For producing marketing, often not. A licence will draft posts, adverts and emails faster and cheaper than any agency, and for plenty of businesses that is genuinely working. The honest question is what it is working at.

What it cannot do is decide what your business should be known for, or tell you that the thing you asked for is the wrong thing. That requires knowing your margins, your capacity and your market, and being willing to disagree with you. If your problem is output volume, the licence is the better buy. If your problem is that nothing distinguishes you from the next option on the list, more output makes it worse rather than better.

Because a language model answers from the middle of what it has read. Ask it to write for a bakery, a clinic or a law firm and it produces the most representative version of that category, since that is precisely what it is built to do.

The consequence is that everyone in a category is becoming more interchangeable at the same time, which is harder to notice than everyone becoming worse. It also means publishing volume now works against distinctiveness rather than building it. A practical test: put a competitor's logo on your last ten posts and ask whether anyone would notice.

The decision about what not to publish. We use these tools heavily and pass the cost saving on, so the output is not the scarce part. A prompt does not produce one result, it produces a range, and most of that range is wrong in ways that are obvious side by side and invisible on their own.

We share our prompts when clients ask for them, because there is nothing worth protecting in a paragraph of instructions. What does not transfer is knowing which of eight versions is right and what is wrong with the other seven. Brand voice is a rejection criterion rather than an instruction, which is why it cannot be written into a prompt.

Activity produces posts published, impressions served and a content calendar that stays full. Brand value produces people arriving already knowing why they picked you, and the ability to charge more than the alternative while still winning the work. The second shows up in your accounts, the first only in a report.

The clearest measurement we have of the gap comes from our own data. On a site we run, people searching the business by name click through at 56 percent, while every other search term on the same site averages 0.4 percent. Same pages, same writing, a hundred and forty times the result, decided entirely by whether the person already knew who they were looking for.

Six questions, none of which need any technical knowledge. Click through every page and check none are blank or full of placeholder text. Copy a sentence and search the site to see whether the same text appears on several pages. Ask for impressions, clicks and enquiries rather than a rankings report. Ask whether you chose the logo or were simply handed it. Ask why a particular layout or headline was used, and listen for whether the answer refers to your customers. Then ask yourself whether you would show the work to your best customer without explaining it first.

A third of the price is genuinely a third of the price, and sometimes that is the right call for where a business is. The question is only whether you are comparing the same thing.

The useful ones work out what the business should be doing before anything gets built or bought. That means looking at who the customer actually is, which channels have any chance of reaching them at the budget available, and what the business can realistically run once the engagement ends. The output is a decision and a sequence, not a campaign.

An agency executes a plan. A consultant works out whether the plan is right, and quite often concludes that the thing a business came in asking for is not the thing that will help.

There are three shapes that work at small-business budgets. A one-time engagement that produces a strategy and a sequence you then execute yourself, which is how most of our small business work runs. A short advisory arrangement where someone reviews what you are doing every month and tells you what to change. And a scoped project against a single problem, such as fixing lead quality or repositioning a brand.

What rarely works at that budget is a full retainer covering strategy and execution, because the strategy portion gets consumed by day to day delivery within about two months.

Ask what they would need to know before quoting. Anyone who can price the work from a one-line brief is selling a package, which may be fine but is not tailored. Anyone who asks about your margins, your repeat purchase rate and who currently answers your phone is working out what your situation actually requires.

The second test is whether they will tell you not to do something. A consultant who agrees with every idea you bring is not giving you judgement, and judgement is the entire product.

It depends on whether your problem is capacity or direction. If you know what needs doing and simply lack the hours, hiring is usually better value, because a consultant costs more per hour and you would be paying a premium for work a competent employee can do.

If you do not yet know what should be done, hiring first tends to be expensive. A new marketing hire with no strategy spends their first six months guessing, and you carry the salary while they do it. Settling direction first, then hiring against it, generally costs less in total.

A scoped one-time engagement usually runs two to six weeks depending on how much needs auditing before anything can be recommended. Businesses with existing campaigns and analytics take longer at the start, because the data has to be read before it can be trusted.

Longer is not automatically better. If someone proposes a six month strategy phase for a business with one product and one channel, the duration is serving their revenue rather than your problem.

Yes. Our work spans India, Belgium, France, Australia, New Zealand, Middle East and the United States, and the case studies on this page include a US-based food startup alongside India-based professional services and a solo coaching business.

Strategy work travels across markets more easily than execution does, because the reasoning about customers, margins and channel fit is the same everywhere. What changes is channel availability, local platform behaviour and compliance, and those get checked market by market rather than assumed.