Video Transcription
What is a fractional CMO? And how do you know if that’s a great solution for your business?
Hi, I’m Jennifer Zick, founder and CEO of Authentic®. We are a community of fractional CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who work with growing businesses to help them Overcome Random Acts of Marketing® and confidently take the next right step in pursuing healthy growth for their company. When I first started this business in 2017, the category of fractional CMO was still relatively new.
What is a Fractional CMO?
So let me start by defining what a fractional CMO is. Fractional simply means part time, and CMO means marketing executive.
So a fractional CMO provides part time marketing leadership services to other businesses, in some cases on a short term basis, and in other cases, increasingly on a long term basis, embedded inside of your business, leading all things related to building your marketing team and programs.
Now, since I started my business, the fractional CMO marketplace has increased and taken on a lot of different shapes. So let me help break it down into the kinds of fractional CMOs that I have seen in the market and what they mean in terms of being a potential fit for your business.
Fractional CMO business models
- Independent Consultants
First, there’s a growing market of what you might consider gig workers, people who’ve left corporate full time roles to consult independently and are serving a book of clients. So multiple clients as marketing consultants. So they use the phrase fractional CMO or fractional marketing leader to describe the work that they do, part of their availability dedicated to each client.
Now, the definition of how the work gets done and what level of experience in what areas of business is as wide as the sea of fractional independent CMOs. So it’s very important when you consider a fractional CMO who’s independent, to understand how they structure their work.
How many clients are they working with at any given time? What is their ideal length of engagement? What is their background? How does that map up to what your business is doing in your growth? The benefit of working with an independent fractional CMO is that they’re usually the lowest cost option because they don’t have big operating costs like a larger business.
- Marketing agencies
Now, a second category of fractional CMOs that I’ve seen crop up is through agencies. Whether it’s a traditional communications and brand agency, advertising agency, digital agency, many agencies are now offering their services together with a dedicated fractional CMO. In most cases, this is a relabeling of the traditional role of account director or account manager or account strategist within an agency. The benefit of working with an agency with a dedicated fractional CMO is that you have the ideal of potentially a one stop shop from strategy through various areas of execution, depending on that agency’s capabilities. The risk there is that fractional CMO isn’t sitting on your side of the table, but is sitting on the agency side of the table and is likely incentivized to upsell their services or to find your solution in the fit of their services.
So just be cautious that an agency offering fractional CMO is going to be motivated to sell their services through that fractional CMO.
- Independent consultants operating under a unified brand or franchise model
A third category of fractional CMOs is much like the first in terms of independent agents, but operating under a unified brand or a franchise model, or a licensing model. In these cases, the benefit of working with a fractional CMO in a licensed, branded or franchised model is that the parent company has likely done some great vetting to ensure the quality of that leadership that they meet the criteria for truly being an executive. Also, there’s more opportunity for them to know and potentially collaborate with the peers in their network.
But for the most part, those fractional CMOs are truly operating independently, setting their own structure to the work, their own pricing to the work. There’s not as much necessarily consistency in how the work is approached.
- Fully committed, W2 employees serving clients across the US
And finally, another category of fractional CMO is where Authentic sits. We are a team of W2 employees who are fully committed to the work that we’re doing in the way that we’re doing it, and serving our clients. Our fractional CMOs who are across the United States, have joined Authentic because they are committed to helping small businesses overcome random acts of marketing, and they’re working only one, two or three client accounts at any given time.
In our model, our fractional CMOs do sit on your leadership team. They work part time with full accountability for all things marketing from strategy and tying that to the business strategy through every aspect of execution to be good stewards of your resources, your budget and your hiring decisions.
Our average engagement is 24 months, and we go really deep with our clients, not only through their dedicated fractional CMO, but through the work of our mindshare community that brings all of our cmos together on a weekly basis to share lessons learned, solve problems on behalf of our clients, and very interactively help move our client strategies further faster toward their north star.
Ready to find your right-fit CMO? Reach out to us today to get started!
