A fractional CMO is a good investment.
“I have no idea what I’m doing with our marketing.” “We can’t afford a fulltime marketing person.”
A fractional chief marketing officer (CMO) can be a great investment for a company that doesn’t have the workload or budget for a fulltime employee (FTE). This arrangement can provide you with a great depth and breadth of experience for your growth goals while helping your budget.
You receive the experience and expertise you need from a senior marketing professional without having to carry the full cost of their salary and burden. Let’s check the math.
Senior marketing FTE salary: $150K - $200K
Burden (benefits, etc) $30K - $40K
Total annual cost of FTE: $180K - $240K
Monthly FTE: $15K - $20K
Fractional CMO (DRS pricing) $5.8K - $7.5K per month
Going with a fractional CMO can save you $9,000 to $12,500 per month. That’s $108,000 to $150,000 per year. Good money you can invest in your marketing assets/spend, re-invest in product development, funnel directly into your bottom line…whatever the situation dictates.
The right fractional CMO will create your marketing strategy, develop your infrastructure and then build and execute your marketing roadmap. They will guide your growth journey and ensure that your company does the right things in the right order for the right people.
At least they should be doing those things. There are more junior fractional marketing professionals out there. They would//could be a great option for the execution of your marketing tactics but not everyone has the experience to lead a ground-up build (or rebuild).
A good fractional CMO should ask a ton of questions rather than make a ton of promises. A strong CMO should be willing to have difficult conversations. A good CMO is not there to simply execute everything you think you should be doing. If that was working you wouldn’t be questioning your marketing/growth in the first place.
A fractional CMO can also help align all of your internal and external marketing resources. Perhaps you’re dealing with a performance agency, a freelance designer and an in-house marketing coordinator for your newsletter and social media. Are you well-versed enough to act as the Rosetta Stone for those people? Can you speak their language? Can you translate one for the other? Do you have the time to nurture your junior staff who is looking for intermediate marketing knowledge?
Continuing the language aspect…do you have enough knowledge to properly vet the agencies or advertising platforms who try to sell you their product? Have you been promised the world by a super salesperson only to be left holding the (empty) bag after things didn’t fulfill expectations? Are you able to provide external resources with the info (ICP, USP, roadmap) they will need to execute their element of your marketing?
Sure, we calculated the hard costs fairly simply. But was is the opportunity cost of the above four paragraphs? How much money has been spent erroneously? How much time has been wasted? How much ground has been lost to your competitors? How much opportunity has been missed with your target audience?
If you don’t have the budget or workload for an in-house CMO, considering fractional is definitely worth it in the long run.