The marketing landscape experiences rapid change in the blink of an eye. Significant shifts over the last several years have created more ways than ever for consumers to interact with businesses and choose the products that meet their needs. While these changes can give businesses wider reach, they increase the workload for marketers.
When teamwide demands are changing so quickly, it becomes more important than ever to have a strong executive presence overseeing the marketing team and ensuring marketing strategy aligns with desired business outcomes.
In short, the value of a chief marketing officer (CMO) has never been more clear. However, it’s not a position every business can afford to fill. In the digital age, small and mid-sized enterprises are competing against large companies with substantially more resources. This accelerates the need for a C-suite marketing professional during early growth stages when companies rarely have the adequate workload or salary allocation for a full-time CMO—particularly one with decades of experience in the field.
For these companies, a fractional CMO can be a game-changer, providing the services and expertise of an experienced CMO with a lower impact on company overhead. In this article, we’ll discuss some of the ways a fractional CMO can help growing businesses navigate changing marketing responsibilities.
Integrating Technology into Marketing
Every aspect of modern corporate structure has been deeply influenced by the integration of technology—and marketing is no different. Ongoing digital transformation requires marketing teams to adapt to new technology to meet changing customer needs, cultural shifts and economic trends. Technology plays a hand in every aspect of marketing, from targeting your ideal audience to creating friendly digital interfaces and measuring the impact of marketing efforts.
Being rigorously data-driven takes some of the guesswork out of decision making,enabling company leaders to target marketing efforts where they will make a real impact on the bottom line. But to gather and analyze the relevant data quickly, you need an efficient tech stack that aligns with your business goals. The right fractional CMO will have the right experience and knowledge to help you choose and adapt to new tools that streamline the data gathering and analysis process and help you make more informed business decisions. Selecting the right tools and software and integrating them into marketing strategies can improve your audience targeting and boost ROI.
Understanding the Customer Journey
Modern consumers expect more from businesses than a rote exchange of money for services. They want companies to recognize them as individuals and communicate with them in ways that are relevant to their needs and wants. To meet these high expectations, marketing teams need to leverage customer data and insights to effectively hyper-target parts of your audience—a particularly important consideration in a Business-to-business (B2B) environment.
Fractional CMOs have the experience incorporating data to drive personalized marketing programs that build stronger relationships with customers. They can introduce a fresh perspective for collecting and analyzing customer data to segment target audiences and deliver the personalized content customers crave.
Maintaining Legal Compliance
While consumers crave personalized communications, they also value their privacy. To achieve the right balance, marketing teams must juggle strict compliance (and over-compliance) j with privacy laws with the information required to craft personalized marketing campaigns.
Fractional CMOs will often have the education and experience to keep up with changing privacy regulations designed to protect consumers—and know when and where to bring in an expert to validate your marketing team’s work. They will be familiar with the process of working with legal teams to prioritize the value of first-party data without violating privacy laws. This allows companies to build trust while delivering the personalized marketing approach that resonates most with customers.
Developing Agile Marketing Operations
Business and economic disruptions have become a way of life across all industries. The only thing we can predict with certainty is that the future will be unpredictable. A strong CMO can help your business navigate unsteady conditions and develop flexible marketing operations built to respond to any challenge. Growing businesses are more likely to be affected by rapid changes than those that are already well established.
A fractional CMO can provide personalized guidance to help your marketing team build a strategy that enhances skills and increases knowledge. They can provide a fresh perspective for making informed decisions to help your growing company. Since fractional CMOs’ work schedules are built to align with the needs of your company, they can be present to help develop new operations that your in-house marketing team can own and operate without their direct involvement.
Measuring Marketing ROI
If you don’t have data to measure success, it’s impossible to know how your marketing campaigns are performing—and to validate your marketing team’s work to senior leadership and shareholders. While digital interactions produce vast amounts of data, that data must be refined and understood to identify the KPIs that show progress toward business growth. A CMO should have the requisite experience to introduce new tools for gathering and analyzing data to determine how your marketing campaigns are performing. They can implement these tools to help identify areas of inefficiency and underperforming marketing initiatives, allowing you to allocate resources to the campaigns that actually move the needle for your customers.
Fractional CMO services provide businesses with a personalized marketing approach to help them compete in today’s competitive market while giving growing businesses the flexibility they need to scale. Businesses can instantly gain the experience of a C-suite professional to address immediate hurdles, create a strategic marketing plan and make a plan to adapt to changes in your industry. A fractional CMO delivers the professional services of a full-time CMO on an as-needed basis. As a result, SMEs get the services they need to gain a competitive edge and thrive in a competitive marketing landscape without unbalancing their budget.
