Chicago Fractional Marketing Agency

Every  marketing effort communicates a message. In order to successfully target a message to the desired listener, you have to know who you’re talking to. Selling to everyone is selling to no one, so it pays to get specific. A Chicago fractional marketing Service will help you identify your ideal customer, develop user personas around that customer, and begin to design a message that will resonate with them specifically. 

Sales are like stories—they have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning might be a prospect discovering the brand; the middle is their consideration of a purchase and perhaps comparison shopping; and the end is their decision to buy or not to buy. What does the journey from step to step look like? How much control do you have over the phases of that journey? 

Once we understand the customer experience as a journey from discovery to purchase, we can start to seize control of that journey and write the story. An ideal customer journey makes the user’s decisions for them by making them easy, even to the point of eliminating the need for comparison shopping. Your Chicago fractional marketing Service can help you develop this 10,000-foot view of the ideal customer experience.

In the first step of the audit, a Chicago fractional marketing Service helped you understand your customer. Understanding your customer opens the door to the power of personalization and targeting. Customers respond best to messages that seem tailored specifically to them. Meanwhile, knowing who you are looking for means you can target those personalized messages directly to them, saving money and increasing efficiency.

Chicago fractional marketing Services help marketing departments see the “big picture.” For most organizations, it doesn’t get more “big picture” than the brand itself. Your brand is what comes to mind when potential prospects think of you, and yet many organizations have put little thought into brand strategy. A fractional marketing leader can help you hone a brand mission, brand purpose, and vision for your brand’s future.

Few strategies have a bigger impact on the long-term success of a brand as its digital strategy. Harnessing the power of digital experiences is one of the highest-leverage activities a brand can undertake. From digital marketing to online sales, backend software to analytics, the digital world is inexpensive to access and easy to quantify. A Chicago fractional marketing Service can help bring coherence and efficiency to a brand’s digital ecosystem.

From digital to traditional, all marketing strategies are built on content. With bad content, even the best message will fail to land with your precisely defined and targeted audience. But content development is one activity that few organizations have the time and in-house talent to execute. A Chicago fractional marketing Service can put in place the tools and resources you need to build a sustainable, high-quality content strategy.

Some organizations have marketing teams in place, but many are in dire need of a plan. They may have disjointed or half-finished campaigns competing for attention and resources, with no established key performance indicators, little idea of what success even looks like (other than “more sales.”) A Chicago fractional marketing Service can help bring much-needed coherence, unity, and strategy to your marketing plans.  

It’s not enough to target “more traffic” or “more revenue.” These are moving targets and hard to build a strategy around. Your Chicago fractional marketing Service can help your team get specific. What does success look like? What are the benchmarks that indicate success, and which indicate a need to change course? Pinning down these goalposts helps your marketing team pull their oars in the same direction. 

If any department—marketing or otherwise—is underperforming, don’t start by second-guessing the strategy. Check the communication first. Many great strategies get undermined by poor intra-team communication. One of the biggest benefits a Chicago fractional marketing Service can bring to the table is to streamline communication between team members so everyone is on the same page and working toward the same purpose.

A great content strategy is not one-and-done—it’s a long-term, ongoing process, one that helps keep your digital experience fresh and make sure that the right message reaches the right prospect at the right time. Your Chicago fractional marketing Service can help you bring order and strategy to your content strategy, with a coherent calendar that your marketing team can follow long after the fractional contract is over.

Even the right strategy can fail if the marketing team tries to implement it using the wrong tools and processes. Some tools don’t do enough, while others offer too many functions and ultimately slow you down with redundancy. Meanwhile, a streamlined or automated process can be the difference between success and failure, profitable and unprofitable. Your Chicago fractional marketing Service can match the right tools and processes to your needs.

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that tell you whether or not your strategies are working, even before the increased revenue manifests. Cost per lead acquisition is one of the top KPIs most organizations need to look at. How much money did you spend on marketing, and how many new leads (contact info of an interested prospect) did that marketing expenditure generate?

Once you know the cost per lead acquisition, the next thing you need to know is the lifetime value of each converted customer. This isn’t just the size of the first sale, but every sale thereafter until the customer relationship “ends.” Knowing the value your average customer delivers over a lifetime can help you determine how much you can afford to spend on acquiring leads and sales. 

How do you calculate the return on your online marketing investment? Your cost per lead acquisition, conversion rate, and customer lifetime value can tell you exactly that. Divide your cost per lead by your conversion rate to discover your cost per sale. Then compare that cost per sale to your customer lifetime value to see if each customer generates more value than it costs to acquire them. 

For some organizations, the cost of lead acquisition doesn’t tell them everything they need to know. They have to understand which marketing efforts are producing sales qualified leads and how efficiently they are producing them. A sales qualified lead isn’t just contact information—it’s contact information of a person who has the interest and the ability to make a purchase, both from a standpoint of motivation and finance.

One of the most important tools a marketing team can provide the sales team is marketing collateral, content that helps the sales team make sales. This could include sales letters, sales videos, copy for fliers and online ads, phone sales scripts, etc. Whereas content marketing involves building brand authority and brand trust over time, marketing collateral is content designed to close sales then and there.

Many organizations rely on guesswork or gut feelings to set their prices. This is actually a mistake, and one that a Chicago fractional marketing Service can help you avoid. Your CMO-for-hire can bring much-needed clarity to your pricing scheme, conducting market and competitive research to determine the maximum price/value ratio that your target market will accept. Ultimately, this leads to greater customer lifetime value and higher marketing ROI. 

Search engines loom large in the digital marketing strategy ecosystem for most organizations. Most people go to search engines to look for new brands and businesses. A Chicago fractional marketing Service can guide your efforts to put your message at the top of search engine results pages (SERPS) using search engine marketing (SEM)—paid search ads—and search engine optimization (SEO)—organic page authority and relevance.

A website that converts is a website that induces traffic to take some sort of action down the path toward a sale. They could convert from traffic to a lead by entering their phone number or email address; or they could convert directly to being a customer by making a purchase directly from the site. Either way, your Chicago fractional marketing Service can lead your team to increase web conversion. 

Leadership is all about the destination. Without a destination in mind, there’s nowhere for a leader to lead. A Chicago fractional marketing Service can help you set the long-term vision for your brand’s growth—a vision of where you could be one year, five years, ten years from now. Once that vision is in place, your CMO-for-hire can help your team chart a strategy to get you there. 

It sounds redundant, but teams depend on teamwork. Modern organizations go out of their way to encourage teamwork, but siloing is still a real phenomenon—individuals lock into their jobs, goal-oriented and dead-set on meeting their goals … even to the detriment of the overall strategy. Your Chicago fractional marketing Service can break down silos and put in place systems that encourage actual teamwork. 

You can’t improve what you can’t quantify. Fortunately, nearly everything that happens in the digital world is counted and quantified. You can use analytics to review the data of the past and even create models for the future. A Chicago fractional marketing Service can help you pick the right analytical tools to track the desired KPIs, and draw actionable insights from a sea of data.

One of the defining characteristics of Chicago fractional marketing Services is that their leadership services are temporary. What happens when they move on to the next contract? Can the marketing team stand on its own two feet? Your CMO-for-hire will provide a wealth of knowledge and mentorship to the team that will continue to pay off years after the fractional services come to an end.