What is a Fractional CMO? (Real World Examples)

What is a fractional CMO, and what are the benefits to your business? Here are three scenarios showcasing the abilities and benefits of a fractional CMO.

The first is a small business, with so much going on they don’t have time to correctly do the marketing that they need to do. A fractional CMO is able to come in and give the business the opportunity to focus on the 20% of actions that they need to do to get the most impact for their business while building an effective marketing strategy.

A fractional CMO is dedicated to a company only for a portion of hours, allowing them to focus on what matters most to a company’s marketing efforts in real time. In the case of the small business, a fractional CMO hire offers the business expertise and strategy without the hefty overhead.

The next business is a large corporation, currently working with a marketing agency and with an internal marketing team. This corporation also has a customer service department and a sales team. The first time these departments came together was when a fractional CMO came on board and brought them all to the same table. The benefit for the corporation of hiring the fractional CMO was that they were able to identify  different information that they hadn't gathered before from the different departments in the company with an open discussion.

The customer service department had great success stories to share with the sales team, the marketing agency discovered the latest completed product PDFs created by the in-house marketing team. The sales team were able to bring up some concerns with the marketing campaigns. All that information combined was highly valuable to the corporation’s marketing efforts, and the more that the teams worked together, the more they improved their business moving forward.

In the case of the corporation, a fractional CMO acted as a conduit between departments, initiating and building communication and aligning strategies with what worked best for all areas of the company.

Finally, let’s look at a growing business. While scaling rapidly, this business doesn’t yet have the infrastructure and staff in place to be able to run everything when staff members need to step away. For example, this business discussed turning off advertisements during a busy month as they were dealing with too many leads at once. Instead, their fractional CMO suggested they create a campaign booking times for consultations to build up the business’ list of prospects, so that when they were ready to take on new clients in the following month, the appointments would be waiting for them.

A fractional CMO’s outside perspective and experience with different business models offers creative solutions to potential problems. In the case of the growing business, when overwhelmed with work they considered holding off on marketing to stop leads coming in. Instead the fractional CMO found a way to book those leads into appointments so that when the business had time and the ability to expand, appointments were lined up.

There are many scenarios where a fractional CMO can accelerate a company’s marketing efforts. From start ups looking to outsource in their initial period to large companies looking for more effective strategy, a fractional CMO’s varied experience and practice could be the key to success.

Looking to take your marketing strategy to the next level? Get in touch at TugboatMarketing.com.