Ep #138: How to Develop a Marketing Strategy as a CMO

Transcript:

00:00:00 Casey: In this episode, I’m gonna talk to you about how to create marketing strategy that actually works for your clients. This is how to get your head into the game of being a CMO and think strategically like a CMO. Let’s get into it. 

00:00:12 Casey: Marketers of the world, why do we work hard to solve small problems? Why do we reinvent ourselves and our clients over and over? And why are we giving away marketing strategy for free? With advancements in AI, we’re all seeing the marketing department shrink from the bottom up. And companies need you to serve them as their fractional chief marketing officer. It’s time to solve bigger problems and bring home a bigger paycheck. It’s time to create the lifestyle we deserve and to make a greater impact.

00:00:45 Casey: This is the Fractional CMO Show, and I’m Casey Stanton. Join me as we explore this growing industry and learn to solve bigger problems as marketing leaders. The Fractional CMO Show is sponsored by CMOx, the number one company to teach you how to attract, convert, and serve high paying fractional CMO clients on your terms.

00:01:09 Casey: All right. So first of all, I’ve got a Facebook group. I don’t know if you know about it. We call it the fractional CMO community. You can go to cmox.com/community and it redirects you there. It’s a free Facebook community. We’ve got thousands of folks in there. And there are a lot of good questions that come in and spam that my team filters out before it ever gets approved. So it’s a lot of signal, and you don’t really see any of that noise. But if you’re going to join, please don’t come in there and like write some dumb self-aggrandizing post about your experience running whatever, like nine-figure companies. I just had someone like write something about that, like, who cares? 

00:01:42 Casey: All right, that aside, let’s talk about this big idea here of how do you think strategically as a CMO? So, someone said that they want to work with a company and they’re talking to the COO and the COO is doing all the marketing stuff, which is not uncommon. I mean, I would say it’s more common for the CEO to be doing it, but it’s great that the CEO has a COO at the cost of the COO not having developed processes or SOPs. Hearing this, you’re probably like, “Well, what is a COO doing if they’re not doing processes and SOPs?” Well, they’re just probably just caught in the day-to-day and they’re just grinding it out and they don’t have any space to create systems and processes. 

00:02:16 Casey: Okay, so they need some help. So then this marketer says, “What do I take on? Like, what of their plate do I take on?” I just think fundamentally, that’s the wrong question. It’s the wrong question. The right question is, “What do they need?” Not what should I take on. So this isn’t to take in, like, take the current kind of… evaluate the current thing and then just kind of like, choose what parts of that should be held in marketing. Instead, it should be: evaluate where the company is, where they want to go, and then come up with the right plan for that.

00:02:42 Casey: I remember when I got brought in on like a half-day consult for a client in the private grocery-anchored commercial real estate space where we acquired a credited investor to get them to invest in real estate property. And when I stepped in, that company was running a podcast. And there was so much to do about the podcast. It was like this very expensive guy who had a very great radio voice. We talk authoritatively about stuff. And they would release podcast episodes. And it was always kind of some tension every Tuesday when the episode would launch and they would have to get all the assets and the imagery and all this stuff together. 

00:03:13 Casey: And I just like, I remember getting caught up in it for the first week or two. And I listened to a couple of podcast episodes, and this content I wasn’t familiar with, right? I’d never done accredited investor stuff. I’d never made an investment like that before. I just like didn’t know the market. So here I am just kind of like soaking it up, listening and listening to the podcast episode and just thinking like, “It’s kind of stupid. This isn’t doing it for me. I’m getting no value out of this. Like literally, there’s nothing that they’re saying that I think is valuable. It’s like they just pulled a bunch of articles and summarize them and kind of read the news.” 

00:03:47 Casey: So the CEO or the co-founder, one of them said to me, “Casey, let’s make this podcast successful.” So I go and look at all the stats and everything. And I’m like, “Man, the best way to make the podcast successful is just to stop it. Stop spending the money. The host was expensive. He was doing an episode a week. He was a very expensive person, maybe the most expensive person on the team. Second to me. I don’t think I could turn this around and make it valuable. I think I had to just get rid of it. Just like, just destroy it.” And I put that note out to one of the co-founders and they said, “Do what you think is right.” 

00:04:17 Casey: So we put a short-term pause on the podcast. It became an indefinite pause and I never missed it. I didn’t miss the tension. I didn’t miss the cost. I didn’t miss the labor from my team that was getting pulled into doing everything last minute on a Tuesday. I didn’t miss it at all. I didn’t miss the calls where we had to come up with new topics that just didn’t matter. 

