So the title tells you almost nothing, which means the useful question is not what a digital consultant is called. It is what the person is accountable for.

The one thing that separates consulting from everything adjacent

A web designer is accountable for the site. A marketer is accountable for the campaign. An IT contractor is accountable for the network staying up. Each one owns a deliverable.

A digital consultant is accountable for the decision. Which of those things to do, in what order, and which ones to skip entirely this year.

That is the whole distinction and everything else follows from it. You are not paying for output. You are paying for judgment about sequence, and if that sounds thin it is because the value is invisible in a way that building a website is not. Nobody admires a decision not to build something.

The practical test is what the person is willing to tell you not to do. An agency sells you the thing it builds, so its answer to almost any question is the thing it builds. A consultant who cannot name three things you should not spend money on this year is not consulting. They are selling.

What the job actually consists of

Strip out the language and the work has four parts, roughly in this order.

Finding out what already exists. Most businesses do not know. There is a domain somebody registered, a site built by a cousin, two abandoned social accounts, a booking tool that was paid for and never configured, analytics installed twice, and a password nobody has. The first week of most engagements is archaeology, and it is unglamorous and nonnegotiable, because you cannot sequence work on a system you have not inventoried.

Finding the constraint. Of everything that is wrong, one thing is currently costing the most. Usually the owner can tell you what it is within two minutes of being asked directly, and usually they have been working on something else, because the broken thing is the uncomfortable one.

This is the part that most justifies the fee. A business with eleven problems does not need eleven solutions. It needs to know which one is load bearing, and that judgment requires having seen enough businesses to recognize the pattern.

Deciding the order. Some work has to happen before other work or the later work gets redone. Choosing a booking system before you know how you take payment means migrating later. Running ads to a site that does not convert spends money proving the site does not convert. Sequencing errors are the most expensive mistakes available to a small business, and they are invisible at the time because every individual decision looked reasonable.

Specifying it clearly enough to be built. Whoever does the work, the consultant or somebody else, needs a brief specific enough that the result can be judged. Build a nice site is not a specification. A three page site that loads in under two seconds and has one conversion action per page is a specification.

What it is not

Not an agency. An agency executes a defined scope and is good at that. The two are complementary and routinely confused, usually because the agency has a strategy offering that exists to keep its production team busy.

Not an IT consultant. There is overlap in tooling and none in the question being answered. IT is accountable for things working. Digital consulting is accountable for which things should exist.

Not a developer, and not a marketer, although a competent consultant can usually do a version of both. The distinction is that they are deciding rather than specializing. The cost of that breadth is real and worth stating plainly, which is that a consultant is not the best developer or the best marketer you could hire, and on a well defined specialist problem you should hire the specialist.

How to tell a real one from an expensive one

Four signals, learned mostly from cleaning up after the alternative.

They ask what you have before proposing anything. Anyone who arrives with a recommendation before an inventory is reciting a template.

The deliverable has an order and a reason. A list of twenty recommendations is not strategy. A sequence of five with the logic for why each one precedes the next is.

They will say the quiet thing. Your pricing is wrong. You do not need a rebuild. The problem is that nobody has heard of you and a new website will not fix that. If every conversation is affirming, you are being managed rather than advised.

They do not need a year of your money up front. A consultant confident in the work does not require a long contract to justify it. Month to month is a statement about the work rather than about the paperwork.

When you do not need one

This is the part consultants leave out, so here it is.

If you have one clear problem and you know what it is, hire the specialist and skip the layer. You need a website and you know what it has to do. Hire somebody who builds websites.

Consulting earns its fee in exactly two situations. The first is when you do not know which problem is the real one. The second is when the problems interact, so the order matters and getting it wrong means paying twice. If neither of those describes you, the honest advice is to not buy the service.

What this looks like at 10 Ton

Four lines of work, and in practice they are stages rather than a menu.

Strategy, which is the audit, the constraint, and the sequence. Web design, because the site is usually the thing the sequence points at first. Digital marketing, once there is something worth sending people to. Technology consulting, which is choosing the stack early enough that you are not migrating off it in year two.

Everything is month to month, which is the same point as above applied to ourselves. The work is for businesses in their first year, which is a deliberate limit rather than a market we have not outgrown. A first year business has no legacy systems, no sunk cost to defend, and every decision still ahead of it, and that is the only moment when sequencing advice is worth what it costs.

The short version

A digital consultant is somebody paid to decide what you should do and in what order, rather than to build any particular thing.

The title is unregulated, so judge the person by whether they inventory before advising, whether their recommendations have an order, and whether they will tell you what not to buy. If they cannot do the third one, nothing else on the list matters.

And if you already know exactly what is broken, you do not need one. Go hire the person who fixes that.