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Looking for an experienced fractional CMO in Chicago? You’ve come to the right place. Digital Authority Partners has the experienced, award-winning team of fractional CMOs who can skyrocket your marketing efforts in the Windy City.
increase in sales for Fortune 1,000 company within one year of working with DAP
Of companies wish they hired a Fractional CMO sooner
Lower cost per year to hire a Fractional CMO versus a full-timeCMO
Days average time needed for a Fractional CMO to help a business
More leads for companies who hire a Fractional CMO
Taking on a “fractional CMO” is essentially hiring the attention of a “part-time” CMO. But that doesn’t mean you’re getting a temp. DAP’s team of marketing officers has delivered results for top startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Many Chicago companies try to outsource their marketing, or place the duties of CMO on a corporate officer with little or no talent, training, or experience in marketing. The result is a fractured marketing deployment that never really “comes together.” DAP puts an enterprise-level Chicago fractional CMO at the helm of your brand outreach, putting you on par with the leaders in your industry in terms of strategy and execution. No more selling your marketing team short—DAP makes you a player with world-class, Chicago-based fraction CMO services.
What are your customer’s needs? Are they motivated by a low price? A good balance of price and value? Luxury? Simplicity? Altruism? How do their physical and psychological needs translate into actions? What do they expect of a brand like yours, and do you deliver? Surprisingly, many companies never bother to get inside the minds of their customers. Our Chicago fractional CMO services get direct customer feedback to understand their needs, especially the unique needs of Chicago customers.
Every customer’s experience of your brand is a journey—from discovery to interest, consideration to purchase, maybe even retention and brand advocacy … unless a weak link jeopardizes this journey. DAP’s Chicago fractional CMO services audit your brand’s customer experience at every touchpoint.
Once we know what your customer journey is, it’s time to align the journey to what your customer would like it to be—in other words, integrating what we discovered in Step 1—Understanding Your Customer. Aligning customer needs with the customer experience will iron out any kinks in your customer journey that might be undermining customer loyalty, retention, and buying intent.
Digital marketing isn’t just about creating a stellar customer experience—it’s about targeting the experience to the individual customer. Depending on the customer’s values, interests, and buying triggers, the experience can be tailored and customized for maximum impact. DAP’s Chicago fractional CMO service includes the development of “buyer personas” that can be used to customize the journey of your buyer.
This is the long-term strategy for your brand. We’ll have time to get laser-focused on today’s KPIs, but your brand has goals or values that are bigger than any one marketing strategy. Everything your Chicago fractional CMO does for your brand must align with that overarching brand strategy, or it’s not worth doing.
A digital marketing strategy is a multi-vector endeavor. It could encompass paid search ads, paid social media ads, website or app redesign, search engine optimization, social signaling campaigns, viral marketing campaigns, influencer campaigns … and best of all, it doesn’t work if it’s piecemeal. Every piece works together to form your customer’s digital experience of your brand. Your Chicago fractional CMO’s job is to work with you to bring it all together.
A content strategy is about answering your customers’ questions—and not just “How much?” Any questions in your customers’ minds, especially the questions for which your brand has services or products to provide the answer—can form a part of your content strategy. DAP’s Chicago fractional CMO services listen to those questions, and then formulate a content strategy that answers them, all the while building trust in your brand.
Anyone can learn marketing theory. It takes seasoned experts to stay on the cutting edge of what’s working and build an actionable plan around it. Your fractional CMO’s job is to build marketing plans on the foundation of your brand, content, and digital strategies to drive results.
Marketing teams need clearly-defined, measurable objectives to work toward. These could be increases in revenue, increases in market share, movement on KPIs, or other objectives. By making them specific and measurable, your CMO sets expectations to which your marketing team can be held accountable.
A communications strategy is all about getting the messaging right, and getting the entire marketing team on board with the messaging. Strong communication means that your brand’s value is being communicated effectively and consistently, so that every time a customer encounters your brand, they get the same pitch—one that has been tested and proven to work.
Content marketing is an ongoing process. Having a consistent output of high-quality content builds your brand authority, helps SEO, and gives customers multiple touchpoints. Your fractional CMO is responsible for creating a schedule for your content strategy—both the creation of the content, and the deployment of that content, with any necessary attention to timeliness and seasonality.
Marketing processes put marketing plans into action. A marketing process moves from goals and objectives to positioning analysis, identifying the tools and tactics needed, putting them into practice, and measuring and repeating the results. Your DAP fractional CMO service puts the right tools and processes into your marketing team—which they can put into practice even when the CMO isn’t on premise.
This metric measures how many marketing dollars it takes to acquire one lead. If the cost to acquire a lead is lower than the profit margin per lead, you have a working marketing strategy. Decreasing the cost per lead acquisition can make a marketing strategy viable or even more profitable; increasing lead conversion rates and lead value can cause a higher cost per lead acquisition to be justified.
Most companies don’t rely on the first sale. Their real money is made on the back end—on repeat business from past customers. The customer lifetime value is how much profit a company can expect to make, on average, from each new customer. Understanding the customer lifetime value is key to understanding what cost is acceptable to acquire a customer through marketing.
Every entrepreneur understands ROI, or “return on investment.” The ROI of your online marketing is how many dollars you make for each dollar spent on online marketing. For every $1 spent on online marketing, do you make $1.25 in profit? $2? $0.75? A positive online marketing ROI may be a sign to scale up; a negative ROI may be a sign to adjust course and flip the online marketing ROI into the black.
