What’s the difference between A CMO and a fractional CMO? So, the chief marketing officer is the marketing leader in your business. The person that makes the marketing happen, and there are three duties that kind of make up that role, whether it’s full-time or part-time.
Strategy
One is strategy. And that is what is marketing going to do in our business. How can marketing help us achieve our business goals? What’s the scale of that? What are the pieces of that? How does it happen over time? Where does it happen? All those things are really important to have in mind. So you’re not just doing things and wasting activity without knowing why you’re doing them. I like to think of this as the design of the marketing engine for your business.
Leadership
Another duty is leadership. So you may have marketing employees that need to be coached, directed, up-skilled, all those things. Or you might be using vendors outside the company for some of all of your marketing efforts who need to be led and, and held to account. You also have other employees in the business that relate with what marketing is doing, like the sales team. But also even the product team and the leadership team that need to be aligned and brought on board with what the plan is and have marketing be part of the culture of your business to be fully effective. And of course, you as the CEO, you would want the CMO to be there for you as an advisor on the strategic decisions you have to make related to marketing and your investment.
Results
And a third duty is results. The CMO is responsible for not only building, that marketing engine that was designed, but turning it on and seeing it run and making sure that it’s delivering what it it was intended to deliver when you decided as a business to invest in this marketing engine.
So all three of those duties are there at whatever scale your business is at, it’s either a full-time CMO, which is pricey. It’s 200, $300,000 all in of course plus or minus, depending on your market and where you are. But it’s a big investment and that’s every year because you’ve committed to an employee versus much less. If you’re using part of somebody’s time on a contractual basis to fill these three roles. Your other alternative is to have you be the CMO, which is what happens when you’re early in your business and all three of those duties are being fulfilled by you.
So some things for you to think about. What is your revenue opportunity that marketing will help you achieve? Do you have a goal to grow your business a lot? Do you have a goal to expand your footprint within customers? Look at what the profit potential is for that, and then have that inform your decision about your investment on your CMO. Because the CMO is not the one that does all the work. The CMO as I said, designs, builds, and executes the engine, that doesn’t have to be full-time marketing employees. So in the case of a fractional CMO, you might have a very nimble marketing engine that includes a few hours from somebody in the company, but some outside vendors. The right outside vendors working together to execute the plan or marketing might be important enough in your business where you’re at that you have two or three or more employees in the business, plus these strategic vendors outside, at which point it might make sense to have a dedicated full-time, CMO on your team.
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