If your business is interested in an outside marketing perspective or if you’re reorganizing internally to streamline your marketing operations, you might be interested in leveraging fractional CMOs.
But how is your business supposed to get the most possible value from your fractional CMO?
What Is a Fractional CMO?
Let’s start with the basics of fractional CMOs. If you know what a traditional CMO does, you already understand most of what a fractional CMO does. A fractional CMO typically has years, if not decades of marketing and leadership experience, and they can serve the role of a traditional CMO in your organization. They can analyze your current marketing efforts, review new strategies and tools that could benefit your marketing department, and ultimately guide all your marketing efforts to more profitability and greater overall success.
The key difference between a fractional CMO and a traditional CMO is that fractional CMOs can be hired much more flexibly. You can hire them as a kind of temporary consultant to solve a particular problem or work on one specific strategy. You can also use them part-time, or on a recurring basis, reshaping your marketing department to be more effective over time.
Taking Full Advantage of Your Fractional CMO
These are some of the most important strategies to take full advantage of your fractional CMO:
- Choose the right candidate. Everything starts with your ability to choose the right fractional CMO candidate. Just like with a traditional CMO, or any position for that matter, it’s important to find the right fit for your organization. There will be fractional CMO candidates with many years of experience and those with an excellent track record of results, but they may not necessarily be the right fit for your needs. In addition to reviewing experience, past results, and areas of specialty, you should focus on the values, personality fit, and communication style.
- Trust their judgment. We should usually trust the judgment of experts when they operate within their respective domains. With a fractional CMO, it’s no different. Even the best fractional CMO is not perfect, and you should feel free to push back on their ideas, but at the end of the day, you hired this person for a reason. If your fractional CMO has strong convictions about a certain strategy, you owe it to your organization to at least try it out.
- Have problems and questions in mind. You’ll get more value out of your CMO if you have specific problems and questions in mind. What issue are you trying to solve? What specific goals and milestones are you trying to hit? If you hire a fractional CMO with only the loose, general objective of “marketing better,” your candidate may not be able to help you much.
- Include your top personnel. In meetings with your fractional CMO, include all your top personnel. A good fractional CMO will do more than simply make advisements and give direction; they’ll train and educate your team members to be better in their own marketing initiatives.
- Set an agenda. Have some kind of agenda in place as well. What is your timeline for success? What are your secondary goals, once you achieve your primary ones? You don’t need to know every little detail; in fact, road mapping and determining secondary objectives are things that your fractional CMO can help you with. However, you should have a loose, high-level idea of what you’re trying to achieve and how you’re going to get there.
- Create a long-term plan. If you want to be successful in the long term, you need a long-term marketing plan. You don’t need to have much marketing knowledge or experience to start building this out. You can start with general aims, like being the dominant competitor in your niche, and work your way to more specific targets, generating a certain amount of revenue by a certain date.
- Take things one step at a time. When working with a fractional CMO, take things one step at a time. It’s going to take some time for your organization and your fractional CMO to get to know each other and develop a good working relationship. It’s also going to take time for your strategies to manifest and start paying off. Remain patient during this process.
- Review and improve. Always make a concentrated effort to review your past work and find meaningful ways to improve. Never stop advancing.
Ultimately, the value you get from your fractional CMO depends heavily on who you hire and how you use and work with them. If you’re willing to put in the work to find the best fractional CMO, and you follow these strategies to fully utilize them, you should be able to see a very positive return on your investment.