Who is creating and driving the marketing strategy for your business? Whether you’re launching a small startup, or looking to scale, you should start thinking about engaging the expertise of a Virtual CMO.
Why hire a Virtual CMO?
When starting a business, most founders focus their attention on developing their core product or service and acquiring new customers. While sales is absolutely a top priority at this stage, marketing is often on the back burner, and that’s normal.
A lot of businesses see early success and growth with a sales-focused model. eventually, the ability to grow to the next level becomes increasingly difficult without the support of a strategic, fully executed marketing plan.
Do these questions sound familiar?
“We think we’re doing some things well, but how do we know for sure?”
“We’re investing a lot of money in getting more leads. Are we getting the right quality and value in return?”
“How can we find the time to prioritize and dive deep into marketing?”
If they do, it may be time to hire a CMO
What is a Virtual CMO?
Your virtual CMO is a 100% cloud-based member of your management team who brings together the talent, processes, and technology to help you achieve your revenue goals.
Your savvy CMO should effectively build and implement your marketing plan that outlines roles, responsibilities, budgets, resources, timelines, tactics, and measurable outcomes.
Outsourcing Your Marketing to a Virtual CMO
A virtual CMO becomes a part-time addition to your management staff, bringing a market-based perspective to develop a comprehensive marketing strategy and manage its implementation. Think of it as an “executive-as-a-service.” One way to think about the value of a CMO is that you are “renting” precisely the type of CMO your company needs.
Key Benefits of Outsourcing:
Speed – Recruiting is a slow process and is often limited by the candidates available in your specific geography. Why recruit a CMO when you can “rent” one quickly? No hiring delays, headhunters, interviews, or relocations.
Convenience – Being able to select from a broader range of candidates means you can find an outsourced CMO who closely matches your company’s specific needs and values.
Cost-Savings – Hiring an outsourced CMO costs 30% – 50% less than a full-time hire. No recruiting, relocation, or benefits costs. The savings add up, and a fixed-rate contract means you know what your expenses will be.
Up-To-Date – A significant benefit of hiring an outsourced CMO is that they have experience from multiple engagements and stay current with the latest technologies and trends.
Connected – It’s not always feasible to have a large marketing team. Having a well-connected leader who has access to other consultants, vendors, and suppliers means they’ll be able to quickly execute your marketing plan without the need for additional hiring.
What Are the Responsibilities of a Virtual CMO?
What are the functions that a marketing organization needs? These don’t necessarily map onto individual hires, and not every marketing team has every capacity, particularly early on. But as companies mature, they often hire dedicated resources focused on many of these areas:
Content – Content marketing is a strategic approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent information to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Content is a critical component of an inbound marketing strategy.
Brand Awareness and Positioning – Brand awareness is the level of consumer consciousness of a company. It measures a potential customer’s ability not only to recognize a brand image but also to associate it with a specific company’s products or services. Brand awareness is achieved through inbound and outbound marketing efforts. When there is a significant competition in an industry, brand awareness can be one of the business’s greatest assets.
Marketing Communications (MarCom) – Marketing communications refer to the tactics adopted by a company to convey messages about its products and services, either directly or indirectly, to persuade customers to purchase. In other words, the different mediums that the company adopts to exchange information about their goods and services to the customers.
Events – These can be either live, in-person events such as trade shows, conferences, seminars, etc. or virtual events like webinars. While these tend to be expensive, they also provide unique opportunities to meet customers and prospects face-to-face and build relationships.
Lead Generation – Helps a company grow by the direct acquisition of actual and potential customers. Lead generation involves multiple channels, including paid search engine marketing (SEM), organic through search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and advertising. For many companies, this usually represents a significant part of their marketing budget spend.
Customer Engagement – Focuses on getting engagement and potentially additional sales and referrals from existing customers. Tactics include email, newsletters, promotions, direct mail, etc. to maintain contact and incentivize customers to purchase additional products and services.
Business Development – Strategic partnerships can be an essential tool in scaling your business. Working to partner with other companies to create win-win relationships can expand your reach and give your company access to new pools of potential customers.
Analytics and Metrics – You can’t successfully implement a successful marketing strategy without knowing what you need to measure and how you’re going to measure it. Analytics and tracking metrics are critical to monitor the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and strategies. Being able to optimize your marketing programs through data analysis is a significant cost-saving measure to be implemented.
How Your Virtual CMO Can Help You
Understand Your Vision
Have a big vision for growth? A Virtual CMO will explore how you’ll get from here to there, and what steps are necessary to grow your business. There are no cookie-cutter plans. Each business is unique and a comprehensive strategy only works with a detailed understanding of where you want your business to go.
Create a Strategic Plan
With market-based insights, an effective marketing strategy can be crafted and executed efficiently. A Virtual CMO will collaborate with you and your team to determine areas of opportunity and how to build out a plan to capitalize on market potential. A Virtual CMO brings the best ideas, within or outside your industry, to deliver results. This executive-as-a-service model lets you engage the best marketing minds in a cost-effective manner. Time is money and a Virtual CMO gets your strategy underway quickly.
Execute, Measure, and Optimize
A strategy is only as good as the results it produces. To that end, being able to use the right tools to execute tactics, measure results, and analyze outcomes is critical to an effective marking plan. A Virtual CMO knows the tools, metrics, and resources needed to help your company get the best ROI for its marketing investments.
What Should Be in Your CMO’s Tool Kit
□ Superb analytical skills
□ Demonstrated ability to lead and inspire a team
□ Outstanding communication and interpersonal skills
□ Flexibility
□ Passionate customer advocacy
□ Thorough knowledge of marketing principles, brand, product and service management
□ Deep understanding of changing market dynamics
□ Entrepreneurial spirit
10 Questions You Should Ask CMO Candidate
1. Describe the most successful marketing campaign you have ever worked on. What made it so successful?
2. What are the biggest challenges when launching a new marketing initiative? How can they be resolved?
3. How do you ensure that you are getting the most from your team?
4. What do you think is the most exciting marketing trend at the moment? How can we use it to increase brand awareness?
5. Which companies or brands do you look to for marketing inspiration?
6. What do you consider the biggest challenges for a CMO these days? How do you work with your executive team to get the most out of the marketing function?
7. Knowing what you know so far about our company, what strategies and tactics would you put in place to help drive revenue?
8. What pricing frameworks do you prefer to use?
9. Describe a situation where teams you managed struggled to collaborate. How did you handle the situation?
10. How will you communicate marketing progress?
Hire a Virtual CMO Today
Outsourcing a Virtual CMO now can provide the flexibility for businesses to engage an experienced resource for the required time and budget the company can afford today.
Don’t wait 6 weeks to recruit a perfect stranger.
Engage a marketing powerhouse to lead your strategy and fast track your growth. At My Cloud Crew, we have highly qualified virtual CMOs already employed by us and are available for lease. Get in touch today to schedule an interview.
