If you’re like many B2B CEOs, you’ve grown your company on mainly sales-led initiatives with ad-hoc marketing for various campaigns or activities here and there.
Over the years, this ad-hoc marketing has become scattered and messy. You’ve engaged various different marketing agencies and contractors. One agency created your eBooks. Another agency set up your SEO. You brought in a freelancer to write those blog posts. And you’re not quite sure who set up those social media and AdWords campaigns… are they even still running?
At the same time, your sales and customer success teams have been filling in marketing gaps by creating their own sales, marketing, and training materials.
At best, your messaging is all over the place. At worst, it’s confusing, conflicting and works at cross purposes. And nothing is connected or working together.
B2B companies can continue on in this fashion for quite a while before reaching a high enough pain point to grab attention. And usually, when that happens, it’s because you’ve hit a revenue plateau and realize that more and more sales efforts are no longer working to move your revenue needle.
You realize you need marketing help – and then you realize your current marketing is a scattered disaster and impossible to figure out. We call this the Messy Marketing Moment. That moment you realize you can’t do this alone, you need help.
So what do you do? You don’t have a single point of contact for your marketing, you don’t know what’s working and not working, you don’t even know where everything is. There could be more marketing stuff out there you don’t even know about!
When you’ve reached that Messy Marketing Moment, this is not the time to assign an executive assistant or your graphic design person to “figure it out”. I will tell you flat out, they won’t be able to.
It’s also not the time to hire a junior marketing person and say – “Ok – unravel this mess – good luck!”. A junior marketing person needs structure, guidance and mentoring. Asking this person to fix a marketing mess is an unfair ask and simply sets them up to fail.
You need to bring in the big guns…
…You need someone who can meet you at your level as a CEO and really understand your business goals, and what’s been happening in your business up until now
…You need someone who can talk to your other leaders in sales, product and customer success to understand what they’ve been doing to support business goals
…You need someone who can see the overarching marketing strategy needed to achieve your business goals, along with the real world systems, content and activities to make it happen.
You need a senior marketing leader, someone who has been around the block. You need a Fractional CMO.
A Fractional CMO has the strategic mind and deep experience needed to understand where your business has been, where it’s heading, and what is needed now marketing-wise to get there. Then, they can audit all of the messy marketing that’s in place right now, and recognize why it’s there, if it’s working, and what needs to be fixed, changed, connected or discarded altogether.
Your Fractional CMO can clean up your messy marketing, and put a best practices system in place that makes sure everything you do is on brand, on message, integrated, and working together efficiently toward a common goal.
With your messy marketing cleaned up, you’ll say goodbye to confusing and conflicting messaging and have all of your marketing working together in an integrated, efficient system.
With a Fractional CMO in place, you’ll have a single point of contact for all of your marketing, and a support system for your sales, product and customer success teams. So if you’re stuck in a Messy Marketing Moment and aren’t sure what to do or which next step to take? Contact a Fractional CMO. You won’t regret it.
Is a Fractional CMO Right for You?
Fractional CMOs offer flexibility and expertise without the long-term commitment and expense of hiring a full-time CMO. You access high-level marketing guidance without the need for a permanent executive-level hire. Best of all, you get the instant senior marketing leadership you need, now.
To help you make important decisions around hiring and working with a Fractional CMO, we’ve created a comprehensive eBook: The B2B CEO’s Ultimate Guide to Hiring & Working With a Fractional CMO.
In this eBook, we walk you through the six most important questions B2B CEOs need to answer in order to build their first marketing team and choose the right marketing model for their stage of business:
You can download the eBook RIGHT HERE.
If you have any questions about this blog post or the eBook or would like to schedule a consultation, send an email or book a consultation time.
Nicole Croizier is the lead Fractional CMO at New Initiatives Marketing Inc. Take charge of your marketing success today with us as your Fractional CMO + Marketing Team. Since 2009, we’ve been supporting mid-size b2b businesses worldwide through effective implementation and execution of marketing strategy. Not ready? Sign up and learn from our monthly newsletter.