00:04:36 Casey: So when you approach a marketing strategy, I want you to approach it from the viewpoint of creating what is needed, not necessarily using what exists. But there is a component of what exists and is it valuable? So, if someone said to me, “Hey, Casey, here’s my business. Here’s what I want to do. How do I do it?” I would lay out a very elegant and simple strategy. The most simple thing I would do is I think of Dean Jackson, if I wanted to sell something, like a horse, what is the headline of the ad for the horse say? It says, “Horse for sale.” And I put that out, outside of my farm and people drive by and see it and then they could come in and inquire about the horse. 

00:05:12 Casey: The first thing I’m going to do is advertise what I have to offer. And I’m going to make it as stupid, simple, and clear as possible. There’s a marketer, Joel Erway, he talks about making a ‘power offer’. A power offer is the idea of just being direct on the nose. “Are you a COO who is stuck in the grind of ABC and you just want to be able to build processes and build and run a great company? Then this might be the most important thing you’ve ever read. Hi, I’m Casey, and I do these things…” Like it’s a clear direct offer to someone. It’s not beating around the bush. It’s not asking for them to download a PDF to hope they then can open the PDF, read the PDF, gets the end of the PDF, click a link, go to a page, book—like it’s none of that stuff. It’s just a direct, he calls it a ‘power offer’. 

00:05:55 Casey: He would have a power offer that would say, “Are you on the brink of divorce? Is your partner talking about divorcing you? And do you want immediate help from someone who is skilled at helping save over 500 marriages in the last three years? If so, then fill out this form.” It’s a very clear and direct power offer. 

00:06:13 Casey: So when we think about marketing, oftentimes you and I probably like to have fun with all of the Rube Goldberg contraptions that we can make around automations and email campaigns and SMS campaigns and what we can do on the website. Maybe some of you are like, “But branding Casey, I love branding. I like the design. I like the typography. I like the colors. I like to do a big launch. I love PR.” All those things are great, but what’s the most simple approach to go get the outcome that we want? That simple approach is the thing that you start with. You just focus on that simple thing. 

00:06:41 Casey: So again, zoom out. What’s the context here? Client wants you to develop a marketing strategy for them. You need to know first of all, what’s the most simple and elegant approach. If someone said, “Hey, I’ve got a horse. Can you help me sell it?” “Well, yeah, I can build a website, we can do all this stuff. But the first thing I’m going to do is I’m just going to write on some construction paper and put it on a big old board outside the farm horse for sale. I’m going put it up there. We’ll see if that works, but we’re going to build some other stuff while I have that running.” 

00:07:04 Casey: Simple first. Simple, direct, clear. You can think, in your mind, you can think that there is a triangle of customers. And the triangle is all potential customers at the very tip of the top of the triangle are those that know they have a problem, know that there’s a solution, know that your client offers a solution, and they’re ready to pay. They’re just waiting for the right time, the right moment, the right something, the right deal. And then there’s the people below that know they have a problem and no solutions exist, but might not know of your solution. And then further down is people that know they have a problem, but aren’t familiar with solutions. And then there’s the people that don’t know they have a problem, which is the mass majority of people.

00:07:36 Casey: Think of health, for example, how many people know what their A1C is? Not a lot. It’s as far as a percentage. How big is the audience of people who know what their A1C is, and know that it’s high, and know that they need to be on a medication to help them drop it? It’s like a very small percentage of people. So when you look at advertising for GLP-1s, while it can reduce A1C, that is not a problem that people are necessarily looking to solve. They’re probably looking to solve a weight problem. That’s why GLPs tend to be around weight. 

00:08:02 Casey: Okay, so you think about that pyramid. The first thing that we want to do is we want to the tip of that pyramid and we want to advertise to them directly, clearly and say, “You’re looking for a solution, we have it.” But that’s a small total addressable market. And so then from there, we have to roll our way down to the larger total addressable market, which is people that know they have a problem, know solutions exist, but aren’t familiar with your solution. I don’t want to pay to educate people that they have a problem. Ultimately, I’ll have to if the business continues to grow, but I don’t want to be the person that has to create that level of content. Because it just is a lot. It’s like a national campaign. 

