Outsourced CMO Services for Improving Your Business
Casey Slaughter Stanton
Founder and CEO
CMOx, The Fractional CMO Company
An Outsourced CMO provides businesses with expert marketing strategy and leadership while maintaining flexibility and avoiding overcommitment for the business.
Outsourcing your chief marketing officer can be really exciting for your business, especially for other c-suite level employees. The outsourced CMO may also be referred to as a fractional CMO as there are a few marketing agencies and marketing consultancy firms that provide this more and more popular role. This role works well with both traditional and digital marketing.
The outsourced CMO is a marketing executive who can provide marketing leadership for startups, small businesses, and really any company’s marketing team that wish to improve their marketing efforts in a more systemized and strategic way.
The outsourced CMO’s responsibilities are far-reaching but generally include developing a marketing plan that is consistent with your company’s messaging and core values.
This marketing leadership will be seen in all areas of customer acquisition and brand awareness.
The outsourced CMO will work with other marketing professionals in your business to improve the bottom line. This can be done by improving search engine optimization (SEO), automation, inbound marketing, email marketing and more. The works.
What is an Outsourced CMO?
An Outsourced CMO is a chief marketing officer working with a business on a contractual basis, usually somewhere between 10-40 hours per month.
What is an Outsourced CMO? An Outsourced CMO is a chief marketing officer role that has been Outsourced to an individual who is not fully employed, such as a W2 worker inside of an organization.
An Outsourced CMO is charged with the duties of the CMO, but most typically the organizations they serve, do not need a full time or 40 hour a week CMO. In hiring an Outsourced CMO, organizations get the financial arbitrage of having top-level talent guide and support their organization and marketing while being able to have capital left to reinvest into the marketing talent necessary to get the campaigns built, deployed, tested, and scaled
An Outsourced Chief Marketing Officer serves on the executive side of the organization, where they make decisions to help make the CEO and board’s aspirations reality.
Through the marketing role, the Outsourced CMO must therefore understand all aspects of marketing, including, but not limited to branding, lead acquisition, paid marketing channels such as Facebook and Google Ads, content marketing, social media, print marketing, television, radio, and more.
The role of the Outsourced CMO requires the CMO to be experienced in all facets of marketing, but not necessarily be an expert in the technical matters of those roles.
The Outsourced CMO then hires and supports in the management, at least in the outcome management of the marketing technicians coordinators and directors and achieving the goals set by the Outsourced CMO.
Why hire an Outsourced CMO?
The business needs an Outsourced CMO because it is growing and needs an expert to lead its marketing strategy.
You may be thinking of hiring an Outsourced CMO to support your organization. And therefore, you may ask yourself, why should I or why should we hire an Outsourced Chief Marketing Officer, the question comes down to where your business is, what your competitors are doing, what the opportunity is for your growth, and where you should be investing in your marketing and sales.
The outsourced CMO is a part-time addition and therefore you should not hire an outsourced CMO if your management team constantly needs to be working with a 40 hours per week in-house CMO. This can be shown by tracking how many high-level marketing activities the CMO is doing.
In such a situation, you would benefit from a full-time, Chief Marketing Officer. Why? Because that full-time chief marketing officer has plenty of work to do and can easily fill a 40 hour a week schedule with high value, high leverage labor to support your organization’s growth and achieving the lofty outcomes that you and the team set. You should hire an Outsourced CMO if your organization has a desire to grow and to beat your competitors. If you have a new product or innovation, or service that you’d like to get to the market that you’re not comfortable or familiar with the marketing strategies of, hiring an Outsourced CMO is the fastest way to deploy a comprehensive go to market strategy, using your team or potential outside vendors.
You should hire an Outsourced CMO if you want the expertise of an expert marketing strategist and leader, but don’t need them to fill 40 or more hours a week of tasks and labor for your organization.
As you think about your organization and your growth trajectory. It’s important to consider what’s really needed. It would be a mistake to hire an Outsourced CMO if you needed in fact, a full-time CMO and could afford one. That said, organizations in the $1 million to $50 million a year space, often can do very well with an Outsourced CMO.
Outsourced CMO Org Chart
The role of the outsourced CMO is to provide leadership and make sure that all departments and people involved in marketing work coherently.
How will an Outsourced CMO impact a business?
A critical question you must ask yourself when considering how to grow your business is who needs to be on your bench to give you the best chance to achieve the lofty goals you’ve set. An Outsourced CMO is a strategic marketing leader who can understand all of the moving parts and pieces inside of your organization, including past marketing campaigns assets that you have on hand, such as customer lists, ebooks, webinars, etc.
This includes the team and human resource capacity that’s available so that the chief marketing officer can then build a strategy that works best for your organization.
Once that strategy is developed, the Outsourced chief marketing officer will be able to impact your business by bringing in the right talent and overseeing that talent to ensure they achieve the outcomes needed.
Our belief is that it is better, typically long term, to hire in-house marketers to execute at your organization. But in some situations, it may be appropriate to bring in outside vendors or agencies that can deploy specific marketing campaigns.
The Outsourced CMO will impact the business by being able to take complete ownership and be accountable to the results for the marketing department in your organization.
How will an Outsourced CMO work with or improve my current marketing team?
An Outsourced CMO does not replace your marketing team.
After years of working with organizations between $1 million and $50 million a year. It has become apparent to us that most organizations have smart capable marketing staff, but no real strategic leadership in the organization. By providing strategic leadership through an Outsourced CMO, the marketing team is able to get more done.
Never again does the marketing team wake up in the morning and say, “What should I do today?” Instead, the Outsourced CMO will be able to give them long term outcomes that they’re aiming for. And the marketing team can then work diligently and ardently every single day to achieve those outcomes.
The Outsourced CMO also provides a level of support guidance and leadership that the organization is potentially lacking currently. This means the CEO or whoever else has been wearing the hat of the CMO can spend their time focusing on other areas of the business. While the Outsourced CMO grows the marketing team’s capabilities and capacity, and provides momentum, through leadership.
The perfect outcome for an Outsourced CMO is to support and encourage the growth of your current marketing team, and hiring additional marketing support as needed. And when the situation arises, providing recommendations and even following through on firing marketing talent that is not performing at the level they need to in order to achieve your business outcomes.
If you would like to outsource your CMO or would like to learn more, contact us at CMOx today to arrange your strategy call.
Casey Slaughter Stanton
Casey S. Stanton is a marketing strategy expert and founder of CMOx, the Fractional CMO company. For over 10 years Casey has been leading marketing strategy for 7 and 8 figure businesses in both digital and brick-and-mortar markets.
Casey Slaughter Stanton
Casey S. Stanton is a marketing strategy expert and founder of CMOx, the Fractional CMO company. For over 10 years Casey has been leading marketing strategy for 7 and 8 figure businesses in both digital and brick-and-mortar markets.
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