Traits to Look for in a Fractional CMO
This article was published on October 25, 2024
Categorized in: Digital Marketing
So, you’ve decided your marketing department needed some assistance. You realized the solution to your issues, needing someone to run your marketing efforts, is to hire a Fractional CMO. Well, finding a good one that will meet all your needs is an art. You need your Fractional CMO to have certain traits. Some of these are generic, others of them should align with your business. Here’s some advice on what to look for:
Business Experience
It goes without saying that the Fractional CMO that you hire needs to have marketing experience – and a lot of it. He or she needs to be an industry professional, and have proven themselves from a marketing perspective. Yet, this isn’t quite enough. They also need to have experience in business.
The reason for this is that Fractional CMO’s need to have a big picture understanding of the business itself and the overall business goals. After all, marketing’s function is to support the business itself. Someone with business experience will understand how to connect marketing to the big picture, and that’s a perfect trait for a Fractional CMO.
Strategic Thinker
Again, having extensive marketing experience isn’t quite enough. A great Fractional CMO also needs to be a proven and effective strategic thinker. This should be the chief function of a Fractional CMO. The purpose is for them to take the business goals and figure out how marketing can help the business achieve these goals.
In order to develop an effective marketing plan and process, strategic thinking is one of the most important skills. Having extensive experience in marketing doesn’t develop this. However, those with a lot of experience do tend to be natural strategic thinkers.
Master Implementer
Believe it or not, some Fractional CMO’s don’t have a lot of experience actually implementing a strategic plan. So, when searching for one, you need someone who is basically the whole package. You need someone with marketing experience, business experience, strategic thinking, and of course, implementing all parts of the digital marketing.
Sure, the Fractional CMO won’t be implementing the strategy they create for you. However, how can they know how to implement if they don’t have experience? It is a lot easier to delegate and determine how the work needs to be done when that is part of their background and experience.
Extensive Skills
A Fractional CMO needs to be well-versed in all phases of digital marketing, as well. That’s because there’s no one-size-fits-all marketing plan. Sure, most businesses use some combination of all or most of the elements, such as content marketing, social media, and SEO. However, if you hire a Fractional CMO where most of their early-career experience involved SEO, then how can you know that they will handle the rest of it for you?
As you can see, there are different things to look for when hiring a Fractional CMO. Ultimately, you need to find one with the skills that most closely match your own company’s goals. You want to hire the one who will do the best job. Having these essential skills is a good start.
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About the Author: Brick Marketing President, Nick Stamoulis
Nick Stamoulis is a digital marketing expert and President of Brick Marketing. With 25+ years experience, he specializes in solving complex digital marketing challenges through SEO, content marketing, social media, PPC, email marketing, SEO for AI (GEO) and conversion optimization.
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