ACCELERATING LEAD GENERATION AFFORDABLY: 

Your ability to scale growth is only as good as your ability to generate qualified leads. Yet executing marketing campaigns that fill the sales funnel is increasingly hard to achieve and expensive. Unless you can tap years of proven expertise and outcomes without the high cost of a full-time in-house marketing team. This is why hiring a fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to lay the foundation for lead generation for your company makes sense.

An experienced, fractional CMO brings years of knowledge about what works and what does not for engaging and converting prospects and can quickly craft winning marketing strategies specific to your brand. They can also set up technology and processes for executing with optimum efficiency. The right partner can also help you better compete with larger brands by giving you the same expertise at much lower cost.

What is a Fractional CMO and What Can You Expect?

Marketing is much more than AI and social media. It is about knowing how to build messaging, experiences, content, incentives, promotions and relationships around the psychology of choice and consumer behavior, and lead prospects on journeys from introduction to lifetime value.

An MProve Sales fractional CMO brings in-depth experience and deliverables as a part-time member of your team. They customize strategies, messaging, websites, creative assets, CRM systems, email lists, automated marketing, touchpoint journeys, and other elements of lead generation programs for your brand and train your staff on maintaining all elements for sustainable results.

Here’s just a glimpse of what a fractional CMO can deliver:

  • Audit of existing brand assets for relevance, actionability, and impact
  • Market research initiatives to learn more about current attitudes toward industry, brands.
  • Market and competitor analysis to identify opportunities and threats.
  • Strategies for branding, positioning, messaging, and channel management
  • Go-to-Market, acquisition, retention and loyalty campaigns.
  • Ongoing updates of website, email, social, content marketing programs
  • Thought leadership campaigns.
  • Customer experience and journey maps
  • Playbooks for internal team guidance
  • Account-based marketing (ABM) actions for sales support.
  • Plans for tradeshows, customer events and more
  • Budget recommendations for media spend, production, events and more.

 Key Responsibilities of a Fractional CMO

Beyond messaging and engagement strategies, a fractional CMO can set up critical systems for your team to maintain, including:

  • CRM platforms such as HubSpot, Constant Contact, Sales Force for personalized emails
  • SEO tactics like website tags, backlinks, keyword management
  • Digital ads across Google, LinkedIn Meta channels, Tik Tok and other platforms
  • AI systems for easy and quick development of creative assets
  • Automated marketing campaigns for triggered communications
  • Metrics and analytics to determine which messages, offers, and channels drive the highest lead generation and ROI.

Hiring a CMO:  In-House vs. Outsourced

Some things to consider when choosing between a full-time or contract CMO include:

Full-Time CMO:

Pros:

  • A fully dedicated team member focused solely on just your brand.
  • Oversees and manages budget for in-house and outsourced efforts.
  • Regular member of executive team with expanded responsibilities and functions.

Cons:

  • Expensive overhead with salary, benefits and bonuses.
  • Cater to company culture more than objective recommendations.
  • Myopic view of marketing if focused on one industry for career.

Fractional, Outsourced CMO

Pros:

  • Brings best practices and innovative ideas from other industries and businesses.
  • Acute understanding of what works and what does not for qualified lead generation.
  • Ability to contribute quickly to setting up proven systems and campaigns.

Cons:

  • Temporary engagement.
  • Less integration into company culture and execution decisions.
  • Continuation of projects will need to be transferred to internal staff at end of engagement.

Fractional CMOs are ideal when…

  • Starting a new company that needs a solid marketing foundation upon which to build.
  • Internal staff is limited in experience and skillsets.
  • Marketing expenditures fail to produce qualified leads for sales to convert, and a positive return for dollars spent.

 Traits of an Effective Fractional CMO

  • Ability to Influence Behavior: Understands human behavior and how to build campaigns around the psychology of choice which is proven to boost results by triple digits.
  • Current: Proficient across current technologies, e.g., AI, SEO/SEM, CRM, PPC, Google Ads, LinkedIn and Meta advertising, retargeting and other digital platforms.
  • Data Driven: Makes strategic and media decisions around data vs. assumptions, and crafts learning plans to identify champions to optimize future efforts.
  • Skilled in Content Marketing: Understands what kind of content will engage, position brand as partner vs. a vendor, and set up conversations with sales.
  • Instructional Capabilities: Trains tactical marketers like web managers, graphic designers, event planners, content producers to further messaging and brand strategy, and in methodology that will enable them to maintain results and ROI.
  • Focused on Metrics: Sets up meaningful metrics, analyzes data and build strategies and campaigns that optimize resources.
  • Growth Oriented: Record for growing qualified leads for startups to established brands across industries, showing an ability to drive results for various products and services.
  • Track record for customer experience: Nurtures leads along touchpoint journeys via meaningful experiences, moving them to conversations, proposals and conversions.
  • Diverse communications capabilities: Executes public relations, thought leadership, internal and crisis communications, content writing, presentations.

 Reasons to Hire an Mprove Sales Fractional CMO

MProve CMO experts build strategies around behavioral psychology, consumers’ decision criteria and processes, and emotional needs which deliver substantially more qualified leads for sales to nurture. Understanding what these are and how to execute in ways that generate desired consumer behavior takes years to master and is far more complex than crafting clever creative.

Additional reasons to hire a fractional CMO with MProve Sales include:

  • Proven expertise –Years of experience around what impacts lead gen and sales which most mid-level marketers have yet to develop.
  • Costs – Time-specific engagements are far less expensive than paying salary, benefits and payroll tax for dedicated staff.
  • Commitment – You decide the length of engagement with a contract CMO vs. commit to a permanent hire who is still to be proven.
  • Customized recommendations specific to your brand, budget, resources, and goals.

Signs You Need to Hire a Fractional CMO

  • Current marketing is “spray and pray” with no branding, messaging or engagement strategy in place.
  • Most marketing is spent on a single channel such as social media with no increase in lead generation or ROI.
  • Marketing success is evaluated by impressions to posts, likes and shares.
  • Your marketing looks and reads like competitors with no distinction for your brand.
  • You have no metrics and have no idea what your ROI is per channel or spend.
  • MQLs do not consistently materialize into SQLs or move into closing patterns.
  • All your efforts and spend are based upon impulsive decisions not a long-term sustainable plan built around market forecasts.
  • Current resources are not skilled in developing and executing relationship marketing.
  • You have an agency that produces the same material, creative and results continuously with no renewed innovation, impact on response and lead generation.

Hiring a Fractional CMO provides affordability and flexibility. If your business changes, you are not obligated to continue past a current engagement, giving you a chance to set up successful marketing programs and returns without committing to permanent staff or long-term agency contracts.

In short, experience matters for creating and executing marketing that drives response, qualified leads, and grows businesses. Inexperienced marketers tend to measure results by web traffic, impressions and likes from digital ads or social posts, none of which deliver actual leads you can nurture to conversion. Marketing that produces qualified leads that can be nurtured into Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) is rooted in strategy and years of experience generating results.