Want to grow your business and position your brand for success? One of the greatest ways to do so is hiring a CMO or Chief Marketing Officer, an experienced, result-driven executive responsible for all your marketing efforts. 

But with an average annual salary of over $330,000 many small to mid-sized businesses can’t easily afford a CMO. Facing tight budgets and strained resources, these companies must embrace the idea of the fractional CMO and outsource their marketing efforts if they want to grow. 

That’s what I want to discuss today. What is a fractional CMO and the services they provide for small to medium-sized businesses. 

What is a Fractional CMO

Let’s start by explaining something a bit simpler; What is a CMO?

CMO stands for chief marketing officer, and it’s the job of the person who defines strategic direction and marketing implementation in a business. The concept of a Chief Marketing Officer comes from large enterprises, but it is a role that has grown exponentially in the last couple of years.

A fractional CMO is basically a part-time version of this position. Just like fractional accountants, fractional Chief Financial Officers, or fractional Chief Technology Officers, a fractional Chief Marketing Officer is an executive that leads the marketing strategy and execution of a company on a part-time basis.

What is the difference between a marketing agency, a marketing coach, a consultant, and a Fractional CMO?

The number of options businesses have to get marketing help can be overwhelming. But if we focus on strategy and implementation, the choices you’ll come across are hiring a marketing agency, a marketing coach, a marketing consultant, or a fractional CMO. 

Marketing Agency

A marketing agency is a company that serves various clients in one or more areas of marketing. Agencies sometimes get involved in strategy, but they often focus on the implementation side of the business. They are useful for companies that have a strategy already in place and need some extra help with execution.

Marketing Coach

A marketing coach normally assists business owners or marketing teams with training material, acting as an accountability partner and recommending strategic actions, but is not involved in the implementation at all.

Marketing Consultant

Marketing Consultants are experts in a specific field who help companies by giving advice and developing their marketing strategies. However, they outsource implementation to freelancers or an external marketing team. 

Fractional CMOs are particularly relevant today because they have the strategic approach of a consultant, can execute as an agency, and act as a marketing coach for your team, while being accountable for delivering measurable results for your business.

Fractional CMO Responsibilities

A typical Fractional CMO has a mix of responsibilities, all designed to meet the needs of the companies they serve.

These can include:

Defining Goals and developing a marketing strategy 

A fractional CMO should be able to develop and communicate clear goals for the marketing team. And align those goals throughout the organization.

Fractional CMOs are also responsible for developing a brand's marketing strategy (budget, vision, team makeup, customer journey, systems, and tactics). They must narrow the marketing focus to crucial marketing channels and formulate a winning and repeatable plan for the business. 

Effective fractional CMOs can direct the strategy from a marketing standpoint. For example, they could help define the ideal clients, propose the best markets to target, and choose the most appropriate marketing channels that lead to more business.

This is the most important part of the role because it helps the company stand out from its competition in the minds of their ideal customer.

To develop a winning marketing strategy the fractional CMO should start with these four concepts;

1. Identifying the brand's ideal client
2. Finding the problem the brand is trying to solve and promise to solve it
3. Make content the voice of strategy and establish the brand as an authority online
4. Create a complete buyer journey

Managing the marketing department

Fractional CMOs may have their own team to implement the strategy or be responsible for managing an internal department. Hiring, managing, and sometimes promoting employees are commonly known responsibilities of a fractional CMO.

The job of a fractional  CMO is one of the most challenging. The average CMO lasts just 40 months, so they have to be prepared to make an impact fast. 

That’s why most fractional CMOs have their own implementation team, and based on our experience training successful marketing managers and consultants, having a network of professionals that can help you execute your plan is essential to achieving  consistent growth as an agency.

The Duct Tape Marketing Agency Workshop certifies fractional CMOs to license the complete Duct Tape Marketing System for their agency. Completion of the workshop includes an invitation to a community of like-minded business professionals who come together for strategic partnerships, continued training and events.

Establishing Marketing Metrics and KPIs

A fractional CMO is responsible for establishing clear marketing goals, metrics, milestones, and key performance indicators (KPIs). These are used to measure progress and determine if the marketing team is meeting the goals of their campaigns. 

Some of the commonly known metrics for a marketing department are the number of qualified leads in a given period, sign-ups or appointments generated, lead conversion rates, lead-to-customer conversion, cost per lead, monthly recurring revenue, and others.

Metrics can help fractional CMOs understand the challenges, and therefore deliver consistent and long-term results.

Act as a consultant for the marketing team

Successful chief marketing officers, both full-time and fractional, often have a strong sense of purpose and can implement a set of values within the organizations they serve. They are not just order takers, but they are strategists, consultants, and coaches.

Other responsibilities of a Fractional CMO are creating programs that support employees in different ways. For example, they could create and run mentorship programs or training for their team or their clients' teams.

