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Head of Marketing. Marketing Director. Chief Marketing Officer. Marketing Manager.
Whatever you call them, they’re expensive.
To many businesses, almost prohibitively expensive.
And rightly so. The complexities of marketing are constantly evolving and growing their own, smaller complexities. Every month, there’s a new tool, trend, or technique to driving results, and it’s nearly impossible to stay on top of it, even for people who make it their life’s work to do so.
There are new ad platforms, ad formats, content best practices, algorithm updates, privacy laws, analysis tools, software updates, devices, demands, campaign types, social attitudes, and markets that shift so frequently that you will lose track very quickly if you don’t stay on top of it.
As a business owner, you can’t stay on top of it. And if you can, then the abundance of free time you have to stay read up on everything suggests your business isn’t keeping you busy.
And it’s one thing knowing about all these updates. It’s another thing working out how to apply these updates to your marketing. Should you do it? If so, how? Is it right for you? Is this worth investing in?
The thing is, if you don’t understand any of this stuff, it’s almost impossible to develop a sustainable and long-term marketing plan for your business. You end up banding together multiple short-term strategies to form a campaign that might run over a long period of time, but is still not what an expert would call a long-term strategy.
That’s where your Head of Marketing comes in.
But they are just so darned expensive. In fact, according to Seek.com.au, Head of Marketing positions can demand up to $175,000 per year. Glassdoor puts this at almost $200,000 per year.
That’s a lot of money to fork out for any marketing resource, particularly because you then need to consider the cost of the actual marketing itself.
So if you need help with marketing, but you can’t afford a full-time internal marketing resource, what can you do?
Hire a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer
Marketing experts love meaningless jargon, so if you were thrown by the word “Fractional” then perhaps you’d be more comfortable with the term “outsourced”. They can also sometimes be called a Virtual Marketing Manager.
A Fractional CMO is a part-time outsourced position you hire to manage your whole marketing function. They take on the mantle of your entire marketing ecosystem and use their knowledge and expertise to build & deploy an effective strategy.
It is their role to stay up to date on industry trends and apply that to your marketing. It is their job to manage the effective delivery of your campaigns, whether they fulfil the campaigns personally, use their own team, or help you find other external resources.
As they are part-time resources and aren’t employees of your business, they are cheaper than a full-time, in-house marketing employee as well. They provide the same level of expertise but don’t require the financial commitment you’d be expected to front if you hired for the role internally.
What Are The Main Benefits of a Fractional CMO?
There are a handful of crucial benefits to outsourcing your marketing function.
They are cheaper than an internal full-time or part-time resource.
You can pay Fractional CMOs a lower amount than an internal resource because they don’t require superannuation, insurance, employee benefits such as devices or uniforms, annual leave, paternity leave, carer’s leave, or sick leave.
Because it is a part-time role, the CMO is free to take on other clients as well, meaning they aren’t dependent on you for their whole income. This gives you a better rate.
They are less likely to resign
Hiring marketing specialists is a pain. Even entry-level team members who have only just learned how to spell digital marketing come out of their baby pants expecting $75,000+ a year.
If you’ve invested your time and money hiring an in-house marketing director to have them resign six months later for a better opportunity, it crushes your soul.
Fractional CMOs are service providers, not employees, so unless the relationship simply isn’t working, it’s very unlikely they are going to leave your business so long as you’re willing to pay them.
Let them worry about hiring a marketing team
Some Fractional Chief Marketing Officers (such as Stark Digital) prefer to go it alone, taking on the role of strategist and fulfilment team at the same time. That has distinct advantages as you speak directly to the people managing your campaigns.
Others will build their own team of specialists. You might only speak to your CMO, but they’ll have a PPC, SEO, Social, Email and Design specialist on their books. When you use the CMO service, you get access to a whole team of marketers.
Because those specialists don’t work for you, you can leave the hiring & employee management to the CMO. This saves you time, money, and means you don’t need to pay other marketing specialists.
They stay on top of things
Because CMOs live and breathe marketing, they’ll be the one to come to you with opportunities to drive more results. Whether that be jumping into AI, advertising on a new platform, running a different type of campaign, or shifting your brand perception, they’ll come to you with the ideas.
This means you don’t have to spend your time trying to figure out where to spend your marketing budget. If you’re a business owner, perhaps one of the most valuable things any service can sell you is time, and that’s exactly what you get back with a Fractional CMO.
You don’t have to fire them
If you find your Fractional CMO isn’t working for you, you can just end your contract. You don’t need to worry about KPIs or performance management. You don’t need HR to craft an improvement plan, or worry about a series of official warnings to protect yourself from FairWork.
Just end your agreement. There may be an early-cancellation penalty, but that’s still preferable to the b*llache of managing an employee out of your company.
They have other clients
This might seem counterintuitive because even though this is a part-time position, you still want to be the focus of your CMO’s time. However, they might learn or discover something while working with another business that would work perfectly in yours. They bring that learning to you and use it to further your marketing efforts.
Had they not had that other client, their learnings would have been limited to what they could have learned at your business alone, and that lack of exposure to other markets can actually stall your growth.
