Many businesses struggle to accurately measure the effectiveness of their marketing activities.
While creativity and brand development are always essential, today’s marketing is more focused on data, strategy, and results. It’s not always easy for businesses to handle these skills in-house.
A fractional chief marketing officer helps organizations bring all of these components together — meaning businesses don’t have to struggle to do it all independently.
By establishing clear goals and creating a data-based system for measuring results, a fractional CMO ensures marketing functions are more transparent, results-oriented, and focused on creating tangible and measurable results.
Here are the five important ways a fractional CMO helps companies achieve marketing accountability.
Table of Contents
1. Setting Clear Marketing Objectives
One of the biggest challenges companies face when handling the marketing function is failing to establish clear objectives. Marketing teams may focus on increasing website traffic, creating more social media posts, and advertising online. But doing a whole lot of things without a clear strategy and goal in place is the equivalent of planning to fail.
A fractional CMO helps companies establish clear, measurable marketing objectives that are connected to positive business outcomes. Instead of an ambiguous marketing objective, the marketing function may be focused on more tangible metrics such as the following:
- Number of leads generated
- Customer acquisition costs
- Conversion rates
- Revenue attributed to the marketing function
These goals provide a system through which a business can measure its marketing campaign performance. And a fractional CMO is just the professional to help improve marketing accountability.
2. Implementation of Data-Driven Performance Tracking Systems
Businesses can only be held accountable if they have data-driven performance tracking systems in place. Many businesses are accustomed to using data in their marketing initiatives, though they’re not always sure how it relates to overall business performance.
A fractional CMO brings a system through which a business’s performance is tracked using data-driven performance tracking solutions. Such systems focus on tracking data related to business growth. For example, a business may use a system like Google Analytics to determine how its websites are performing in terms of traffic and conversions.
Through these systems, a business can determine how its marketing initiatives are performing in terms of return on investment.
3. Establishing Structured Marketing Processes
A business marketing team may be operating in a highly dynamic environment where they’re required to design and implement marketing campaigns within a very short time frame.
For this reason, the professionals on the marketing team may, without a good system in place, fail to perform well. A fractional CMO, however, will bring a system through which a business’s marketing team will operate. This system may include campaign planning systems, content creation systems, approval systems, and more.
4. Creating Cross-Department Alignment
Marketing accountability isn’t limited to the marketing team. Marketing campaigns require close coordination with sales teams, product teams, and even organizational leadership.
Fractional CMOs play a vital role in ensuring that marketing goals align with the needs of the entire organization. For instance, the marketing team may work with the sales team to define what a high-quality lead is. Communication tools can be effective in helping the team communicate.
5. Providing Executive-Level Oversight and Leadership
Lastly, a fractional CMO provides executive-level oversight that is often lacking in small and mid-sized businesses. This oversight ensures that the marketing team doesn’t lose focus.
A fractional CMO periodically reviews the marketing team’s performance to hold the team members collectively and individually accountable for the results of their marketing campaigns.
This oversight ensures that a culture of performance is instilled within the marketing team.
In addition, executive oversight can ensure that marketing budgets are being spent wisely. Instead of continuing to spend money on marketing campaigns that aren’t yielding the desired results, more effective strategies can be pursued.
Turning Marketing Into a Measurable Growth Engine
Marketing is a critical function for business growth, but it’s also one of the toughest functions to measure and control. Many companies invest heavily in marketing campaigns, social media, content development, advertising, and other marketing strategies. But all too often, there’s no clear mechanism for measuring what’s working and what’s not.
This is where the importance of a fractional CMO comes into play. Such an executive-level marketing professional works with companies on a part-time or consulting basis and is highly effective at helping companies achieve maximum returns on investment for marketing efforts.
