You dreamed of this moment.
The moment you were finally profitable enough to hire more people.
When you started your business or signed up for this team, you knew you were part of something that was on the way. It was growing and you would be a big part of that growth.
But with growth comes growing pains. For every successful campaign, another challenge finds its way into business. At some point you have to ask yourself
Do we need to hire someone to help us with our marketing?
By now you’ve figured out how to make some sales, and you’ve even got satisfied customers who have turned into keen fans (our favorite stage on the customer value journey).
However, the next step requires expertise. Expertise that you don’t have time to learn or spend on. You’ve got enough to do – and it’s time to outsource.
The question is, do you need to hire someone full time or could a chief marketing officer (CMO) help?
Here are the 5 reasons your company should hire a fractional CMO instead of an internal CMO.
Reason # 1: The budget is not yet ready for a full-time marketing manager
At one point, Amazon couldn’t afford a full-time executive. Every company has to go through the essential growth phases, which are not always associated with a large ROI. The beauty of hiring a faction CMO is that you can get the expertise of a marketer without going into the red.
In addition to being a seasoned marketer, your faction CMO specializes in joining new teams and organizing the team, gathering the right data and launching new projects. They’ll tell you exactly what to expect from working with them so you can compare their workload to that of a full-time CMO.
Reason # 2: You don’t have a captain for your marketing ship
If you hunt all the rabbits, you won’t be able to catch any. We’re pretty sure this term came straight from a marketing team that didn’t have a captain at the helm of their ship. Without the guidance from above, they spent too much time hunting various rabbits and had nothing to bring home with them at the end of the night.
Focus on one rabbit and you will catch it with ease (we haven’t tried chasing rabbits in real life, but we just assume it). To get the next growth spurt, it’s imperative to hire a fractional CMO who brings all of the different parts of your marketing team together. Your team needs to know what they’re focusing on and why, and without a captain to lead it in the right direction, it will be lost.
Reason # 3: The management of the company itself has gotten messy
See it happens. They don’t even want to see what our desk looks like the week after the Traffic and Conversion Summit.
You’re busy and the last thing you can think of is cleaning up. While a messy desk is an easy solution, messy data can be more difficult (or worse, no data at all). Without someone helping you “clean up” after the releases, creating the necessary spreadsheets to track the ROI of the content and making sure you are still headed for paradise – things get messy.
This is where hiring a faction CMO comes into play. Your faction CMO can organize the clutter of data that has piled up like dirty cups on your desk. They can help you figure out where your business is, what you need to do to achieve your next goal, and make a plan for doing it.
Reason # 4: You are preparing to start something new
You like to bring new products to market. We know (we know too). The rush to hit release on your next launch is like a mini-skydive that you probably do a few times a year. However, you may not see the results that you were hoping for. If your conversion rates are lower than you’d like and you know it’s because you’re messing something up (but you don’t know what), hiring a fractional CMO can get you out of that trouble.
With a Fractional CMO, you can hire them to aid you in your new initiative. Let’s say you just want to try this new product with a great introduction. A fractional CMO can help you with this introduction and get you moving on with your other marketing initiatives. A full-time CMO will be involved in all of these initiatives, which is not always necessary.
Reason # 5: You want more flexibility than working with a marketing agency package
We teach agency owners to create packages every day. These packages are essential to the growth of your business (and your sanity). But we get it. As a company, you don’t always need the package that an agency has to offer. Sometimes you need your own thing (like having someone help you get started and nothing else).
When you need marketing help but want to choose what that marketing mind will help you with, this is where a fractional CMO comes in. Instead of bypassing an agency’s packages, you can ask the CMO to work exactly the way you need them. As you get closer to your goals, you can rethink this agency (or even hire your CMO full-time!).
It’s an exciting moment to hire marketing help, and there’s no need to read up on the challenges that come with growing your business. Take a moment to celebrate that you need someone to help you with your marketing.it means you are successful.
This doesn’t mean you have to hire a full-time employee. With a fractional CMO, you can partner with brilliant marketing expertise that can work part-time for the part of your business that you need most.
And there is always room to use them in the long term in the future.
