Maximize Profit, Minimize Overhead: Why Smart Businesses Choose Fractional CMOs

Here’s what I’ll accomplish in the first 30 days on the job:

1. Establish baseline company metrics
2. Clarify product and service offerings
3. Analyze customers and target audience
4. Set marketing and sales goals for the company
5. Develop or adjust the marketing budget
6. Identify an effective marketing strategy
7. Create an actionable plan to achieve marketing success

Read the full step-by-step guide on what my first 30 days as your CMO would look like.

Let me be straightforward: Experience doesn’t always equate to better results.

A Chief Marketing Officer with an extensive resume may look impressive on paper. Twenty years in the industry means they’ve accumulated numerous stories about what used to work—key phrase being “used to work.” An impressive resume and a hefty price tag often come with a side of bias.

Bias doesn’t drive business growth.

Bias is a luxury your business cannot afford. It doesn’t foster growth; it hinders it. In today’s landscape, with all the testing options available, dealing with bias is unnecessary. Marketing tests can now be conducted more easily and profitably than ever before. Tools like Google Analytics allow you to see who’s visiting your website, what they’re doing, and provide a foundation for running tests. I’ve witnessed CMOs dismiss social media by saying, “Don’t bother with social; it’s just for kids.” Really? Just for kids?

One of my clients receives 80% of their web traffic from social media. They’re in the news industry and generate revenue through advertising. Is money just for kids? I didn’t think so.

Interested in viewing my resume and accomplishments?

1. An Outsourced CMO Can Collaborate with Your Existing Marketing Team. Suppose you have an established CMO or VP of Marketing, or someone who fills that role without the title. Outsourcing a CMO doesn’t mean you have to let this person go. A CMO brought in for a short-term project can guide your existing team and offer fresh insights to your current marketing director.
2. Outsourcing Your CMO Brings New Perspectives to Old Challenges . An outsourced CMO has a significant advantage over in-house team members: they bring a fresh perspective to your business. It’s easy to become so close to a problem that it becomes invisible. An external CMO can help identify these hidden issues.
3. Contracted CMO Roles Offer Flexibility. Markets and businesses evolve. Sometimes, you need to adjust your team accordingly. With a contracted CMO, you have greater control over your marketing employment costs and can adapt more easily if circumstances change.
4. Part-Time CMOs Can Help Scale Your Marketing Efforts. If you have an existing marketing department or strategy but lack the human resources to execute it fully, an outsourced marketing professional can help you grow faster. Marketing often underperforms due to limited resources—both time and money. If you have the budget but not the personnel, outsourcing can bridge that gap.
5. Experience Faster Growth with an Outsourced CMO on Your Team. Hiring the right full-time help can be a slow process. The hiring cycle, interviews, and onboarding take time, and you may not even be sure if the candidate is the right fit. With an outsourced CMO, you can bypass much of this delay and see immediate results.

And there are plenty more reasons why you should consider outsourcing your CMO role.

What to Look for in a CMO

When searching for an outsourced CMO, it’s important to consider the big picture. Do you have a marketing team? If so, does this person have the leadership skills to guide them? If not, does this person have the skills to execute marketing programs independently?

I offer both marketing consultation in the role of an outsourced CMO and hands-on execution of marketing strategies. Need a new website? I can handle that. Looking to refine your advertising programs? I can do that too. Email marketing? Absolutely. And the best part is, I contract by the hour, so there’s no salary, benefits, or 401(k) to worry about.

Here’s what your new marketing leader needs to nail in the first month on the job.

I’m often asked what I’ll do in the first month at a company. In reality, even before I’m hired, I invest time to understand the unique state of the client’s business during the proposal phase.

Establishing a Baseline to Build On

If you’re considering hiring me, it’s likely because you need help focusing your marketing efforts. Most companies I work with don’t have dedicated in-house marketing personnel. I’m usually stepping into a role that has been shared by the CEO/founder, a sales director, and perhaps a marketing assistant. Everyone is doing a little bit of something occasionally, but there’s no clear direction or accountability for cohesive marketing.

Growing Companies Can Be Disorganized, So Information Needs Re-evaluation

This is common among growing companies. They don’t update processes or allocate resources because they’re too busy fulfilling work. If there’s an internal marketing person, they are often too close to the work to see the big picture. Everything is tactical rather than strategic. This often means there’s a lot of data floating around but no clear action being taken on it. Again, very common among fast-growing organizations that scale rapidly.

A Baseline Needs to Be Identified So Growth Can Be Measured

Before you can create a strategy to get somewhere, you have to understand where you are right now. Otherwise, you won’t know if things are improving or deteriorating. Fortunately, analytics tools make that incredibly easy to measure. But it takes focus and experience to turn piles of data into useful information.

Websites Are the Core of Most Businesses and Need Analysis

When I first meet a prospective client, I’ll almost always ask for access to Google Analytics or a similar tool before moving into the proposal stage. This helps me understand website and digital channel performance. Are they getting visits but no conversions? Do they have any visits at all? The proposal for a startup versus an established company is vastly different, so understanding the baseline is critical for managing client expectations and developing an effective marketing program.

