Marketing questions, answered

Aoun Zia is a full-stack marketing consultant with 12 years of experience, trading as AZ Marketing & Web Design. He plans and runs paid media, organic social, SEO, AEO and GEO, creative, web, cloud, CRM and analytics for brands in the Americas, the Middle East and Europe. He is Toptal top 3% vetted talent and an MCIM member of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. More about Aoun.

A marketing consultant reviews how a business attracts and converts customers, decides what to change and, depending on the consultant, either advises your team or does the work. I do both: I write the plan, then run the campaigns, content, tracking and reporting myself.

A full-stack marketer can plan and run every part of marketing, from strategy and paid ads to social, SEO, creative, web, email, CRM and analytics, instead of specialising in one channel. For a growing brand, that means one accountable person instead of several freelancers or an agency team.

Hire a consultant when you want senior experience on your account and one accountable person who knows your business. Hire an agency when you need a large team producing high volumes in parallel. Many brands use a consultant to set strategy and manage the specialists or agencies they already have.

It depends on scope, seniority and market. Consultants usually charge by the hour, by the project or with a monthly retainer. Retainers suit ongoing work such as running ads or social; fixed project fees suit a website build or an audit. I quote a fixed monthly or project price after a free marketing audit, so you know the cost before you commit.

Monthly retainers for ongoing marketing, or fixed-scope projects such as a website build or launch campaign. You get a written quote after a free marketing audit call.

A call to go through your goals, numbers and channels, plus a look at your website and any accounts you choose to share. You leave knowing the first fixes I would make. See what the audit covers.

Yes. All work is remote, and calls are scheduled inside your business hours, whether you are in the US, Canada, Latin America, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the UK or the EU.

Toptal top 3% vetted marketing talent, MCIM membership of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, and 12 years in marketing, including Head of Marketing and International Marketing Manager roles in Dubai.

A marketing strategy consultant researches your market, customers and competitors, decides how you should position yourself and which channels to use, sets budgets and targets, and builds the plan. I also run the plan, rather than handing it to someone else.

Goals and targets, target customers, positioning and key messages, the channel mix, a budget by channel and month, a content and campaign calendar, the KPIs for each channel, and how and when results are reviewed.

Work backwards from your revenue goal. Estimate how many customers you need, what you can afford to pay to acquire each one given your margin and repeat purchases, and multiply. Then split the budget across channels, test, and move money toward what pays back. The ROAS calculator helps with the maths.

Look for someone who has done the work you need, not only advised on it: ask for examples, how they measure results and who will actually do the work. Check credentials you can verify, such as professional memberships and vetted networks, and start with an audit or a small project before a long contract.

A digital marketing consultant plans and improves how a business wins customers online: search, paid ads, social media, email, website and analytics. Some only advise; a full-stack consultant also runs the channels.

SEO (search engine optimization) is improving your website so it ranks higher in Google and Bing for the searches your buyers make. It covers technical health, content, internal links and authority from other sites.

AEO (answer engine optimization) is structuring content so it is picked as the direct answer in featured snippets, voice assistants and AI search. In practice: answer the question in the first sentence, then add detail, and mark the page up with structured data.

GEO (generative engine optimization) is shaping how AI assistants such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity describe and recommend your brand. It combines crawlable, well-structured content with consistent facts about your brand across the web.

SEO aims to rank a page in search results so people click it. AEO aims to have your content quoted as the answer itself, in a snippet, a voice reply or an AI response. Good AEO is built on good SEO. Full comparison of SEO, AEO and GEO.

AEO focuses on getting a specific answer selected for a specific question. GEO is broader: it covers how generative AI tools understand, describe and recommend your brand overall, across many questions.

No. AI search tools still rely on crawling and ranking web pages, so the foundations of SEO still apply. GEO adds work on top: clear answers, structured data, AI crawler access and consistent brand information.

Allow OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot crawler in robots.txt, make sure your pages are readable as plain HTML, answer buyer questions clearly near the top of the page, add structured data, and build mentions of your brand on sites people trust. Step-by-step guide.

Be easy to find and easy to describe: a crawlable site with a clear statement of what you do and for whom, consistent business details on every profile, reviews and mentions on third-party sites, and pages that answer the comparisons buyers ask about.

Decide per crawler. OpenAI documents GPTBot as its training crawler and OAI-SearchBot as the crawler that surfaces sites in ChatGPT search, so you can block one and allow the other. Anthropic and Perplexity publish similar lists. If you want to appear in AI answers, do not block the search crawlers. Crawler list with sources.

No. Google says Google-Extended controls whether your content is used to train Gemini models and does not affect inclusion in Google Search, which includes AI Overviews.

