Chief Marketing Officer
Fractional CMO
The second most-bought fractional role after CFO, and the one with the widest quality spread in the market. A fractional CMO is not an agency and not a campaign manager. The job is positioning, pricing, channel strategy and holding the agencies and juniors to a standard.
It works part-time because the strategic decisions are episodic and the execution is not the executive’s job. It fails when a company buys a CMO and expects them to run the ads themselves.
What they deliver
- Positioning, messaging and competitive differentiation
- Pricing and packaging strategy
- Channel strategy and budget allocation with real attribution
- Agency and freelancer selection and management
- Brand architecture for multi-product or multi-market businesses
- Building the in-house marketing function and hiring its first lead
Signals you need one
- You are spending on marketing without knowing what works
- Your agencies report activity rather than outcomes
- You are entering a new market or launching a second product
- Pricing has not been revisited since the business was half its size
- Sales says the leads are poor and marketing says the follow-up is poor