As businesses grow, demand for their products or services increases. As demand increases, often so do capacity issues. At this juncture, many companies turn their focus away from gaining more customers and clients and instead focus on ensuring they have the required resources, time, and personnel to meet that demand.
If you are overworking yourself and your team, the best thing to do is to bring in an expert to assist in making the path ahead clearer. You need someone who can not only handle capacity issues but also use their expertise to keep demand growing. In this manner, your business continues to flourish – even with higher pressure.
Partnering with a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is the usual solution, but they come with a hefty price tag – one you may not be ready to pay just yet.
However, (as more and more of today’s CEOs are learning) a fractional CMO, also known as a part-time CMO, provides a more cost-effective and efficient solution. Read on to learn about fractional CMOs and the 6 important ways they can benefit your business.
What Is A Fractional CMO?
Fractional CMOs are marketing experts who partner with business owners on a part-time basis. The term “fractional” refers to the percentage of time a full-time CMO spends working with a specific client. While their time is “fractioned” up between clients, a CMO brings to your company their complete, “un-fractioned” expertise.
Fractional CMOs who employ a shared cost model can provide your business with the expertise and support needed to pinpoint capacity issues and determine how to increase demand for your business.
But a good fractional CMO is far more than a consultant.
The best ones fully engage with your company and become a part of your team, working to align your marketing moves with your revenue goals – and getting you real results. Best of all, after partnering with a fractional CMO, many business owners find that they part ways with another gift: clarity for continued, predictable growth in the future.
1. A Strategic Marketing Plan
Defining where you want to go is the first step to getting there. And that’s where a fractional CMO can make all the difference.
The CMO can help your business decide what goals to set. Then your fractional CMO will help create a strategic marketing plan that meets those goals and objectives.
A truly strategic marketing plan does three important things:
- It defines your target audience and identifies where they can be found.
- It provides an outline of your overall marketing strategy.
- It identifies the key metrics you’ll use to track results.
Then implementation begins.
If you’ve found the right CMO, they’ll work with your team throughout implementation, by first creating a marketing budget and then managing the plan throughout the year to ensure that it stays on track.
2. In-Depth Buyer Analysis
An important step in reaching the right customers is the analysis of relevant customer data for any insights you can garner.
But don’t get the wrong idea here.
The goal is not to reinforce your ideas about what makes your company so great – rather it is to dig deep and develop an understanding of why your ideal clients/customers do or don’t yet do business with you.
An experienced CMO knows how to analyze customer data to help your business achieve marketing objectives by:
- identifying potential customers
- tracking leads and potential customers
- evaluating marketing campaign results
3. Marketing Initiative Implementation
Let’s face it, if you’re facing increased demand, your CEO and COO already have enough on their plates. Adding a fractional CMO to your team is one smart way to take a load off.
With their key expertise, know-how, and management experience, a CMO can meet that increased demand head-on. And then the fact that they’ll also be hitting the accelerator on your company growth becomes a sweet, sweet bonus.
They’ll use their unique marketing oversight to properly position your products and services, and help your business achieve marketing objectives.
Marketing initiatives that CMOs guide and implement often include things like:
- demand-generation campaigns
- lead nurturing campaigns
- content marketing campaigns
- sales campaigns
- and more
4. Marketing and Sales Alignment
It’s a tough lesson that every business owner learns eventually: The sales and marketing teams must be working from the same page if you want to maximize your sales growth potential.
And then there’s this: Easier said than done.
But there’s hope. It’s the CMO’s job to ensure that marketing and sales strategies are in sync and working toward the common goal of revenue growth.
To do this, the CMO will clearly define roles and responsibilities, bring both teams together to share data and insights, and focus on the same objectives. With crosstalk between the two teams, everyone will better understand how they can contribute to the business’s overall success.
Aligning these two departments will lead to better communication, improved customer experience, and better returns on your investments.
5. Team Management and Metric Measurement
Fractional CMOs can help businesses create the right team and measure the right metrics to ensure success. The right team and metrics can help businesses streamline their processes, increase sales, and handle capacity issues.
Getting your team on board and accountable is essential to ensuring your capacity is not exceeded even in the face of increased demand. That is why working with a Fractional CMO with experience managing a diverse range of teams can help. They’ll get everyone on board and accountable, while also ensuring each metric is properly measured and weighted.
6. An Optimized Marketing Budget
Want the most bang for your buck? The greatest return on your investment? It’s the CMO’s job to ensure you get it.
With an experienced marketing executive structuring your processes for campaigns and creatives, you’ll be able to optimize your marketing budget and better achieve marketing objectives.
You can rest easy knowing your CMO will find the strategic moves that are right for your business’s goals.
The Bottom Line
A fractional CMO can help your business manage capacity issues and increase demand by providing a number of benefits, including developing and implementing a strategic marketing plan, providing guidance on marketing initiatives, managing marketing teams, creating and measuring marketing metrics, analyzing customer data, and optimizing your marketing budget.
Whether you need help managing capacity issues or want to increase demand for your product or service, a fractional CMO can help.
And if you’re ready to put an expert strategy in place now, our CMOs are here to help.
yorCMO Fractional CMOs are skilled in taking what can be a complex process and distilling it down into the exact hands-on marketing help you’ve been looking for.
Best of all, when we partner on the C-Suite, our marketing experts fully engage with your company, aligning your sales with your marketing efforts, and giving you clarity for continued, predictable growth.