If you’re like most smaller or medium-sized businesses, a top-notch Chief Marketing Officer is probably outside your realm of possibility. In fact, you probably won’t get as much value out of them as an enormous corporation would since there isn’t enough for them to sink their teeth into.
That’s why it makes sense to go fractional. Hiring a part-time CMO is the best of both worlds. You’re able to afford top-notch expertise without having to break your budget for a diminished return on your investment. Best of all, you’ll only need to cut them a check when you need them to produce.
Here are six important ways hiring a fractional CMO makes an instant impact on your business:
Getting More Strategic About Your Marketing
One of the largest problems businesses have as they start to really grow is that their marketing becomes disjointed. Sales operates as a completely separate department. Marketing tasks get distributed through a wide variety of teams. There’s nothing holding the messaging together. Coordination and efficiency are non-existent.
A fractional CMO has the ability to step in and help you start getting more strategic about your marketing. With their experience leading companies to success, they’ll know how to develop a plan to ensure all of your marketing activities are integrated. Everything will run much smoother, and everyone will have more time to help you come up with the next big thing.
Helping Make You More Scalable
When your company is growing quickly, it’s more important than ever to stay on-course. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the most difficult times. You’ll need to rapidly boost your sales staff and increase your reach without suffering from any retention issues. Without the proper leadership, it’s a difficult ship to steer.
Expert marketers, such as your potential fractional CMO, are experts at managing growth. Their success tends to breed it, after all. They’ll help you navigate your growing pains and turn them into a competitive advantage. Since they’re a part-time asset by nature, you’ll even be able to increase the amount of influence they directly have on your organization, as necessary.
Forcing You to Make Data-Driven Decisions
Data should be at the heart of your biggest marketing decisions. You need to know exactly who your most profitable audience is, where they are, and what they care about. Your message has to address their problems and get specific about how you can solve them. The best way to make these decisions is by capturing and reviewing your data.
This process is trickier than it seems. You need to figure out what systems you’re going to use to capture and store the data. You’ll need to develop a process to ensure that the data is clean and gathered properly. Most importantly, you need to make sure the decisions you make based on the data are logical and strategically viable.
Fractional CMOs will have the experience necessary to make recommendations on your systems, processes, and decision-making strategies. Your organization can become data-driven overnight.
With a Fractional CMO, you’ll have the power of data in the palm of your hands!
Filling Your Coffers With Prospects
As a growing business, prospects are your lifeblood. You need a constant stream of them in order to keep closing new sales and driving growth. This means you need to work on your inbound marketing.
Fractional CMOs will have experience in a wide variety of inbound activities. They’ll be able to help you put together a content marketing plan that places you as an industry expert, enticing prospects to reach out to you. They’ll know exactly what to do to drive natural search engine traffic.
When you’re not sure how to keep filling the top of your sales funnel a fractional CMO could be just the trick.
Giving You a Fresh Perspective
When your organization is doing well, it’s natural to become complacent. If everything is chugging along and bringing in money, why would you need to look inward and change any of your processes?
When you’re on top of the world, it’s the perfect time to get an outside opinion. With a new perspective, you’ll notice opportunities staring you in the face that you never thought of before. More importantly, you’ll have an objective look at your weaknesses, saving you from falling behind your competition.
Even if you don’t want to hire a consistent fractional CMO, it’s a good idea to bring one in occasionally for this reason alone. As an organization, you can’t afford to get stuck in your old ways. Companies like Blockbuster and MySpace were on top of the world before they were taken over by their younger, fresher competitors.
Letting You Focus On Your Strengths
Putting together a cohesive, effective marketing strategy takes a great deal of time. You need to take the time to put together a plan, sift through a lot of data, and delegate tasks. After that, you have to make sure that long-form content is created, videos are shot, and marketing materials are designed. Unless you can put together a constant stream of fresh content, your audience is going to stagnate.
Unless you’re already an organization with a strong marketing presence, that’s a lot to ask for. A Fractional CMO relieves you of this burden, assisting with the design and creation of marketing content and materials, and taking the brunt of the strategic planning workload. This allows you to spend time on other value-creating activities, letting everybody focus on their strengths.
Unless you have plenty of extra time on your hands, you need a Fractional CMO’s help!
If your business needs the positive impact a Fractional CMO provides, make sure to reach out to us here at Blue Wave Marketing. We have the necessary experience and expertise to make sure your strategies and results are improved immediately.
