Fractional CMO Support for Growing Businesses
Are you ready to take your marketing more seriously? Are your current marketing efforts very sporadic, with no real measurement of success? Do you need someone to help you create a robust marketing strategy without the cost and commitment of a full-time CMO?
Then, Fractional CMO Support sounds like the perfect option for you.
For CEOs who Need Marketing Leadership - Not Just Activity
Let’s take a wild guess at where you are right now. You run a thriving business, with a team of people who work tirelessly to complete the tasks set out by your clients. Repeat business continues to form a large part of your success, but despite all that, you have a problem. Marketing is an afterthought.
Time isn’t on your side. Your people are sending out the odd post here and there, but marketing feels reactive, with no clear direction or understanding of what delivers the greatest impact.
The challenge you face is that marketing feels like a minefield. Spend 10 minutes on any social media platform and you’ll consume ten different opinions on what you should and shouldn’t do, without the internal resources to execute on any of them. So the task of marketing your business continues to be ignored.
Now, you could hire someone to take on the responsibility, but sadly, these junior roles often don’t last because the candidates simply don’t have the experience or the skills to provide you with a clear marketing direction. Then there’s the CEO, who might be you.
Right now, you’re juggling a million tasks at once, and while you crave the ability to step away from the day-to-day operations, marketing is pulling you back in. You feel that as the person at the top, you have to lead the process, but lack the capacity or desire to do so. This is holding your business back
What Does a Fractional CMO Do?
1. Audit what’s currently happening.
The first job of a Fractional CMO is to analyse what is currently being done, how it impacts the business both negatively and positively, and how it speaks to your target buyer. A large percentage of content currently being produced by businesses without the proper resources in place is having little to no positive outcomes.
2. Align sales and marketing
We then need to assess how connected the marketing efforts are to the sales team process. The best marketing material is often driven by the greatest challenges your buyers face. We must work towards aligning the sales and marketing teams so that we can solve these challenges within the marketing material we produce.
3. Map the buyer journey
The Fractional CMO must then set a clear business direction by understanding the journey your buyers take from initial exposure to final purchase. Where do they find you? What do they do next? The goal here is to meet your buyers where they reside, and not produce marketing material for channels that will never be seen.
4. Connect marketing to revenue
To align marketing and revenue, we must have a clear understanding of the buyer’s journey. Close alignment with the sales team, combined with detailed site and social media analytics, will help us determine growth and correct potential points of confusion in your messaging.
5. Integrate with your team
As a Fractional CMO, our goal is to integrate into your team. For us to be effective, we seek to understand the entire business and how each of the departments functions so that we know exactly who to include as part of the marketing strategy.
6. Manage specialist suppliers
We collaborate with third-party suppliers that may influence the marketing function. This includes the website, events, and PR teams that may already be in place. We act as the buffer between the CEO and everything that requires additional management.
Why is Fractional CMO Support Different from an Agency?
A digital marketing agency will deliver a series of tasks in line with an agreed set of actions. Some are very good at it.
What an agency doesn’t do is integrate into your business as ‘one of the team’, mainly because you are just one of many clients they are working with at any given time. That’s where a Fractional CMO is different.
We work as a marketing leader within your business. We are not a full-service creative, video and paid ads agency, but we can collaborate with the experts in that space should the need arise, based on our agreed strategy.
We are there to understand your business in full, directing the experts responsible for delivering the tasks that make the greatest difference. If your business requires a full-service agency in-house, we may not be the option for you.
If you’re not sure what you need, and the above sounds interesting, then hit the button below and let’s arrange a call.
This is strategic marketing leadership – not outsourced task delivery.
What Does a Fractional CMO Look Like in Practice?
Let’s take a situation in real life.
We entered a client’s business at a pivotal moment in their journey. They were an established tech company in the waste industry with over 60 staff and relied heavily on repeat business and word of mouth.
The sales team was old school. Phone calls, emails and effective account management to keep the existing portfolio of clients happy. What they lacked was a connection with the marketing department, which consisted of one person doing multiple roles.
Marketing was sporadic and without any real structure or purpose. It was a tick-box exercise that didn’t do enough to reach new audiences or showcase the great work being done across the organisation.
Our first job was to integrate with their systems, access the current strategy of distributing content and strip back anything not adding value. We needed to understand the bottlenecks in the business and identify the real reasons for a lack of consistency and direction with marketing.
Next, we needed to understand the disconnect between the sales and marketing teams and educate both parties on the importance of a collaborative approach. We demonstrated the effectiveness of the sales team documenting their activities and how that directly impacts online exposure.
