You’ve dreamed of this moment.
The moment when you’d finally become profitable enough to start hiring more staff.
When you first started your business or signed up to work with this team, you knew that you were part of something that was on its way up. It was growing and you were going to be a big part of that growth.
But, with growth comes growing pains. For every successful campaign, another challenge finds its way into the business. At one point, you’ll have to ask yourself,
Do we need to hire somebody to help us with our marketing?
You’ve figured out how to make a few sales by now and you even have happy customers who have turned into raving fans (our favorite stage of the Customer Value Journey).
Yet the next step requires expertise. Expertise that you don’t have time to learn or to spend time on. You’re busy enough—and it’s time to outsource.
The question is, do you need to hire somebody full-time, or would a fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) be able to help?
Here are the 5 reasons your company should hire a fractional CMO over an internal CMO.
Reason #1: The budget isn’t ready for a full-time marketing executive
At one point, Amazon couldn’t afford a full-time executive. Every business has to pass through the essential phases of growth, which don’t always come with a huge ROI. The beauty of hiring a fractional CMO is getting the expertise of a marketing professional without having to go into the red for it.
Your fractional CMO isn’t just an expert marketer, they also specialize in hopping on to new teams and helping organize the team, collect the right data, and launch new projects. They’ll let you know exactly what you can expect from working with them so you can compare their workload to a full-time CMOs.
Reason #2: You don’t have a captain for your marketing ship
When you chase all of the rabbits, you can’t catch any. We’re pretty sure this term came directly from a marketing team who didn’t have a captain at the helm of their ship. Without upper guidance, they spent too much time trying to chase different rabbits and ended up without having anything to bring home at the end of the night.
Focus on one rabbit and you’ll be able to catch it with ease (we haven’t tried running after rabbits in real life, but we’ll just assume). Bringing in a fractional CMO to pull together all of the different parts of your marketing team is essential for hitting that next growth spurt. Your team needs to know what they’re focused on and why, and without a captain guiding them in the right direction…they will get lost.
Reason #3: Managing the business itself has gotten messy
Look, it happens. You 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 imagine doing is cleaning up. While a messy desk is an easy fix, messy data can be harder (or worse, no data at all). Without someone helping you ‘clean up’ after your launches, creating the necessary spreadsheets to track content ROI, and making sure you’re still heading towards paradise—things will get messy.
That’s where hiring a fractional CMO comes in. Your fractional Chief Marketing Officer can organize the mess of data accumulated like the dirty cups on your desk. They’ll be able to help you figure out where your business is, what you need to do to get it to your next goal, and create a plan to make it happen.
Reason #4: You’re getting ready to launch something new
You like launching new products. We know (we do too). The rush of hitting publish on your next launch is like a mini skydive that you’re probably taking a few times a year. But, you might not be seeing the results you’d hoped for. If your conversion rates are lower than you want 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 this funk.
With a fractional CMO, you can hire them to help you with your new initiative. Let’s say you just want to test out this new product with a great launch. A fractional CMO can help you with that launch and let you keep doing your thing with your other marketing initiatives. A full-time CMO will have their hands in all of those initiatives, which isn’t always necessary.
Reason #5: You want more flexibility than working with a marketing agency package
We teach agency owners every day to create packages. These packages are essential for the growth of their business (and their sanity). But, we get it. As a business, you don’t always need the package that an agency has to offer. Sometimes you need your own thing (like having someone help you with a launch and nothing else).
If you need marketing help, but you want to pick and choose what this marketing mind helps you on—that’s exactly where a fractional CMO comes in. Instead of working around the packages of an agency, you can ask the CMO to work specifically as you need them to. As you’re able to move closer to your goals, you’ll be able to reconsider that agency (or even hire your fractional CMO full-time!).
Needing to hire marketing help is an exciting moment and it’s not something to glaze over as you’re stressing about the challenges that come with business growth. Take a moment to celebrate needing someone to help you with your marketing—it means you’re succeeding.
What this doesn’t mean is that you need to hire a full-time employee. With a fractional CMO, you can work with a brilliant marketing mind who can work part-time on the part of your business you need most.
And there’s always room to bring them on long-term in the future.