Structured data helps search engines understand who you are, what you offer and how your pages relate. It is a low-cost way to remove ambiguity about your brand, which is what AI tools need when they describe you.

llms.txt is a proposed convention: a plain text file at the root of a website that summarises the site and links to its key pages for language models. It is not an official standard and support across AI search engines is not confirmed, but it is cheap to add. This site has one.

Technical fixes can show up in weeks once pages are recrawled. New content usually takes several months to rank for competitive terms, depending on your site's authority and the competition. I set expectations per keyword in the plan.

Meta, Google (Search, Performance Max, YouTube and App campaigns), Microsoft Advertising, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Apple Search Ads, Amazon Ads, ChatGPT Ads and programmatic platforms such as DV360, The Trade Desk and StackAdapt.

ChatGPT Ads are paid placements that OpenAI sells inside ChatGPT. Advertisers can buy them through OpenAI's Ads Solutions team, agency and technology partners, or self-service through Ads Manager. Guide to ChatGPT Ads.

OpenAI's help centre lists self-service Ads Manager as available in 63 countries, including the United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, the United Kingdom, the EU countries, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Oman, Bahrain, India, Japan and Australia. The advertiser's legal entity must be based in an available country. Source: OpenAI.

Enough to get statistically useful data on each platform you test, usually starting with one or two platforms rather than all of them. In the free audit I look at your margins, average order or deal value and sales cycle, then recommend a starting budget and the platform to start on.

ROAS (return on ad spend) is revenue from ads divided by ad spend. A ROAS of 4 means every 1 dollar spent brought in 4 dollars of revenue. Calculate yours.

One that is above your break-even ROAS with room for profit. Break-even ROAS is 1 divided by your gross margin, so a business with a 50% margin breaks even at a ROAS of 2. A good target depends on your margin and on how much repeat purchase a new customer brings.

They do different jobs. Google Search captures people already searching for what you sell. Meta and TikTok create demand by showing your product to people who match your buyer but are not searching yet. Most brands need both, in a mix set by budget and sales cycle.

For brands whose buyers are on TikTok and who can produce native, video-first creative, often yes. TikTok rewards ads that look like TikTok content, so the creative plan matters more than on most platforms.

Yes. Creative is the biggest lever in most accounts, so I brief, design and edit ad creative, including AI-generated video, as part of the work.

The ones your buyers use and where you can post consistently. For most B2B brands that is LinkedIn plus one video platform; for consumer brands it is usually Instagram and TikTok, with YouTube for longer content. I recommend a mix in the free audit.

SMO is making your profiles and posts discoverable in search inside social platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn, using the keywords, captions, on-screen text and profile details people search for.

As often as you can keep quality and consistency. A steady schedule you can sustain beats a burst of daily posts followed by silence. I set a cadence per platform in the content plan.

Both. I plan, write, design and edit the content, including short-form video, then schedule, post and manage the replies.

Any platform can rank if it outputs clean HTML, loads fast and lets you control titles, URLs, redirects and schema. I choose based on who will edit the site and what it needs to do, not on preference.

Not if the move is planned: matching URLs where possible, 301 redirects for the rest, updated sitemaps and Search Console checks after launch.

Wix sites can rank, but Wix gives you less control over code, speed and how content is rendered than a custom or more flexible platform. This site moved off Wix to static HTML for speed and crawlability.

They are DNS records that prove your emails really come from you. SPF lists the servers allowed to send for your domain, DKIM signs each message, and DMARC tells inbox providers what to do with mail that fails those checks. Gmail and Yahoo require them for bulk senders.

Yes. When changing DNS I only touch the website records and leave the MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC records for your email exactly as they are.

Klaviyo is usually the stronger choice for Shopify and e-commerce because of its store data and flows. Mailchimp or Brevo can suit simpler newsletters and services businesses.

For e-commerce: welcome, abandoned cart, browse abandonment and post-purchase. For services and B2B: welcome and a lead nurture sequence. These cover the moments when people are most likely to buy.

HubSpot is faster to set up and easier for small and mid-size teams. Salesforce suits larger teams with complex processes and admin support. Zoho, Pipedrive and GoHighLevel are strong lower-cost options. I recommend based on your team and budget.

Google Analytics 4 collects and reports on what visitors do. Google Tag Manager is the container that loads tracking tags, including GA4, ad pixels and conversion tags, without editing your site's code each time. Most sites use both.

Server-side tracking sends conversion data from your server or a tagging server instead of only from the visitor's browser. It is more reliable when browsers block scripts, and it feeds tools like the Meta Conversions API.

Each platform counts conversions differently: different attribution windows, models and tracking methods. I align the setup, remove duplicates and build one report that reconciles them against your actual sales.

Google's guidance focuses on whether content is helpful and original, not on how it was produced. I use AI to speed up research and drafts, then edit for accuracy, experience and brand voice before anything is published.

Yes. I connect your forms, ads and inbox to your CRM so every lead is logged, tagged and gets a fast first reply, with alerts to the right person.