Why Hire a Fractional CMO?
What is a Fractional CMO?
A fractional CMO is a part-time Chief Marketing Officer, responsible for leading the marketing strategy and managing the marketing department. Fractional CMOs typically work with businesses who need the role of a CMO, but not in a full-time capacity.
Businesses use fractional CMO services because they do not need a full-time CMO but still require expert strategy and leadership and often enjoy the flexibility a fractional CMO provides. Often, it makes sense to bring in a fractional chief marketing officer as opposed to a full-time CMO. This can be for financial reasons, as a typical full-time CMO salary can cost more than $200,000 per year. Or because the amount of work required by the CMO does not constitute a full-time position. Understanding what a fractional CMO is can help businesses in determining if they need a part-time or full-time position.
Fractional CMO Responsibilities
Developing the marketing strategy for both the short-term and long-term.
Deciding and committing to which marketing strategies are best for your business, such as SEO, content marketing, paid advertising, or a podcast, etc.
Solving marketing problems that will arise and need to be resolved quickly.
Leading the marketing department and inspiring team members.
Hiring new employees and building out your team for success.
Working with outsourced agencies leaning on their experience.
Your Fractional CMO should have a wealth of marketing and managerial experience. Therefore, the Fractional CMO should be the natural leader of the marketing team.
In addition to leadership qualities, a good Fractional CMO is to be seen as the c-suite level marketing strategist who helps organizations achieve their marketing goals.
Your Fractional CMO from CMO Exponential works closely with both your organization’s leadership team and the marketing talent executing the marketing tactics on a day-to-day basis.
Why you need a Fractional CMO
Marketing Leadership: Your marketing department requires leadership from an experienced marketing professional. In addition to leading the marketing team, a leader is required in terms of decision-making.A business needs a Fractional CMO when they require marketing leadership and the expert marketing strategy skills of a CMO, but do not need it on a full-time basis.
Reasons a business needs Fractional CMO services:
- Marketing Strategy: Your business needs a comprehensive marketing strategy for your niche and industry. Such as a Fractional CMO with years of experience in SaaS or private equity.
- Part-time CMO: You require the skill set of a chief marketing officer, but not for the 40 hours per week that a full-time CMO will be. Even if you need a Fractional CMO for only 5 hours per week, or 20. Your agreement is flexible.
- Experience: You have staff to execute marketing campaigns, but they lack strategic experience. Therefore, you need someone who has done it before and can foresee challenges and obstacles.
- Reporting & KPIs: You need to monitor the health and progress of your campaigns and have someone lead weekly KPIs meetings. Namely, so your team has accountability and is always results-focused.
- Optimization: You need to improve marketing campaign optimization by having an expert identify opportunities and new possibilities.
- Efficiency: Your existing marketing team’s efficiency is below optimal. You need leadership and management to maximize efficiency for your marketing department.
- Go-to-market Strategy: You are a startup or are launching a new product or service for your business. You will need a new marketing plan for the short-term and the next few years. Your digital marketing efforts need to be precisely planned out so your marketers know exactly what to do. Additionally, they need to know what marketing initiatives and key performance indicators are a sign of success
Growth-focused Marketing Strategy & Leadership
Our Fractional CMOs are growth-focused strategic experts. Moreover, profitability in campaigns is crucial to what we understand success with a client to be. This can be done through maximizing the efficiency within your marketing team. Therefore our first 90 days with a client will focus on improving the systems and processes within your marketing department.
This is most effectively done via our weekly reporting on marketing KPIs through a scorecard. We will create this, or improve your current one, as an immediate improvement for your marketing department.
As you consider a Fractional CMO for your high-growth business, consider the cost of not having a marketing leader. Additionally, think of the potential gains of having an experienced marketing leader.
Consider the risk you’re taking by having a marketing director or coordinator set the campaign objectives and success criteria in your organization. Odds are, they are under-qualified for the role.
By hiring a fractional CMO from CMOx, you’re getting the confidence and capabilities your team needs to reach new heights, both in terms of sales and profitability.