When is a company ready for a Fractional CMO or Marketing Advisor?
No matter what stage of business, it’s so important to have the right marketing strategy — so how do you know it’s the best time to bring in an expert to develop a strategy or lead your company’s marketing efforts?
When are you too small for a chief marketing officer? Is your business ready for a full-time executive, Fractional CMO or Marketing Advisor?
I spoke with Casey Stanton who shared some great examples and answered these exact questions.
When should a company organization actually bring on fractional CMO? When are you too small for a fractional CMO?
“There's a lot of cost in having a bad marketing strategy or spending your team's time on the wrong effort. Having a marketing strategy that is right — for your business, with the capabilities that you have, with the cash that you have available with the mailing list that you have.
When I look at all the stack of marketing campaigns that are half complete in the department, what's the right campaign to utilize those, right? You want to have that right strategy. I think that it's really important, kind of at all stages of the business, frankly, startups that are, pre-funded like that's difficult, right? Like they don't have the money to pay for an expert. They're going to struggle to get the right marketing strategy. I believe they should invest in it because we've all seen incredible products that are just in the dump. It just went down to the dump because the inventor couldn't sell it. We've seen mediocre products be very successful because they're sold well. It's rarely about the innovation of the product and more about the ability to get people to buy it.
Example: Dorco raisers. The whole idea of like razors are so expensive to shape with, you're going to spend $9 a cartridge. Dorco for years has been producing effectively like wholesale, very inexpensively. You can search up Dorco razors and you can buy like a year's supply for like $20. Dollar Shave Club took Dorco raisers, packaged them up into a novel way for someone to receive it, which was a $7 a month package to get 4 razors. They marketed that and they became a unicorn and they sold to Unilever for over a billion dollars. They didn't innovate a product. They innovated the way that the person received the product. It's still Dorco razors. They never even private-labelled them. They never even changed the colour of the aloe strip on them. It's the same reason that I can go to Darko and buy a lifetime supply for $50 or I can go to Dollar Shave Club and buy it a month at a time.
The organization doesn't need product innovation as much as they need customers. The question is, how do you get customers? What's your customer plan? I think all stages of businesses need to have a go-to marketing strategy. Also the younger the company, the less revenue that they have, the more they have to focus on one route. Every time we add an additional traffic source or an additional offer, we multiply the time it takes to get to success by two.
If you say, I'm going to go Facebook to this campaign, to this landing page, to this checkout process, with this upsell, if that's your process — and then you say we're going to Facebook, but we're also going to do YouTube ads. it's going to take you twice as long to get this success to the same amount of success. Focusing on less and mastering is really important. I think of Airbnb, their hack, they tried a bunch of stuff, but the thing that worked for Airbnb was we're going to take our listings and we're going to post them on Craigslist. They did that all the Craigslist all across the country, and they became successful because they had that one strategy. So what's your growth hack? If you can figure that out and run it for a while. You want simplicity there.
If you can't figure it out, you gotta hire someone to help you — and hiring a fractional CMO to come in for a half-day consult can give you the biggest bang for the buck. Taking someone like Daniel, and bringing him in as an advisor to support you longer-term, where you're meeting with the team and coaching the team, could be really helpful. If the company doesn't have the budget for a marketing leader, a marketing strategy or a marketing team, they probably can't have a very good marketing department, right? If they don't have the money for it, they just can't have it. They have to be honest with themselves.
Oftentimes there's this feature versus satisfaction curve that exists in product. The more features that something has, you get to a breaking point where that bell curve starts to dip and that dip comes down and says: the more features, the more I'm overloaded, the less likely I am to be happy with the product. Many incredible product developers are overbuilding their product, when they really need to sell. If you're reading this and you're an organization that's overbuilt your product or service, slow it down and just sell everything you got because it works. You don't need a new feature. You don't need a new page. You don't need a new calculator technique — you need more customers.
The young company needs a marketing strategy. The mid-stage company call it 10 to 50 million needs a marketing strategy. Does the senior company, it's just the problem changes over time from needing a strategy and needing maybe one or two vendors to execute it. A marketing leader to oversee it to a bigger in-house team, to a much bigger in-house team.”
The above was stated by Casey Stanton in an interview with Daniel here.
