Prefer to listen? Here is my reading version of this article.
Introduction: Growth is harder than it should be
I speak with founders and business leaders every week and a common theme is they feel growth seems harder than ever before.
Challenges come from every side and don’t need to be rehearsed here. We all know it’s tough out there.
One that’s not talked about often is a lack of good marketing rigour.
Lots of businesses plateau despite having strong products.
There’s a myth many have been sold: get Product Market Fit and all will be well. Unfortunately, even with good PMF, there’s no guarantee your audience is even aware of you, let alone considering purchase.
Businesses need to find competitive advantage wherever they can. Clearly, having great marketing is central to growth, but most smaller businesses can’t afford a full-time experienced CMO or marketing director.
Why marketing leadership is critical to sustainable growth
Long term sustainable growth doesn’t come from throwing more marketing at the world.
But that’s the approach many businesses without experienced marketing leadership take.
Send more emails. Deliver more Meta ads. Increase Google spend…
Throw more spaghetti at the wall…
Senior marketing leadership should understand the role it takes in scaling revenue for the long term. It’s about setting the right strategy, ensuring the organisation is set-up for success, developing processes that build momentum and getting execution on point. (In case you didn’t know it, these are the four pillars of my SOPE Framework®).
Operating without this level of strategic direction will increase marketing costs while decreasing your marketing effectiveness. Essentially, it costs businesses more and delivers less.
And it’s what many of your competitors will be doing.
If they can’t afford experienced marketing leadership, they will be suffering.
However, the big competition probably has hired a hot-shot CMO or marketing director and they’re busy building their competitive advantage.
3 ways fractional marketing leadership increases competitive advantage
1) Speed is an advantage
(That’s assuming you’re heading in the right direction)
Fractional leadership condenses time. This may sound counterintuitive given we are only with you some of the time, but fractional leaders have experience to draw on, understand patterns, shorten the time to make decisions and the distance between decision and execution.
2) Commercial alignment across teams
A lack of alignment across teams (marketing v sales v product v tech v finance…) causes friction, delays, roadblocks and value leakage.
An experienced fractional CMO will be able to build bridges, alignment and deliver better working practices. Fractional marketing leaders aren’t interested in politics or silos, we know what it takes to get the job done.
3) Stronger marketing control with a team pulling in the right direction
A good fractional leader starts with strategy and gets the team on board. They build processes that allow momentum and repeatability. They get the team functioning to the best of their ability.
The team delivers more, delivers better and gets results.
Need more ways?
3 MORE ways fractional marketing leadership increases competitive advantage
1) Reduced leadership drag
Founders and CEOs in smaller businesses spend too much time thinking and worrying about marketing (particularly when it’s not their area of expertise). Having a fractional marketing leader on the team (even if it’s for a few hours a week) reduces that drag.
Your leadership becomes more productive. And you are probably the biggest competitive advantage your business has.
2) Strategic clarity in difficult markets
Your competitors probably suffer from an inside-out perspective; teams of ‘do-ers’ struggling to make tiny gains without having an external lens.
A fractional marketing leader brings board-level experience, often from outside your niche, to offer real clarity.
3) Less spaghetti, more sauce
All marketing requires experimentation, but that doesn’t mean you are operating in the dark. An experienced fCMO will be able to help the team make better marketing decisions, understand where to deliver marginal gain and ultimately throw less cold spaghetti at the wall hoping some of it will stick.
It’s simple: great marketing builds bigger and better businesses. And great marketing needs direction and leadership from someone with experience and expertise.
While your competitors are either floundering without the right leadership or, worse, spending all their budget on a single hire, you can take advantage of expertise but at a fraction of the cost of employment.
