I was a bit tough on marketing experts last week.

I pointed out that very often you can't realistically follow their advice because they over-complicate things. They love marketing. Particularly advanced, sophisticated marketing, even if it doesn't get much better results than simple marketing. And they're happy to spend all their time on it.

That's the opposite of normal business people who want to do the simplest and quickest possible marketing to get the clients they need.

But marketing experts do have a lot of value to add. You just need to know how to tap into it.

So, one thing marketing experts are good at is coming up with new ideas. When you spend most of your time thinking about marketing you're going to be able to think of new things much better than someone who only works on marketing for a little of their time.

They also tend to “hang out” with other marketing experts and get early access to their new ideas too.

The trick here is to make sure that the marketing expert you're paying attention to has tested their new idea before you do anything with it.

Many of the ideas that I thought were my best have turned out to be duds. And many of the ones I thought were so-so have proved to be big winners. The only way you can ever know is to test.

I treat my own business as a bit of a testing ground. Most of the things I recommend to my clients are things I try out for myself first so that they don't have to run into all the initial speed bumps.

So if a marketing expert tells you about a wonderful new way of doing things, don't immediately adopt it unless they present solid evidence that it works from their own experience or that of others.

The other thing you need to do is to simplify their ideas and recommendations.

Marketing experts will naturally tend to focus on the very best, most sophisticated and hence most complicated solutions.

So you need to take those solutions and whittle them down to get to their 80:20 essence.

Look for ways of simplifying that give you most of the benefits, but can be done in much less time and with much less effort. 

Ideally, the marketing expert will be experienced enough at working with real clients to do that themselves. But if not, you need to do it (or ask them questions to extract the 80:20 value).

Finally, marketing experts should have a broad and deep experience base. So they should be able to give you very good feedback on whether something you're planning has worked before for others – and if not, how to fix it so it will work.

As before, you need to keep them focused on simple, practical solutions – not the complex, advanced ones they can find so interesting.

Make sure with all the advice you take from marketing experts – me included – that you hold it to these standards. Make sure it's practical. make sure it's focused on the critical few elements that make all the difference. And make sure you get the benefit of their knowledge of what has worked before and what hasn't.

Do that and you'll get value from marketing experts rather than being overwhelmed by them!