An internal resource wouldn’t have come across those discoveries because they are fully focused each week on working for you.
Who Needs A Fractional CMO?
Anyone that doesn’t have the desire or means to pay for a full-time marketing manager would benefit from a fractional CMO.
Scaling businesses
As a business grows, its marketing demands also increase. However, hiring internal marketing resources may be prohibitively expensive if you’re still quite small in size (i.e. a startup). If you just need a little help with marketing, or some assistance getting things done on time, a fractional CMO is a great alternative.
It also means you don’t need to pick and choose a specialist. Let’s say your business runs PPC, social ads, and a little bit of email. They are all working well and any one of them could be scaled, but if you hire a PPC specialist, you can’t afford to hire a social or email specialist as well. If it turns out that scaling social ads is more suitable for you, and you’ve committed to a PPC specialist, you’re stuck until your business grows some more or your PPC specialist leaves the business.
A fractional CMO would have the knowledge and resources to expand all three channels for one cost, and that cost would be cheaper than a full-time single-channel resource.
Small marketing budgets
Even big businesses can have small marketing budgets. If you go to a regular marketing agency, they will usually charge per service. For example, if you want PPC, SEO, Email, and Social Media advertising, each one of those services would be its own line item on your invoice.
If you pay an agency $2,000 for PPC and $2,000 for social and $2,000 for SEO, you expect each channel to get $2,000’s worth of attention each month. Because the expectation of your CMO is that they do “marketing” and all that entails, they are a lot more flexible when it comes to small budgets.
A Fractional CMO would combine all of those services into one monthly rate, and they would then allocate their own resources depending on what needs to be done. This means your PPC might not get a lot of attention one month, but during that time your SEO will get a huge amount of time. The next month, social ads might be the star while your email gets left to run on autopilot.
This means your Fractional CMO is allocating your monthly retainer where it is needed the most.
Businesses in the hiring process
Let’s suggest you’re actively looking to hire internally. It’s a pain. Your head of marketing not only needs to have a wide range of skills, but they also have to be a good fit with your wider team.
An insufferable marketing manager can turn even the most cohesive team into a toxic nightmare.
You need to take your time to make the right choice, but a marketing strategy without anyone keeping it on target will likely go awry. You don’t always have time to wait until the right candidate comes along.
That’s where a Fractional CMO comes in. You can simply hire one on a temporary basis to keep things running smoothly until you’ve found the right internal hire.
A good Fractional CMO can even help you with the hiring process, and ensure a seamless handover when the successful candidate joins your team.
Is A Fractional CMO Right For Everyone?
It might sound like a dream hire for a business to come across a reliable CMO, but it’s not right for everyone.
Enterprise businesses
If managing your marketing is a full-time job and requires the focus of a full-time employee, hire one. A Fractional CMO is a fraction of a Chief Marketing Officer. They cannot be expected to work full-time on your business. If you’re turning over millions of dollars a year in revenue, invest in your own internal marketing team.
Businesses with very small marketing budgets
If your marketing budget is smaller than $10,000 each month, a Fractional CMO probably isn’t for you, particularly if that media budget is being spent on only one marketing channel. If you’re dumping $10k each month into Google Ads and that’s all you can afford, a CMO is overkill. You’d invest in a Google Ads specialist to manage this for you.
Remember, Fractional CMOs might be cheaper than a full-time employee but that doesn’t make them cheap. They are still a highly-trained and capable resource for your business, and marketing is a high-demand skill set. You shouldn’t be surprised to pay $5,000+ / month just to have access to a fractional CMO.
You need more than just marketing
With the expansion of marketing as a general industry comes an increasing lack of understanding over what actually falls under the term “marketing.”
We all know the four Ps of marketing: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. However, your fractional CMO most likely isn’t going to help you develop your product, advise you on how much you should charge, or help you with placing the product in bricks-and-mortar stores.
The issue is that most job ads for marketing managers require candidates to be experts in PPC, Social, SEO, Email, Design, Stock Management, Content Writing, Content Production, Organic Social Management, Event Organisation, and Web Development.
When you combine more operational roles such as sourcing or pricing products, you’re putting too much on one person.
And if that one person leaves…? 50% of your business operation goes with them.
If you’ve grown to the point you need an Operations Manager, Stock Controller, and Marketing Manager, then you should probably consider diversifying your leadership structure and hiring for the roles that will have the biggest impact on your business.
Asking a Fractional CMO to become an integral part of your business operations is setting yourself up for failure.
So Is A Fractional CMO Right For You?
The best way of answering this question is to talk to one. Deciding whether to outsource or hire internally is stressful. There are pros and cons to both approaches, so if you’re in doubt, the best way is to talk to a Fractional CMO. Tell them about your requirements, your pain points, your hopes and your dreams.
If they can help, they’ll tell you how. If they can’t, they can help you decide where to start.
If you’ve made it this far, and you want to talk to an experienced Fractional CMO, then just click here to arrange a time to talk with Stark Digital. We can talk about your needs and get started straight away.
