Why every SME needs (and can afford) a CMO aka a Chief Marketing Officer

What do you think of when you hear the acronym CMO (Chief Marketing Officer)?

Expensive?

Unnecessary?

Only reserved for multi-million-pound companies?

All these stereotypes are what I want to break as I rebrand to one.

Why? Because the most unserved market for a CMO is the company size that people assume can’t afford it which is the SME’s (classified in the UK as having under 250 employees).

I would go ask far to say who have less than 3 in-house marketing staff doing the day-to-day activities.

Four reasons why SME’s need a CMO is because:

1. CEO’s previously hired task takers/doers- not strategic decisions makers. Typical hires include Social Media Managers and Marketing Assistants. They now need someone to be a leader and strategic while the staff is held accountable.
2. Companies who are past the startup stage and entering the growth stage which means they getting out of the red for the first time. Therefore marketing is more of a focus to drive revenue into the black.
3. A need for structure and sustainability for in-house marketing efforts. Companies at the start were happy to scrappy and outsource tasks to agencies and consultants to gain traction but now they need standardised methods in-house to control growth.
4. Trying new marketing methods for the first time and managing new relationships such as paid ad agencies and PR. This becomes a lot to manage and no one has the skillset to understand what is truly effective.

Whilst traditional CMO's are easily ï¿¡200k+ a year on a salary excluding benefits which is unaffordable for many companies at the SME level, an alternative is what is called a Fractional CMO (FCMO).

FCMO’s are part-time, temp and even virtual CMO’s who are paid like an external consultant but are invested like a full-time employee.?Virtual CFO's have been doing this for years. Their engagement tends to last from 3 to 24 months.

They differ from normal consultants because only FCMO's provide high-level leadership for and collaboration with the marketing team. They are a visible and accountable leader that your team can look to for direction. Marketing consultants and agencies can’t and don't have the insight to fix internal issues that prevent their strategy from being effective and they shouldn't. FCMO's are a part of the team, have an inside view of sales, marketing, financial, and executive teams to empower them to help fix the four issues that were aforementioned which are unique to SME's.

FCMO's have two main objectives:

1. To create and imprint a concise and effective marketing strategy that is in line with what the CEO’s goals are
2. To build out and mentor the rising stars of the marketing team through hiring, training, and accountability

Because they are temporary, the aim is to leave the company better than how the CMO found them. It is within their best interest to leave as much knowledge as possible as opposed to being relied in the long term.

The reality of many service-based SME’s which causes ineffective marketing are:

1. The founder usually started the company off their own skillset, decided to run a business of it, and got their first few clients from referrals or their network. Now that they have a bigger team, the sales need to come thicker and faster as the initial referrals have been met and the wider public isn’t acquainted with them to sell to yet.
2. There are more questions being asked to the marketing team on their activities and results achieved. They can't give clear answers because they weren’t trained or hired to do anything more than to complete tasks.
3. The CEO decided long ago they that aren’t a marketer and don’t want to manage it. They just do it for now because no one else is. They are usually delivering the service, managing sales or striving to be a true CEO.
4. There is a hodgepodge of different marketing activities going to see what sticks which sometimes ticks along on the surface but no one can explain or analyse or question it.
5. Despite having sales, the CEO wants to focus on digital/organic marketing to drive up revenue without driving down profit from agencies/ad spend/external consultants. They have been doing social media intermittently and don’t know where to go next.

A good FCMO will be able to solve all these inefficiencies and more.

Now that I explained what a FCMO is and how they can serve SME’s, has your connotation of one changed?