Video Transcription
Your business is growing and it’s time to accelerate your marketing efforts. Should you make a full time hire? This is a common conversation that I have with leaders of growing businesses and most times, entrepreneurial leaders will default to defining a lower level entry level marketing role and then embarking on a search for a marketing unicorn who can be affordable in a full time role for their small business and who somehow can magically bridge everything from strategy through execution.
But those marketers simply do not exist. So let me offer you an alternative to how you might approach building and scaling a sustainable and healthy marketing program and team for your business.
I was once a young marketer myself in a fast growing entrepreneurial business and we learned through trial and error. And let me tell you that that is an expensive way to go about shaping and supporting your brand. There are likely going to be many iterations along the way and the opportunity cost of getting it wrong is here.
So one of the reasons I established Authentic to provide fractional CMO services was to help growing businesses more quickly get access to executive level marketing leadership. People who’ve been there, done that, built teams, engaged partners and successfully scaled. This helps entrepreneurial businesses avoid the risk and turnover that affects their brand reputation in the market. So consider the possibility that if you were to hire a full time entry level or early stage marketer, that person still needs strategic guidance, they need appropriate resourcing, they need help to know where to direct their energy and effort across an increasingly complex marketing landscape.
Hiring an early stage marketer without senior level support will likely create more work for your business because they still need management and strategic guidance and they still need somebody to help integrate the efforts of all the people around the ecosystem in terms of navigating which technologies, which channels, which partners and how to make them work together most effectively for the business. An alternative to this approach is to begin by hiring a fractional CMO who can help your business confidently outline where you will place your bets from a marketing perspective.
What budget do you need? Which channels make sense to attract the audiences that you wish to engage? What time frame will it require to build the momentum to engage those audiences and bring them through your sales pipeline? Which partners you might need to accelerate activation based on specific niche marketing capabilities that they can do best in class services around, whether that be search, marketing, pay per click, digital demand generation, content creation, web development.
These are all kinds of very specialized capabilities that you’re not likely to build internal capabilities around. But you do know you you need to know how to bring them in, when to bring them in and how to integrate their efforts for strategic impact so a fractional CMO can help your business figure out which channels to reach audiences, which partners to activate those channels, what kind of budget to commit behind those programs and ultimately with those frameworks in place which hires you will need and when on your team to maintain the day to day project management and then coach and mentor those people in their roles so that their gifts and talents are applied in the best highest use for your business so you do not have to guess at how to go about building your marketing team, your marketing partnerships and the ecosystem of technology channels and strategies that will best support your business.
Authentic is here to help entrepreneurial businesses confidently take the next right step to build from foundational to truly sustainable marketing teams and programs. We’d love to be your partner on this journey and help you navigate confidently the right mix in the right way to build strength and sustainability for your revenue programs. So reach out. We’d love to be with you on this journey.
