Chief marketing officers have a big responsibility to oversee your company’s marketing strategy. Growing your business with a CMO should be easy when they have the skills and experience to come up with amazing ideas. However, even the best long-term CMOs can get complacent and decline in standards. The best way to overcome this may be to look at hiring short-term fractional CMOs instead. Here are some of the pros and cons.
Benefits Of Standard CMOs
Let’s start with the benefits of having standard CMOs in your organization. There are advantages to having someone with long-term experience within your company. They will have been there with your brand through the highs and the lows. There’s a good chance that at some point in the past few years, they’ve come up with some brilliant marketing ideas that elevated your company. Why else would they have been in the top spot for so long? Their experience means a greater understanding of target markets, company history, and the finer points of the company.
This sort of long-term relationship can be advantageous because it allows for a sense of loyalty that you don’t get with short-term hires. Loyalty should be seen in these CMOs’ willingness to go the extra mile to make a strategy successful and put in the time and effort necessary. The best will make sure they earn their pay and that you’ll continue to keep them onboard.
Disadvantages Of Standard CMOs
The downside to all this is that you do run the risk of working with someone who gets stuck in old patterns. They may have certain approaches to marketing strategies and branding that they love and that worked for them years ago when the company was at its peak. That approach might not work as well in modern marketing, especially if your CMO’s heyday was before the dominance of social media. If they can’t get out of that narrow-focused approach, you could lose out.
Similarly, those long-term CMOs who have become comfortable in their role could end up becoming a little complacent about their skills. They may not have taken on many training opportunities recently to get them up-to-speed with new techniques and marketing tools for social media. Obviously, this isn’t going to be true for everyone. Many standard CMOs will be very adaptive and keen to work on their personal and professional development. Even so, with so many part-time hires with diverse skill sets out there, there’s a lot of competition.
Finally, there’s that elephant in the room regarding cost. Standard CMOs take home considerable salaries that cut deep into the company expenses. That’s fine if they are pulling their weight all year round and delivering strategies that increase profits. The problem comes when the strategies start falling flat, but the salary stays the same. Worse still, those under-performing CMOs could insist on their yearly pay rise and bonus when it might not be deserved. Again, there will be CMOs worth every penny. Still, you have to consider if a fractional CMO may be a better option.
Benefits Of Fractional CMOs
When you work with a fractional CMO instead of a standard one, things happen a little differently. These experts are part-timers who come in to help with problematic projects and branding issues and offer their insights. The immediate benefit here is the ability to gain a completely new perspective on the project. They may be able to think outside of the box and challenge you to take a new approach. This push could be just what you need to get noticed and stop treading water.
One reason these part-timers are perfect for these alternative strategies is their wealth of experience. Standard CMOs can spend so long working in one industry or even one role that they run out of ideas. Fractional CMOs may have a host of previous projects under their belts that span various industries. One month, they could be trying to sell something in the automotive industry, and the next, they’re in healthcare. The point is that this can help with those fresh perspectives and add a twist on an old idea to reach new people.
The other benefit, which is perhaps the most significant for struggling businesses, is that this can be a more cost-effective solution. While other companies pay their standard CMOs a high salary all year round, you can bring in fractional CMOs as and when you need them. You can hire them for a month or so from companies like One Rawr when you have one big project to complete. If you work with a company often, you can also enjoy the scalability of their pricing.
Disadvantages Of Fractional CMOs
This doesn’t mean that fractional CMOs are the perfect choice for all businesses. It’s important to be aware of the potential drawbacks before committing to this approach to growing your business with a CMO. For example, some of these short-term hires will focus on quick fixes over short-term strategies. They may offer an amazing solution for the problem at hand without any thought to what comes next. That isn’t necessarily true for all of them, but it is a risk.
Of course, the downside here is that you are then left to handle the fallout from a marketing campaign without their guidance. Hopefully, once your fractional CMO leaves the project, they’ll do so, having imparted a lot of helpful information about the project and what to expect moving forward. You just need to be sure that you aren’t going to be stuck dealing with any last-minute changes or rebranding issues without them. Again, there’s no guarantee that you’ll feel abandoned like this when you hire a fractional CMO from the right source.
Is It Time For A Change?
You’re going to have to ask yourself some tough questions here. Is your current CMO doing enough in their full-time role to provide the quality strategies and profits you’re looking for? Has your marketing department declined or stagnated recently to a point where your branding is suffering? If it’s the latter, it’s time to look into hiring experienced fractional CMOs instead. They could shake things up in a positive way.
