a little extra money, of course.
Change Management
It is no longer just about you adapting, but about convincing your client that they must adapt too—and showing them, with figures and estimates, why the change is necessary.
Because managing resistance to change in a company is anything but easy. Be prepared to put up with all sorts and endure things that will make you sit on the sofa with a beer when you get home from work.
But guiding—or trying to guide—companies through transformation processes as smoothly and effectively as possible is part of the job, whether you like it or not.
That was the final characteristic I wanted to discuss.
As you can see, there are quite a few skills and attitudes required to do the job effectively.
But they are essential if you are to face the challenges of a constantly evolving environment and build strong, lasting relationships with your clients.
And now comes the question: how do you acquire these skills and this mindset?
How to Train as a Digital Business Consultant
First, reread the previous two sections and think about whether you really want to become one.
Think about your real reasons for considering becoming a consultant:
Do you enjoy the work?
Do you see a future in it?
Would you like to spend 10, 15, or 20 years doing it?
Will you be able to handle the difficult parts? Because there are always some.
Those are the first questions you need to ask yourself, but there are more.
For example:
Do you think you have the necessary experience?
And the knowledge?
And the mindset?
If the answer is yes, I’m afraid I do not have much good news for you.
But I do have some.
There is not much good news because there is no specific training for this.
There are no courses for digital business consultants.
And certainly no master’s degrees or university programmes.
Nothing.
But the truth is that, if you genuinely want to work in this field, you do have a few options. Three, specifically:
The first is to complete a range of different training programmes.:
- In digital marketing.
- In UX.
- In web design or development.
- An MBA or something similar will not hurt either.
As you can see, all of this relates to the skills side.
It gives you theoretical knowledge, but not real-world application.
That is where the second route comes in: changing jobs, taking on the different roles mentioned above within the same company or—more likely—at other companies.
In my experience, after two years in the same role you have already learned a great deal about it—more than enough to cover that area in a consulting engagement, whether paid media, SEO, automation, or traditional business consulting.
Finally, a third option is mentoring..
Working with a consultant who offers mentoring will shorten the process: you will not need to spend a couple of years in each role or complete months-long courses in every necessary pillar.
No.
The mentor’s experience and perspective will allow you to focus on the key aspects. You will receive enough cross-functional training to step into the arena.
And you will also be able to rely on them whenever you need support in your work.
Both in terms of knowledge and in terms of focus —mindset—and contacts who can get you out of a tight spot when needed.
Honestly, if you are sure you would like to become a Digital Business Consultant and have worked in the sector for fewer than five years—or longer, but always in very similar roles—I do not think there is a better option.
And I’m not saying that because I offer my own programme.
It is exactly the opposite: I provide a digital business mentoring service because I believe it is the best and fastest way for you to start working as a consultant and offering these services, whether within a company or by creating your own business.
If the subject interests you, take a look and let’s talk.
Conclusions
So, is it now clear what you need to become a Digital Business Consultant?
Do you like the sound of it?
I have been doing it for many years and, honestly, it is a job I enjoy a great deal—otherwise I would not do it, obviously—where the advantages outweigh the drawbacks.
That is despite the fact that it can be stressful, make you rack your brains—really rack them—on certain projects, and force you to stay trained and informed about the sector.
You also learn a great deal and never get bored. It constantly pushes you to learn more.
One thing balances the other.
As you have seen, this is a growing sector and it is not expected to decline—quite the opposite. So if you like it, I’ll see you here next week or, if you prefer, by subscribing to my Newsletter (with a gift) or on my YouTube channel..
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