00:08:35 Casey: This is a gross example, but I love it. Squatty Potty. It’s just stool that you put in front of your toilet to put your knees up, right? Because the American toilet when the way that you sit on it, your knees are pretty low. But if you go to like an Asian toilet, you see that people are squatting and there’s like a natural human kind of way for elimination through that, right? So someone said, Well, I’m going to make a stool. I’ll probably sell it in a health food store because some, you know, crunchy people that go to a food co-op kind of know that this is a thing. And I sold it and probably did okay.

00:09:04 Casey: But then a company, Squatty Potty, was like, Well, I want to make this a national campaign. In order to make it a national campaign, I can’t only sell to the people that are the most educated that know that they have a problem and no solutions exist and are waiting for a bamboo version of the Squatty Potty. I have to instead go for the mass market. Where’s the mass market? People who don’t know they have a problem.

00:09:22 Casey: So Squatty Potty hired Harmon brothers to make a beautiful ad. It’s gross, but it’s beautiful with like a unicorn rainbow soft serve. You get the picture. Look it up if you want, Squatty Potty, Harmon brothers commercial. It is funny. Say kind of like a kind of like a knight in it that looks a bit like the Burger King guy. I don’t know. It’s great. It’s really funny. It’s really well done. It’s humorous. It was expensive for them to produce, but they educated the market.

00:09:48 Casey: When I think about building a marketing strategy for a client, I want to start at the tip and I want to sell to the people who pretty much have cash in hand. And then I want to move down a little bit lower and a little bit lower. And then ultimately over the course of maybe a couple years, I’ll get to a place where I need to teach a larger audience that they have a problem and that there’s a solution to that problem. But I have to educate them on the problem. Again, the problem of that, like the difficulty in educating people that they have a problem is the cost of it.

00:09:15 Casey: And now that Squatty Potty exists and they’ve done the heavy lifting of educating the market that the problem exists, now anyone can come in with a stool at a lower cost or a slightly different design or, with Chip and Joanna Gaines who like put their brain on it, whatever, they can now sell their own version of it and benefit from the investment that Squatty Potty made into the education of the market. But Squatty Potty is still the reigning supreme king of the toilet stool space. 

00:10:42 Casey: Similarly, there’s the folks behind bidets, right? Like they kind of like created that American bidet kind of scene that didn’t really exist before. Now anyone else can create a bidet and enjoy riding the coattails of that education strategy. However, it was the people who kind of created the education that got the benefit of it all, but they took a massive risk. 

00:11:08 Casey: When I work with my clients, I think of the tip of the iceberg, the tip of that triangle. And I want to get the people who have money in hand and I want to slowly work my way down over the course of years. The problem is, is that some companies are running marketing campaigns today that only go after the uneducated and they’re doing nothing to go after the fully educated, ready to buy. Or maybe they’re only running discounts. Maybe every month they seem to run a stupid discount.

00:11:32 Casey: I have a shared office coworking space and I get the worst emails from them about discounts. “Oh, we have a discount on this. We have a discount on that.” It’s like all they can do is offer discounts, but never once have they kind of done anything to make me want the office space, the office space with a better view, the office space with more esteem to it, the office space that comes with a high end chair. They’ve never offered that stuff. So they just play this boring game of just like, “How about now? Here’s a discount. How about now? Here’s a discount.”

00:12:02 Casey: Your job with your client is to identify where they’re currently working with their marketing budget and if it’s effective and then also can start at the top of that pyramid and work your way down. And the more simple you take things, the easier your life’s going to be. I don’t want to make a Rube Goldberg machine. If you don’t know what that is, that’s that thing like a Pee Wee Herman on Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. I think that’s the one. He makes breakfast. He pulls a lever and then a chicken lays an egg that rolls down a chute that falls into a thing that goes onto a frying pan that flips over with a spatula that’s attached to it. Yada, yada, yada.

00:12:33 Casey: It’s like a whole kind of contraption. Looks like an okay, go video. That concept of marketing, so unnecessary. It’s just boring, simple, straightforward stuff done expertly without failure tends to drive the biggest result for our clients. And the difficulty comes when we start adding more modalities like we’re only doing email marketing. Now we’re doing email plus paid. Now we’re doing email plus paid for social. Now we’re doing it for different product lines. Now we’re launching a new product. Now we’re adding a podcast.

