For the lion’s share of small- to medium-sized businesses (SMB), affording a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) isn’t feasible. Marketing leadership aside, most SMBs know all too well the difficulty in shelling out money on marketing efforts alone—especially when their marketing needs change ad hoc based on new projects.
Fractional marketing provides a solution for SMBs who want to hone the expertise that CMOs—or other marketing professionals—offer while staying within budget. In a nutshell, fractional marketing refers to the outsourcing of marketing material when companies need to tap into expertise they don’t currently have in-house.
At Broad Street, our differentiation lies in the 20+ years of global marketing experience we each boast that can be tapped into for the full price of a single employee. In working with us, companies gain extensive experience in building world class organizations without outstripping their budget.
Read on to see three reasons why fractional marketing at large can be an asset to your SMB.
1. Network Access and Collective Talent
When companies work with a fractional CMO, for example, we lean on more than just our years of experience: we offer an extensive network of subcontractors, in-house contacts, and other marketing professionals that can tackle everything from on-the-fly market development to content ideation and creation.
As a rule of thumb, three or four brains will always be more valuable than one alone. Oftentimes, many SMBs have only one employee dedicated solely to marketing. As the complex world of digital marketing continues to rapidly evolve, calling in multiple opinions and multiple channels of expertise is the most effective way to yield highly effective results.
2. Increased quality of work
Effective marketing backed by experience can mean the difference between ROIs met, customers acquisition, and increased revenue. It doesn’t always make sense for SMBs to solely manage their marketing efforts themselves—especially if their marketing efforts have become a collective effort across the company that’s become reliant on guesswork.
Add to that, marketing’s rapidly changing nature makes it difficult to replicate what worked yesterday tomorrow. Between search engine results pages (SERPs), keyword ranking and usage, paid and organic traffic, there are a bevy of marketing collateral companies need to stay on top of in order to stay ahead.
Fractional marketing is a fool-proof way for companies to ensure and maintain high-quality, results-driven work, since it draws on professionals who have proven their worth in the space (in our case) decades prior.
3. Increased In-House Retention
It’s no secret that employees working in SMBs wear multiple hats. As cost effective as it is for SMBs to fill parts of a role across multiple employees, in doing so, work can lose its value—and employees can quickly burn out.
As the market inevitably shifts and audiences become more difficult to reach and retain, it can become too unwieldy for one marketing individual or a small team of marketers to keep effective, engaging, informative content on the line.
As a result, in-house marketers can lose out on opportunities to execute marketing initiatives—especially if they don’t have the luxury to devote their day-to-day entirely to marketing efforts.
For those reasons, it’s essential that SMBs utilize experts with experience and backing to realize long-term success. CMOs especially tout decades of experience under their belts and can step in to prevent missed or poorly executed opportunities.
In offering marketing help as needed, fractional marketing will fuel in-house marketing teams by revitalizing their quality of work, marketing opportunities, and morale.
Here’s How to Know if Your Business Could Benefit from Fractional Marketing
It’s simple: if you don’t have a full-time marketing team, if you're relying on hunches alone, if you’re unhappy with your marketing ROI, or if you have a specific marketing strategy you don’t have the means to execute in-house, it's simply good business to outsource your efforts.
Fractional marketers’ experience can save your company time and money by advising you on where to allocate your resources or by stepping in themselves. Best of all, fractional marketing takes away the pressure of hiring a full-time marketing executive or building out a marketing team, which is especially important if your marketing needs aren’t full-time.