Having a full-time Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) may not always be the best option for businesses. Some organizations may not have a senior-level marketing expert on their team, while others may not have team members who are ready to step up into a CMO role when someone leaves or goes on parental leave.
This is where Fractional CMO services come in to bridge these gaps in a marketing organization in a flexible and cost-effective manner. A Fractional CMO works on a freelance basis to ensure that your team and strategy remain on track, and even flourishing.
These are the five crucial skills that fractional CMOs should possess. However, the CMO's ideal profile may vary depending on the industry and business stage they work in.A CMO who excels in B2B martech may not be the right fit for a B2C company due to the different marketing challenges they face. Hence, senior marketing professionals typically specialize in an industry vertical.
Regardless of the industry, here are the essential capabilities that any CMO should have, all of which MarketerHire vets for:
Lead generation: An important part of a CMO's role is to understand user acquisition across various channels such as paid search, SEO, and content marketing. While fractional CMOs may not have hands-on experience, they should have experience managing team members focused on lead-generation marketing programs.
Retention and engagement: CMOs should evaluate overall customer experience and come up with creative engagement strategies based on solid messaging, automation, and retargeting campaigns to keep existing customers.
Marketing communications: CMO candidates should be proficient in storytelling, establishing the company narrative, and collaborating with a public relations strategist or media to enhance brand awareness.
Brand positioning: Strong CMOs or directors of marketing must be able to define a brand and refine the company's marketing and messaging based on customer and market feedback, including competitive analysis and market research. Ideally, fractional CMOs have a brand methodology they follow.
Research and analytics: Good marketing is data-driven, so a CMO must work with other executives to identify patterns in data, develop hypotheses, research trends, forecast, and execute strategies to achieve target KPIs.