00:13:01 Casey: It becomes more complex, but the kernel of it all must remain clear to the initial marketing strategy, which is to get customers that are ready to buy to buy, that aren’t ready to buy to be educated to buy and then the modalities to find them in. When someone says to me, “We need to be on TikTok.” My question is “How good is your customer journey right now?” Like really you want to go on TikTok to create content and advertise, but like, have you done the other stuff first? Like the infrastructure. You just want a bunch of people that want to buy, but you have no process to take the money. Can we optimize to take the money too? Like, isn’t that a good campaign? 

00:13:34 Casey: So start from zero. Like subtract all that they’re doing down to the bare minimum. I worked with a company and a woman at it, the marketing technician, her role was so much copy paste. So one of the first things I did was like, “Well, what are you copying and pasting? Okay. Can we just fundamentally change your relationship to the work so that like…” we get automations in here and maybe we have to spend 10 grand to make that happen. I mean, today we wouldn’t spend 10 grand, not after Opus 4.6. 

00:13:59 Casey: But let’s say it’s 10 grand to get it, you know, working. Great. Now she has eight hours of work week back. That’s worth it. And I can get her to do stuff that uses her brain, not just her copy paste. Our job as CMOs isn’t to like, just take what exists and take it over. It’s to critically rethink what is required for the business to be successful. And you want to know trends, right? You like when you’re around other CMOs and you can kind of share stuff like, “we have a podcast, I want to get like 100 downloads.”

00:14:30 Casey: Someone’s like, “well, we get 150 downloads. But like, actually, we get customers from it. They’re like a really good audience for us. 100 isn’t so bad.” Like that could be educational for you. Other people might say, “Oh, you know, we’re getting a million downloads per episode or 100,000 downloads per episode. And here’s our real numbers behind it.” That stuff becomes helpful for you to do a better job at choosing the right campaigns for your client.

00:14:51 Casey: Generally speaking, I think that a lot of marketers fail to understand the fundamentals of marketing. And therefore they allow themselves to get caught up on the next trick, the next idea, the next SaaS, the next one tool. Someone like Russell Brunson, who says that they’re one funnel away from everything their client wants. And they don’t have a strong retort when their client says, “Hey, aren’t we one funnel away from XYZ?”

00:15:15 Casey: You know, rarely are you one funnel away. Rarely are you one trick away. More often than not, you’re the basics away done expertly without failure, without losing focus. I can’t tell you how many companies I’ve worked with in the past where one of the things I say when I’m doing my initial analysis of them after they’ve paid me… I say, “Well, what’s worked really well for you in the past?” And they tell me. I say, “Cool. Are you guys still doing that?” They’re like, “Nope.” “Okay, why’d you stop doing the thing that worked really well?” They’re like, “I don’t know.”

00:15:44 Casey: Or they say, “Well, we had a gal and she would go to those events. And now she’s a manager, so we just don’t have the capacity for it.” You know, it’s like those kind of ahas. It’s like, “Okay, well, can we just do that? Can we stop doing the newsletter and the podcast and then just go back to the event, and won’t that solve a lot of the problems?” That simplicity, being that outside voice, is often the thing that creates the biggest value for the client. So don’t forget that. Don’t forget simple things. 

00:16:11 Casey: But also it’s the community of people that you’re around that you can like throw these ideas around that. Sometimes there are new things, like AI powered chatbots that have a good corpus of data that they reference when they answer prospects questions on the website. That’s great. That’s a cool new thing that you could add that’s not terribly heavy. You could probably find a GitHub repo that’s got it, and you can get Claude Code to spin something up and test it at least. Or you can go to a paid service and try it, right? Like these things are possible, but you gotta know the ideas of what you want to do. 

00:16:41 Casey: You have to think through it from a systems level, not from a “What do I do with what’s in front of me right now?” It’s “Where do they want to go? What’s the best way to get there?” Now what tools are already kind of half built, pre built, started and abandoned? Maybe it’s running sub optimally, maybe it’s running optimally. What do we keep? What do we kill? And everything is on the table: every vendor, every relationship, every tool. Everything has to be on the table for you to devise the right strategy for your client. And then you deliver that strategy coming from a place of true invention, true creation from the ground up. This is your creativity.

00:17:14 Casey: After that, it’s all about your leadership of getting it done, getting people to do the things in the right order. If you’re doing the wrong order, people are going to be a little upset with you because things are going to break. So you’re doing the right order. Do you want my help doing that? I’d love to help you. So we talk about all the time at CMOx. I mean, we had boardroom, we’re doing two boardroom calls a month. Man, we’re having fun. One’s like a little more personal, and then the one’s just about like topical questions and skill shares. And we just are playing and having fun. I’ll tell you our CMOs are killing it right now. 

