A fractional CMO helps companies of all sizes and stages. As part-time top marketing leaders, they guide you to grow and scale up. They also pass on tons of knowledge and experience, which usually only top execs have. This article looks at the biggest reason to hire one of these fractional sales management experts. It also breaks this key benefit into three parts:

• Strategic thinking and planning
• Marketing insight and analysis
• Effective communication and teamwork

Keep reading to learn the top things fractional chief marketing officers (FCMOs) teach their clients. Let’s go!

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Wondering what a Fractional CMO can do for your business? Watch this video below.

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What Is the Biggest Benefit of Hiring a Fractional CMO?

John is the founder of a small business inventory management software startup. His company is ready to promote it but needs more investor funding to scale it. This is when he hits major roadblocks: 

• His burn rate is high; his cash flow is good for only three more months.
• A tech blogger published a story about this financial problem. It can ruin his funding chances if it becomes viral.
• Initial market testing shows the application needs a unique selling proposition. Its features cannot convince small business owners to abandon their existing platforms. 

John knows he cannot solve all these problems alone, but what happens if he gets a fractional CMO? Fractional CMO benefits range from optimizing marketing campaigns to supporting a startup. All these sum up to one advantage: a marketing crash course in a lifetime of experience. In particular, they teach businesses the following:

• Strategic thinking and planning
• Market insight and analysis
• Effective communication and collaboration

     1. Strategic Thinking and Planning

Strategic planning means setting a company’s mission, vision, goals, and plans. It uses data to decide how to compete and succeed. Strategic planning requires strategic thinking, looking at the whole market landscape. These include competition, customer needs, industry trends, and other big-picture items influencing success. Working with a fractional CMO lets you learn strategic planning from an executive-level expert. They teach you the following:

• Making a strategic plan, including tools to study the market, choose focus areas, and set measurable goals
• Gathering and using market data to inform your strategy
• Analyzing customer behaviors and needs to define and prioritize target market groups
• Sizing up competitors using frameworks such as Porter’s Five Forces
• Evaluating growth options using tools such as Ansoff Matrix
• Looking at case studies to get better at big-picture thinking and anticipating market shifts
• Turning high-level plans into specific goals, tactics, and measures for all parts of the company

For John’s business, the fractional CMO first closely checks the cash flow situation. If money is meager, FCMOs look at options. They can lower marketing costs and rework vendor deals. They try to boost short-term revenue, too. The expert can also help John find investors who match his startup’s plans. Additionally, they identify customers most likely to see value in the product. Finally, they develop a strategy focused on the most valuable types of customers and marketing channels. They start small pilot programs with those targets first. The goal is to get evidence and success stories that support a bigger launch.

     2. Marketing Insight and Analysis

Market insight means understanding conditions, trends, and changes in the market. Examining all of these is vital today for the following reasons:

• The pandemic greatly altered what customers want and need. You must align your post-COVID digital marketing strategy with these changes..
• COVID also caused big changes across industries. This not only produces new competition but also new opportunities. Studying market conditions reveals risks, gaps, and areas for growth.
• You should base choices on current data rather than old assumptions.
• More uncertainty brings financial, operational, and strategic risks.
• Today’s world requires business agility.

Fractional CMOs teach companies to use more data for decisions. First, they look at all relevant information to understand their markets, customers, and performance. Then, they map the full journey customers go through. What stops them from buying? What hurts the user experience? Those answers help improve the whole path. FCMOs regularly do market research through surveys, focus groups, and interviews. Looking from all angles creates more detailed customer profiles to better target. The experts study the competition, too. Who is leading, and why? Can the business be number one? How can the client find a niche and get a good share if a rival is strong? For John, an FCMO interviews 25 potential small business customers. This reveals problems such as manually tracking inventory, which causes stock-outs or excess stock. Industry reports also show that 60% of small companies still use Excel, not software. Through a comparison of competitors, the FCMO recommends that John improve the product’s demand forecasting. They rewrite their marketing to highlight how this feature cuts a small business’s inventory costs by 50%.

     3. Effective Communication and Collaboration

Businesses work across many channels today, so communication and teamwork are crucial. They should happen: 

• Across all channels, from emails to social media to websites 
• Between internal teams and departments

These groups cannot be silos, or companies will struggle. A company consisting of siloed departments cannot give customers a unified experience or respond quickly to changes. Without collaboration, insights stay trapped in departments. This leads to mistakes such as developing the wrong customer profiles or marketing strategies. Fractional CMOs teach companies to share goals and break down disparate systems with the following techniques:

• Centralizing the approval process for outbound messaging to keep it consistent 
• Defining roles and responsibilities clearly
• Running sessions for teams to share insights 
• Using project management to coordinate and track cross-functional efforts
• Making a crisis management plan 
• Keeping open channels for communication feedback at all levels

For John’s problem, the FCMO makes a PR crisis plan. It includes articles and interviews discussing the business’s long-term potential and investor support. John also writes a “personal” blog post explaining the real situation. He highlights the startup’s progress and strengths to allay fears and doubts. The FCMO establishes one messaging document that everyone can access. They also lead weekly meetings between the product, marketing, and sales teams to align priorities and strategies.

Summing Up

As the example of John’s company demonstrates, fractional CMOs teach valuable lessons to help new and existing companies succeed and compete. From strategic planning to market insights and team communication, they provide tools and techniques that boost growth. Even better, the fractional model makes all this knowledge affordable and available for organizations of any size. Do you want to grow or find your competitive edge? How about improving your marketing tactics? Digital Authority Partners (DAP) is an award-winning fractional CMO agency. As your partner, we help create data-driven plans tailored to your business’s goals and challenges. Contact us today to schedule a free call.

The post What Is the Absolute Greatest Benefit Businesses Gain From Fractional CMOs? appeared first on Digital Authority Partners.