A fractional CMO is a part-time marketing leader responsible for leading a business’s marketing team and provides strategic marketing guidance. These executives fulfill a company’s need for a chief marketing officer but not on a full-time basis to achieve established goals and growth.

The path to becoming a Fractional CMO is different for each individual but will involve years of experience in leading marketing strategies and marketing teams. 

In the usual course of events, when companies grow enough to need services a Chief Marketing Officer provides but are still not at the level where they can hire someone senior and experienced, they go one of two ways. In one scenario, they hand CMO tasks to a more junior person from within their organization.

This is someone who is an experienced marketing professional with an extensive background. However, they lack the executive background, which is the other part of the CMO’s job. This person starts out handling tasks like posting to social media, writing blog posts and others. But, over time, they get overwhelmed. If they are tasked with creating strategy for the business, they may be over their heads. Not everyone can handle content strategy effectively. Sometimes you find a diamond in the rough who just needed an opportunity, but those people are rare. Maybe one in 100 effective marketers has the skill to move on to these important executive positions. 

The other path is to take the leap and hire a CMO, either from a competitor or from someone in a similar industry. This can wind up putting a significant drain on a growing company’s funds. When a company is bringing in revenue of around $750,000 per year, tying up a third of that in one salary can be crippling. It can be very hard to make that investment worthwhile.

A Fractional Chief Marketing Officer is someone who performs the function of a CMO without forcing your company to commit to a full-time person in that role. Think of it as CMO as a service.  Many organizations already recognize the value of outsourcing other C-Suite functions, such as the CFO. They may not need the services of a Chief Financial Officer full-time. Instead, they need someone to come in and perform this function for a few hours a week. They bring in someone who has the top-level experience that they need, but who doesn’t tether them to the cost of having someone like that as permanent staff. This is all why hiring a fractional CMO works for those businesses during that growth period.

By working with a fractional CFO, the business can get the benefit of a CFO’s guidance and skills without having to have one on staff full-time. A Fractional CMO can be the right fit for a number of organizations. They’ll help an organization maintain a lean structure and cut down on wasteful spending at a time when every dollar counts.