If you’re looking to become a Fractional CMO, you’ll need to embody the skills every good CMO has. These essential skills are vital for creating strategies that work and for leading a client’s brand toward the sales or conversion goals they seek. Below are our top essentials we believe every good fractional CMO needs and how they’re important for creating value for your client.
At CMOx, we strive to help potential fractional CMOs get started in the industry. Our goal is to help you be the best Fractional CMO possible for your client using our effective tools and support. If you’re interested in becoming a fractional CMO, contact us today at (219)804-0797 or by filling out our contact request form. We can’t wait to hear from you.
1. Use the right tools
Now more than ever, there are a wealth of tools at your disposal for you and your team to use. If you’ve seen our page on the CMO software every CMO needs, you’ll know there are plenty of amazing types of software to accomplish every type of marketing task. While you may not be the one directly using these software tools, it’s important to implement the right tools for your business and marketing team. These tools will help you solve the bigger problems your marketing strategy needs to address.
2. Maintain open communication
Communication is key. One of the most important aspects of the CMO is the leadership they provide to the marketing team and collaborating with them when necessary to design and implement a strategy that will convert. We recommend using apps like Zoom or Slack to maintain effective communication with your team. In addition, communication is vital for ensuring campaigns, posts, ads, and other marketing communications activate at the right time.
3. Direct company strategy
Consumer behavior, regardless of your industry, is constantly changing. An effective CMO needs to know their end consumer inside and out to continue to make a profit. In order to do this, you’ll need to direct your strategy toward what works best for your client. Those insights come from collecting data. Once you understand the insights your data delivers, you can direct the efforts of your client’s marketing team toward what will drive conversions or profit for the business.
4. Constantly improve process
Part of becoming a CMO involves establishing a goal to streamlining your processes from a leadership perspective. Ultimately, you’ll want a team to work like a well-oiled machine to make the implementation of your marketing strategies that much easier. This includes anything from streamlining the process to starting up a social media campaign, collecting data, sales, and much more.
5. Track the right data
One of the most significant essentials for any CMO is an effective CMO scorecard. A good scorecard will aggregate your data into one sheet for your review. That said, you’ll want to be tracking everything you can about your client’s business, from campaign conversions, social media likes, Google Ads, GMB data, and much more. An effective scorecard will collect all this data and enable you to make more informed decisions about the health of your campaigns, your team’s effectiveness, and to see what works and what doesn’t.
6. Personalize your strategies
Depending upon where your strategies are will determine your target audiences. With the data, you collect you’ll be able to tailor your campaigns to your customers. Consumers want to feel like their voice is heard, and they want to see an aspect of themselves in your product or service, so your strategy should reflect that in a personal way. In addition, you want your client’s brand to feel more personable and less like a company.
7. Drive innovation
The marketing industry as a whole is changing/growing(?) constantly, especially with the increasing need for an effective online presence. Digital marketing, and everything that comes with it, has become much more of a necessity for certain businesses. As a CMO, you’ll need to know how to implement these digital marketing tools properly. These tools include everything from SEO, social media, and much more.
8. Mind the buyer's journey
One of the main goals of any CMO is to create campaigns that convert and to do that, you need content that falls along your potential customer’s buyer’s journey. The buyer’s journey is your customer’s path to purchasing your product or service, so your content should tailor them toward that conversion. The content you create campaigns you design, and ads you run should all be geared toward this path to purchase.
