What is a Fractional CMO & the Benefits They Offer (2024)

A fractional CMO or Chief Marketing Officer is a part-time, outsourced position which fulfills the role of a marketing executive for businesses without committing to the cost of a full-time, in-house role.

When your business is experiencing rapid growth, sometimes your needs don’t scale uniformly. You may find that you need specialized marketing and business strategy services that can help you continue to move forward, but that you aren’t ready for multi-six-figure commitments. While traditionally businesses have either had to choose between options that were less than ideal, our CMOx model offers choices that are a perfect, customized fit. We’d like to introduce you to the Fractional CMO and what someone in this role can do for your brand.

If you’re interested in becoming a fractional CMO, the CMOx Accelerator is the program to start in growing your career as a part-time marketing executive.

A fractional CMO is a part-time marketing leader or head of marketing responsible for leading marketing teams and providing strategic marketing guidance. These executives fulfill a company’s need for a chief marketing officer without the commitment of a full-time position to achieve established goals and growth.

The path to becoming a Fractional CMOis different for each individual but will involve years of experience in leadingcustom marketing strategies and marketing teams.

In the usual course of events, when companies grow enough to need services a Chief Marketing Officer provides but are still not at the level where they can hire someone senior and experienced, they go one of two ways. In one scenario, they hand CMO tasks to a more junior person from within their organization.

This is someone who is an experienced marketing professional with an extensive background. However, they lack the executive background, which is the other part of the CMO’s job. This person starts out handling tasks like posting to social media, writing blog posts and others. But, over time, they get overwhelmed. If they are tasked with creating strategy for the business, they may be over their heads. Not everyone can handle content strategy effectively. Sometimes you find a diamond in the rough who just needed an opportunity, but those people are rare. Maybe one in 100 effective marketers has the skill to move on to these important executive positions.

The other path is to take the leap and hire a CMO, either from a competitor or from someone in a similar industry. This can wind up putting a significant drain on a growing company’s funds. When a company is bringing in revenue of around $750,000 per year, tying up a third of that in one salary can be crippling. It can be very hard to make that investment worthwhile.

A Fractional Chief Marketing Officer is someone who performs the function of a CMO without forcing your company to commit to a full-time person in that role. Think of it as CMO as a service. Many organizations already recognize the value of outsourcing other C-Suite functions, such as the CFO. They may not need the services of a Chief Financial Officer full-time. Instead, they need someone to come in and perform this function for a few hours a week. They bring in someone who has the top-level experience that they need, but who doesn’t tether them to the cost of having someone like that as permanent staff. This is all why hiring a fractional CMO works for those businesses during that growth period.

By working with a fractional CFO, the business can get the benefit of a CFO’s guidance and skills without having to have one on staff full-time. A Fractional CMO can be the right fit for a number of organizations. They’ll help an organization maintain a lean structure and cut down on wasteful spending at a time when every dollar counts.

A fractional CMO is a marketing expert who performs the same general tasks as a full-time chief marketing officer but in a part-time capacity. This means they lead marketing operations and oversee implementation and tracking for the businesses that hire them.

Typically, a CMO has their tracks, has their head on the budget, they hire marketing talent to deploy campaigns, they occasionally act as a conduit or bridge between the product team and marketing department as well as look for ways to create strategic relationships to drive more eyeballs to the website and more leads to the sales team.

A fractional chief marketing officer differs in their capacity. While many tout being a fractional CMO and are instead just a glorified funnel builder, a truefractional CMObuilds a strategic plan and identifies the right talent to do the job at the right time.

Fractional CMOs must understand the appeal and the profitability of different products and services. They must understand the entire sales sequence and how sales happen. Furthermore, part-time CMOs must be conversion-rate focused; they must be able to focus minutely on the conversion rates and business objectives, as well as on the macro problems faceing any marketing function including positioning authority.

A company should hire a fractional CMO when it either cannot afford a full-time CMO or run the marketing campaigns that the CMO identifies, or simply do not need a CMO due to the relative simplicity of the marketing efforts of the business. It is not necessary for many businesses to have a CMO. Instead, smaller businesses under $1,000,000 would do well to have an advertising technician support them on creating a campaign to get them to the $1,000,000 mark. Companies between $1-50,000,000 a year depending on their profitability would do well tohire a fractional CMO. They are at a critical growth phase and typically need the strategy and marketing leadership experience that only an experienced CMO could bring; however, these companies are typically unable to afford a full-time investment.

There are a number of signs a business can benefit from hiring a fractional CMO. Recognizing these signs may mean your business needs to expand and add a part-time CMO for further growth.