Fractional CMOs might also implement the marketing strategy with their own team of experts. This can be far more effective than attempting to spread out these tasks throughout your company, or creating and hiring a whole new department.

The global market value of artificial intelligence (AI) in the marketing world is projected to reach over half a trillion dollars by 2024. 

There is an AI tool out there for almost any marketing need, and the stat above proves that these tools will grow and develop to offer even more value to marketers and small business owners.

Using AI tools is just one way to help optimize your content marketing workflow. As you create your next piece of content, look at the tools shared here, and see what value they can bring to the table.

The more tools you plug into your workflow, the easier it will become to build great content, and deliver it in a timely manner. 

What are AI marketing tools?

AI marketing tools are platforms or systems that mimic human intelligence and help marketers improve efficiency, accuracy, and automate parts of their job. There are numerous AI marketing tools on the market right now, and odds are, you probably already use a few of them.

Benefits of using AI tools for Marketing

AI Marketing tools can take a lot of the work out of doing marketing for a small business. They’re often scalable to the size of your business, and quite easy to use. They also reduce the amount of manual work needed, meaning less human error and more efficiency. 

Best of all, AI marketing tools can cover every area of your small business marketing. As you’ll see in this article, there are AI tools for copywriting, design, social media, SEO content creation, decks, and much more.

Honestly, the biggest pain in using AI marketing tools for your business can be deciding the best to use.

Here are our 5 AI tools that every marketer can and probably should start using today. Check them out and see what works for your business:

1. Writesonic

A market leader, Writesonic offers marketers the opportunity to use AI to create written content of any kind. It has you covered from creating SEO-optimized long-form posts to sales emails, Q&A, essays, product descriptions, reports, and even ebooks. 

For blogs and SEO articles, simply enter a keyword or a topic, and it will give you AI-based options for your title, introduction, outline, and finally a well-written post in minutes.

Writesonic has a cloud-native, AI-powered system, that provides complete ownership of the AI-generated copy in your account, and integrates effortlessly with Semrush, WordPress, and other common marketing programs.

We use this tool at Duct Tape Marketing, and it has been a massive help to us with time-consuming tasks like topic research, crafting engaging long-form content, doing FAQs and Q&A pages, optimizing our SEO, and creating ad variations.

If you struggle to create written content but want to brighten up your online presence without spending much effort and time, then Writesonic might be helpful. With their generous 2,500 words free trial, it can help you build tons of relevant content in no time.

2. Lately

If you want the content of your social media to be created and tested efficiently,  Lately is the perfect solution. 

It employs a combination of your social media analytics, millions of data points from its own archives, and crowd testing to create organic social media content that your audience will love.

This allows your social media team to spend more time focusing on strategy, growth, or creating a better end-to-end experience for your clients online.

Try their 7-day free trial to create posts your followers will love and share.

3. Photosonic

Need some inspiration for new creative designs, concepts, or projects? PhotoSonic lets you create realistic or artistic graphics from a text description, using a text-to-image AI model. Just type in a few keywords and the software will produce several relevant images for you to choose from. 

This AI marketing tool also lets you modify existing images with text and filters, create images of any kind, and customize them with diverse attributes and details within seconds.

Photosonic offers a 15-credit free trial that helps you get an idea of how AI Image generators can boost your marketing.

Jasper

With all of its combined features, Jasper is an effective AI Marketing tool that can help marketing teams break creative blocks to create amazing, authentic content faster.

Jasper has a Chrome extension that lets you create content directly on social media platforms. It also helps marketers write viral YouTube and TikTok video scripts, craft LinkedIn articles, Instagram captions, website copy, and write emails.

Jasper and Writesonic are built on the same AI technology, both have good customer support and can help marketing teams to create content more efficiently. However, Jasper doesn't offer a free plan and is more focused on writing short-form content like ads and product descriptions.

5. Grammarly

How to start using AI Marketing tools for your business

Choosing the right AI marketing tools can often feel overwhelming. There are often so many services and each with their own unique features. 

To get yourself through the process and find the best AI tools for your business, think about these 3 simple tips;

1. Nobody knows your business more than you do, so really think about where an AI  tool might benefit your workflow. Is your content creation process slow? Are you disappointed with your social media efforts? Identifying your needs will help you target the right AI tool for your marketing.
2. Test all the AI tools you’re considering. Most of the above-mentioned offer free trials, so take advantage of these. Make sure you like using them, and that implementing them will be as easy as possible.
3. Does the tool save time and drive growth? If you do your research and test the product, you’ll know if it helps you or not. Don’t add too many tools and keep it simple.

You’ve hopefully come away with some new insights about AI marketing tools, the benefits of AI tools for marketing, and how to choose the right one.

Now, you’re ready to get out there and find the right tools for your business.