Which ultimately grows the engaged audience and fills the top of the sales funnel.
The third stage was to bring both teams together every 2 weeks for a Q&A around customer challenges, successes, what’s working, what isn’t, and the immediate customer demands.
This process is designed not only to create the foundation for the upcoming marketing material, but to demonstrate to the sales team how important it is to the way the business communicates with potential buyers online.
The outcome of this initial piece of work was:
- A focused and totally aligned sales & marketing function with a clear understanding of how effective content distribution affects sales performance.
- 200% increase in social media profile views from target buyers caused by an aligned content strategy from multiple team members.
- A 100% uplift in meeting requests from industry events due to the authority being built by the volume of digital content now being produced.
- A faster and more efficient buying journey, created by adding customer touchpoints in the digital spaces they spend the most time (LinkedIn).
Which Organisation Would Benefit from a Fractional CMO?
A Fractional CMO would benefit businesses in three categories.
Founder-led or SME. If you are a business owner who currently manages every department, then you will already know that the largest bottleneck is you. Yes, you may have perfected the art of being a Jack of all Trades, but marketing is currently getting in the way of you doing what you love. Which means it’s either being done badly or not at all.
CEOs who want strategic clarity. If you’re a CEO with sales and marketing teams that don’t work as one, you need strategic clarity. A controller of sorts that brings the various departments together and demonstrates the benefits of a collaborative approach. You need your customer contact points to align, ensuring a seamless buying journey that highlights all potential drop-off points.
Businesses are generating revenue but missing growth opportunities. Understanding how many potential buyers are never getting to the vital stage is critical for growth. With a strategic marketing plan in place that aligns the messaging across your digital contact points, you eliminate the missed opportunities that limit new customer acquisition.
What does a Fractional CMO partnership look like?
Fractional CMO support is typically delivered on a monthly retainer basis. We typically only work with 2 or 3 businesses at a time, allocating the equivalent of 1-1.5 days a week to each one. The approach is very agile and not limited by individual allocation of days. For example, it may be that we spend 2 hours a day on each of our clients one week, and then 2 whole days the next, depending on the demands at the time.
We are output-driven, as opposed to being restricted by contracted hours. The goal is to remove pressure from the CEO and create synergy between the sales and marketing teams through a series of tasks and initiatives. We look to become a part of your existing team, building the trust required to change the way they value the purpose of marketing and their role in it.
During the first 90 days, you will see a clear strategy for change, highlighting the key objectives required, who’s involved and how these actions will impact the organisation. There will be cohesion between the sales & marketing teams, with a meeting structure in place, resulting in clear outcomes for the content distribution.
FAQs
What is a Fractional CMO?
A Fractional CMO is a Chief Marketing Officer who traditionally works outside of your organisation, as a leading consultant to your business. They work part-time, usually between 1 and 3 days a week, and are paid on a monthly retainer model.
What does a Fractional CMO do?
A fractional CMO doesn’t just post on social media or manage paid ads. They are responsible for high-level leadership, strategy and direction of the marketing function.
In short, they will clarify the current positioning of the organisation, establish the aspirational goals and ambitions, and create a system that allows the business to connect with its buyers along the various stages of their buyer journey.
When should a business hire a Fractional CMO?
A business would typically hire a Fractional CMO at the point where they have become too big to ignore marketing, or ask someone from another department to manage it. They need to reach new audiences, but their current marketing efforts are sporadic, and they do not wish to commit to a full-time CMO.
How is a Fractional CMO different from an Agency?
A Fractional CMO is essentially a part-time senior marketing leader who integrates into your business, acting as a controller of the marketing function, without physically doing the tasks. They will liaise with internal and external departments to deliver on an agreed strategy, managing all aspects of marketing, instead of just key elements. A Fractional CMO will typically only work with one or two companies at a time.
An agency will typically work with you in specific projects (paid ads, new website launch), but will not integrate into the business in the same way. They will be paid to deliver a specific brief and usually work with several clients at any one time.
How quickly will we see results from a Fractional CMO?
An initial fact-gathering and planning phase of around 90 days is required to fully integrate a Fractional CMO into your business. At this point, you will have a clear direction, a documented strategy, and a deep understanding of what the priorities are and how, as a team, you will deliver them.
Does a Fractional CMO manage execution or just strategy?
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to Fractional CMO Support. Generally, this role is about the development of a strategy and the control of bringing it to fruition. There will be several moving parts, which some Fractional CMOs will take on, depending on their background and skillset. When you work with Think Unconventionall for example, we have a broad set of skills allowing us to personally deliver certain pieces of work, if it fits within the strategy.