Company Products and Services Need Clarification

Strong products and services are much easier to market and sell. Clarifying what you’re offering is essential to marketing them effectively.

What Products and Services Are We Focusing On?

For companies with a range of products, it’s often best to focus on the big revenue generators. Sometimes my clients already know what these are; other times, they need help identifying them.

For example, I worked with a company that had been in business for twelve years. They had just launched a new product that, within three months, accounted for 33% of their revenue. Their goal was to shift 100% to this product as their main revenue source within three years. This information was crucial in developing a plan to make that happen.

Customers Must Be Analyzed and Their Value Identified

It’s important, as an outsider, that I fully understand your customers. This involves meeting with sales personnel and analyzing customer information for buying patterns. Understanding the value of a customer is critical for developing marketing budgets, which will assist in crafting a marketing strategy and plan.

Identifying Customer Segments

Not all customers are equal. Pretending they are is an easy way to waste resources and fail to differentiate in a crowded market. Creating customer groups allows marketing to use fewer resources and achieve higher conversion rates by focusing efforts on high-value prospects.

What Value Does the Company Offer Customers?

Why do your current customers buy from you? Why would they pay a premium for your products and services? How does working with your company make them feel?

If you can’t answer these questions, I know who can: your customers and your salespeople. They understand the value your company provides. Listening to them is essential to identifying the true value your company offers in the market.

One of the first things I do is interview both sales and marketing staff to understand the following:

• Who are the customer groups, and what do they look like?

• What’s working and what’s not?

• How can marketing empower sales to sell better?

• How can sales empower marketing to market better?

• What needs to be done to align sales and marketing moving forward?

• What are marketing’s strengths and weaknesses?

• What resources do we have, and where are they? (List of customers, sales collateral, advertising collateral, graphics, videos, etc.)

• What marketing campaigns are running or planned for the future?

Set Company Goals for Marketing to Achieve

Setting clear goals is essential. Even if you’re unsure what your goal should be, having any target is better than none. A solid number to aim for by a certain time will focus your efforts.

The Company Must Have an Overall Goal or General Direction

Most CEOs have a rough idea of what they want to accomplish. They may not know how to do it, but they have a number in mind. This can be anything from “selling 100 more units next year” to “increasing revenue by 30%.” This gives us a foundation to build on.

Strategy and Tactics Can Be Created to Help Achieve the Company Goal

Deeper analysis of the company’s performance will lead to a rough projection of metrics that need improvement. If the company relies on their website for driving leads or sales, website metrics can shed light on conversion rates for forms and landing pages. Combined with product, service, and customer value data, projections of visits, cost per visit, estimated advertising costs, and estimated revenue can be developed.

This projection will help guide a strategy, marketing plan, and budget to reach the company’s goals.

The Importance of Setting a Marketing Budget, Even If It’s Arbitrary

Many CEOs I speak with are hesitant to discuss marketing budgets. They’ll say the budget is virtually unlimited as long as there’s a positive return on investment (ROI). I understand this concept, but for companies that have been doing little to no organized marketing, there has to be a starting point.

Setting a Marketing Budget Is Important for Several Reasons:

• It creates accountability for spending money on growing the business.
• It ensures accountability for measuring how marketing affects revenue.
• It provides clarity on what tactics are available for use in a marketing plan.

Spending Money on Marketing Is Crucial for Business Growth

According to the Small Business Administration, companies with under $5 million in revenue should allocate around 8% of gross revenue to marketing. You can generally think of it this way: 5% maintains your current position, 10% leads to slight growth, and 15% or more focuses on significant growth. This varies by industry, depending on the margins of your products and services.

If you’re a $3 million company, you could see growth by spending $300,000 a year on marketing. That’s $25,000 a month covering wages and costs related to marketing, all of which can be written off by your accounting department. If that’s too much, spend at least 5% of your gross revenue on marketing to set a baseline.

Ensuring Marketing Delivers Profitable ROI

Marketing is a science involving a lot of testing. Sometimes these tests yield desired results; other times, they don’t. Measuring the effects of marketing tests is the only way to identify what works and what doesn’t. If something doesn’t work, change it. If it still doesn’t work, change it again. If nothing makes it work, stop spending money on it and try something else. And, of course, if something works, invest more in it.

A Marketing Budget Narrows Your Choice of Marketing Tactics

Just like trying to find the right movie on a streaming service, there are overwhelming options when it comes to marketing your business. Setting a marketing budget helps eliminate options from the table and creates focus.

Identifying a Marketing Strategy and Developing a Marketing Plan

A business doesn’t operate in a vacuum. Excellent marketing strategies are difficult for competitors to copy and factor in multiple market forces. It’s easy to confuse strategy with tactics, but to put it simply, the marketing strategy is the big picture of how marketing will achieve the company’s goals. The marketing plan is the step-by-step process for fulfilling the strategy.

Ready to take your marketing to the next level? Let’s discuss how I can help your business grow.