00:17:39 Casey: I really love seeing how many women are so successful. I think kind of for the first time across the board, like the women are dominating in both like earnings and I would say probably in fun. We definitely have some guys that are doing really well, but a lot of women are just crushing it right now. It’s just awesome to watch. And I want to say like, not that it’s a competition, but it is a friendly competition. One of our CMOs just stated that she wrote a million dollars as her annual goal for 2026. That’s what she’s trying to bring in. And one of the other CMOs heard that and she was like, “Oh, shoot. Okay, that’s my goal too.” So now they’re kind of competing against each other who’s going to hit it first. And I think that’s really exciting.

00:18:19 Casey: So if you want to be in a room of people that are hungry for growth, that are really serving clients well, that where the clients on their own volition renew, like you don’t put them into a headlock and say, “You’re going to pay me until the end of time.” You are in a really good clear relationship where they get to renew if they want to, on contractually of terms that are supportive for you. But generally speaking, right? This is like a consensual relationship where the client wants you, where they’re where you continue to deliver more and more value over time. You want to be in that place. 

00:18:48 Casey: You want my help. You want these other CMOs to be there and support you and cheer you on. Let’s see if you’ve got what it takes to be a CMO inside the CMOx. We’ve got something really special going on and it’s just getting nerdier and better, especially with this AI stuff. What we’re doing, I really feel like is at the bleeding edge. I’m consuming a lot of content around AI. I’m playing for the last four weeks. I think I’ve probably put in no less than two hours a day, seven days a week, some days a lot more. I mean, today I’ve probably put in four hours, just playing with these tools and learning.

00:19:17 Casey: And I’ve got a lot that we’re doing for clients and really kind of how things are being restructured for what marketing technicians do versus what the CMO leads the brand to do. It’s cool. I’m finding my footing here. I’m like, this kind of weird dynamic, this duality of “I don’t want you to do implementation,” but also if you can get the outcome faster than it could take you to find someone and hire them. What do we do in that situation? And I would do that in a way that protects you and doesn’t open you up to scope creep and things.

00:19:50 Casey: So we’re having a lot of fun conversations around that so that we can move faster for our clients. I feel like with all this innovation, the speed of your clients’ innovation has to keep up. And if it doesn’t, some upstart is going to do it. They’re going to just beat any incumbents in the market and take it over. So if you’re using AI intelligently, I think that you stand a fighting chance of being able to keep your clients relevant. That’s the big thing. It’s like relevance.

00:20:15 Casey: I could go to any website right now, and I could knock it off in maybe 30 minutes, deploy a new server with a brand new website, knock off someone’s site completely. And then I could spin up, through Claude Code, excuse me, a SaaS tool and have a decent SaaS tool by tomorrow morning. I could have all of that stuff. What’s the difference between that and your clients? I’ll say, your clients have a brand, have experience, they have thoughtfulness, they’re innovators. They need you to support them on marketing. 

00:20:43 Casey: And the pressure’s on. The pressure’s on right now. You know software developers? They’re not doing well right now. They’re losing their job. They’re saying like, “Oh, people are going to get restructured.” It’s like, I don’t think that’s really it. I think software developers, by and large, are just going to lose their footing. What are we going to be able to do as marketers? Well, we have to rise to the top to be this top marketer in our industry. And in the company, we have to be the CMO and then have a couple clients that we serve as the fractional CMO. That is your ticket for safety, for fun, for innovation, for meaning, significance, for relevance. That’s what we’re after right now. 

00:21:16 Casey: All right, if you want my help, book on a call: cmox.co/call. That’s it, book on a call with Justin. He just got back from a great trip. He’s like recharged. He was out in Patagonia. Ask him about it. I think he had a great time. Ask questions about what we’ve got going on at CMOx and see if we can help you. At least know for yourself if that’s the right next step. All right, take care. See you soon. Bye.

00:21:35 Casey: Thank you for sticking around for the full episode. As you know, learners are earners, but you’ve got to take action on what you heard today. For more information and show notes, visit fractionalcmoshow.com. If you’d like me to answer your questions on an upcoming episode, you can share your question at fractionalcmoshow.com. And last, please hit the like and subscribe button so that I know that this content is helpful to you. All right, go get them.