San Diego Fractional Marketing Agency

An audit of your current marketing assets starts with an audit of your customers. Marketing is all about communicating messages. To craft the right message, a San Diego fractional marketing agency needs to know who we are talking to, as well as who we want to be talking to. We make a distinction between your current customers and your ideal customers, developing user personas for your most lucrative relationships.

Every sale is the result of a journey. Smart brands move customers on a journey from discovery to exploration to the decision. Further on this will lead to brand advocacy. A San Diego fractional marketing agency can provide that birds-eye view of the customer journey. This allows your marketing department to be intentional about customer experiences and maximize the revenue potential and the impact of each user journey.

Once you have the view of the customer journey outlined, a San Diego fractional marketing agency can help optimize it. Marketing leadership is all about creating a vision and setting the standard by arming the marketing team with the tools they need to succeed. A CMO-for-hire can help the marketing team understand what the ideal customer experience looks like, so they have a clear vision of the end goal.

Personalization is the gold standard of the modern marketing landscape. We develop user personas for a reason—users and prospects want to feel like the message is personalized to them. It motivates a user to continue along the buyer’s journey. A San Diego fractional marketing agency can help you target your message to different user personas and customize each customer journey too.

Marketing is about building brand awareness, so a necessary first step is to bring coherence to the brand itself. The San Diego fractional marketing agency you hire will ask tough questions that you may find yourself answering for the first time—what is your brand vision? What does your brand stand for? Where do you expect your brand to be in five years? How about in ten years?

It’s a digital age, and every brand must have a digital strategy to remain competitive. Digital strategy is about more than just marketing—it includes custom software, social media, intellectual property, basically everywhere the brand intersects with the digital world. This allows digital content assets to grow and prosper. A San Diego fractional marketing agency can help your brand get its digital strategy under control.

Customers respond to content. Whether from web pages, emails, videos, podcasts, social media, and so on. It is how you communicate your brand’s message and enter the consciousness of your target users. It takes research and know-how to create a unified, impactful content strategy. Your San Diego fractional marketing agency can help you create a data-driven content strategy that serves your brand.

Marketing departments—and the brands they serve—tend to struggle when they operate on an ad-hoc, piecemeal basis. There needs to be a unified strategy, or the campaign goes nowhere. Messages get complicated and can undermine each other. Brands come to a San Diego marketing agency to bring cohesion to their marketing efforts—resulting in a marketing plan that will long outlast the fractional marketing officer’s time with the company.

Marketing is a multichannel enterprise and a result of teamwork. Without leadership, marketing teams will set sails in conflicting directions. One of the best pieces of the puzzle a San Diego fractional marketing agency can solve is a clear set of marketing objectives. Teams work better together when they have common, achievable goals to work for.

Another aspect of your marketing plan that can fail without leadership is your communication strategy—both externally with your brand’s message, and internally within the marketing team. Without solid communication, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. San Diego fractional marketing agencies set up clear communication channels so messages don’t get lost, effort doesn’t get wasted, and team members don’t work overtop each other.

The content strategy devised by your San Diego fractional marketing agency can’t be deployed at random. It must be implemented according to a calendar. Your fractional marketing leader can help create that calendar and direct your marketing team to the resources they need to fill said calendar with high-quality content. They can also establish systems of quality control and accountability for that calendar once it’s running.

Tools and processes make running a marketing campaign easier, but not all are created equally. The right tool for one organization may be completely wrong for another. Your San Diego fractional marketing organization can cut through the static and identify the right tools and processes for your needs. They can also provide guidance and leadership in the implementation of them.

Successful data-driven marketing campaigns identify key performance indicators (KPIs) to track their progress. A San Diego fractional marketing agency can help you identify the right KPIs to track and instruct the team in tracking them. Cost per lead acquisition is an important KPI for most organizations. How much does it cost you to bring in one prospect—one email address or phone number?

Cost per lead acquisition is an important KPI for most businesses to track, but customer lifetime value completes the picture. It counts the average revenue a single customer will generate throughout their relationship with the brand. Go beyond the first sale, and forecast every returning sale. Once you know your conversion rate, you can compare your cost per lead to customer lifetime value to identify profitable marketing campaigns.

Once you know how much it costs you to acquire a customer and how much revenue each customer generates, you can begin to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing expenditures. Once you understand how much bang for your buck your marketing efforts are getting, you can begin to optimize your campaigns to improve their efficiency and increase the ROI.

Many organizations choose to go beyond cost per lead and customer lifetime value—they want to know how many sales-qualified leads a campaign produces. A sales-qualified lead isn’t just a phone number or an email address. It’s the information of a lead who needs your brand’s solution and has the resources (i.e. money, time, and talent) to purchase and make maximal use of it. 

Marketing collateral is considered anything that benefits the sales team in a consistent way. It could include white papers, sales scripts, sales letters, and videos for lead funnels. It also includes ad copy and creatives for banner and social ads. Your San Diego fractional marketing agency can guide the marketing team to build an arsenal of marketing collateral that will stand strong for the long term.

Pricing products and services is a tricky business. Most organizations price their products according to what they need (or think they need). Not what the market needs. A critical piece in the leadership puzzle that a San Diego fractional marketing agency can provide is to conduct a detailed market pricing analysis. This includes an analysis of both customers and competitors to arrive at a singular pricing strategy.

Search engines are a core channel of brand discovery for nearly every organization. Every brand needs to consider its search engine strategy carefully. Search engine marketing (SEM) consists of paid search engine ads and can provide early positive results and testing grounds to build upon. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the more lucrative strategy long-term. Your CMO-for-hire can help build a sensible SEO/SEM strategy.

Your organization might have a website, but does that website convert traffic to leads? Without conversion, a website is little more than an online business card. A San Diego fractional marketing agency can help you arm your digital assets to convert. The point of digital marketing is to drive traffic to your digital properties and goes beyond the traditional format of physical advertising.

Leadership isn’t just about getting by from one objective to the next—it’s about the bigger picture. The big-picture perspective is what so many marketing departments lack. A San Diego fractional marketing agency is an affordable solution for even smaller organizations to get the C-suite leadership it needs to build a long-term vision. Count on brand development, brand awareness, and sustainable prosperity for the future of your company.

Marketing teams are just as susceptible to “siloing” as any other department—blocking themselves off from each other, focusing on their standalone tasks, and fighting for their piece of the overall vision. Leadership from a San Diego fractional marketing agency can break down the silos and encourage communication, cooperation, and collaboration toward the common goal.

You can’t improve what you can’t track. An early priority for a good San Diego fractional marketing agency is putting analytics tools in place to quantify the results of any marketing campaign. Most people associate analytics with digital marketing, and with the right tools, you can quantify the results of many traditional marketing channels. Your CMO-for-hire knows these tools intimately and can guide here.

San Diego fractional marketing agencies can provide smaller organizations the affordable marketing leadership they need. But what happens when the CMO-for-hire leaves at the end of the contract? One of the best benefits of a fractional CMO is mentorship and knowledge-sharing—arming the marketing team with the insights and instincts they need to sustain successful marketing campaigns for the long term.