“Sales-qualified leads” (SQL) are differentiated from “market-qualified leads” (MQL) in that while MQLs recognize the importance of the problem you are trying to solve; SQLs recognize that your brand is the solution to those problems, and they are ready, willing, and able to buy. Sifting SQLs from MQLs helps your CMO devise a strategy to target the SQLs effectively and affordably.
DAP’s fractional CMO services arm your sales teams with exhaustively-tested, meticulously-designed marketing collateral in the form of ads, fliers, scripts, videos, brochures … everything the team needs to make the sale, all unified in terms of design and brand messaging.
Your fractional CMO will devote time and effort to pricing your products and services correctly. Based on the value offered and the quality of the customer experience, a higher price may be justified … which may adjust the goalposts for your KPIs. Alternatively, if a lower price is justified, it may affect buying temperature in a measurable way. Your fractional CMO helps you strike the right balance.
Search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) are focal points of any digital marketing strategy. With SEM you can essentially “buy leads.” Your fractional CMO helps you make sure you are buying them at an affordable price. SEO improves organic search ranking and takes longer, but the marketing ROI of SEO is exponentially higher over the long term.
Web conversion is the art of calibrating your digital experience to convert visitors into leads, or even into sales, with minimal input from human personnel. By building your digital experience with your customer’s needs and ideal customer journey in mind, your CMO can optimize it for automated conversion.
Few industries have seen such drastic change in a short period of time as healthcare. It wasn’t long ago that healthcare consisted of an ecosystem of big hospitals, opaque insurance billing, and doctors who had a captive audience and no earthly idea what their services cost, with no need to think of patients as “customers.”
Those days are over. Healthcare is more consumer-based than ever, with providers abandoning “fee-for-service” models of billing to compete with retail healthcare providers—minute clinics, storefront clinics, private ERs and ORs—that bill on a “value-based care” model. Many healthcare providers now have to think seriously about their marketing for the very first time.
Unaccustomed to a market-based approach to customer retention and advocacy, healthcare companies benefit from Chicago fractional CMO services more than almost any other. DAP’s Chicago fractional CMO services can help healthcare companies get their marketing on track through:
DAP’s Chicago fractional CMO services help major hospitals, research centers, small or local retail healthcare providers, medtech firms, and software-as-a-medical-device (SaMD) designers.
Chicago is a major hub of global financial services, the home of major fintech companies intent on changing the world. Half of all the publicly-traded securities in the country and 20% of the security trading in the world runs through Chicago. Not New York, Chicago.
As such, the competition is hot. A slapdash marketing effort just won’t cut it—not for a small financial services firm vying to be a player, not for a large firm or fintech startup vying to be a disruptor. Financial services and fintech companies have to get their marketing on point. With the kind of competition arrayed against them, that means enlisting the services of a CMO—and if they can’t or don’t want to staff a full-time CMO, the Chicago fractional CMO service by DAP is the ideal, affordable alternative.
DAP’s Chicago fractional CMO services help fintech and financial service companies square away their marketing efforts through:
Financial services and fintech companies in Chicago live and die by the effectiveness of their marketing. Chicago fractional CMO services by DAP lay the foundation for ROI-driven financial marketing.
Local colleges and universities face tougher marketing challenges than ever. Whereas reputation, word of mouth, or sheer geography used to keep their classes selling and the tuition dollars flowing, students have more educational opportunities than ever—including online learning for a fraction of the costs. Chicago fractional CMO services represent an advantage that most universities need.
Chicago schools and colleges need to take a proactive approach to marketing, sometimes for the first time ever, in order to stay competitive. This includes some of the most prestigious names in Chicago higher education, who find themselves competing with the Harvards and MITs of the world thanks to remote learning.
DAP has helped some of the most well-known Chicago schools, colleges, and academies make the challenging transition to a consumer-based marketing approach. Our Chicago fractional CMO services have also helped educational institutions with:
Chicago fractional CMO services by DAP give colleges and universities the competitive advantage they need, especially in the challenging transition to a remote learning paradigm needed to safeguard their relevance and open their brand up to national and international audiences.
Governments don’t think much about “marketing.” They have “constituents,” not customers. Do constituents really need to be marketed to? The answer is “absolutely.” They may not think about “marketing,” but they do think about “messaging”—unifying constituent communication into a brand voice. Governments do have a brand. If that brand isn’t considered trustworthy, it hinders that government’s ability to do its job, whether that be regulation, licensing, policing, or public service and distribution of benefits.
DAP has offered Chicago fractional CMO services to state and local government bureaus interested in using the power of next-generation digital marketing to get the word out. A Chicago fractional CMO service can help government bureaus get on track with:
We can work within any available budget to provide Chicago fractional CMO services to help public servants serve. Effectively marketing government services helps put tax dollars to their best possible use—into the service of taxpayers, who understand through effective brand communication what government agencies can offer them.
Ecommerce companies usually don’t think they need a CMO. They are often slim operations that don’t have the personnel to spare, especially at the executive level. After all, Ecommerce is a purely digital business, right? Actually, no. In fact, many Ecommerce operations don’t know which KPIs to monitor, why they matter, or what represents a robust ROI when it comes to bang for your marketing bucks.
A skilled CMO can pull the right levers for an Ecommerce business that can substantially reduce their cost per lead, customer lifetime value, and marketing ROI. Our Chicago fractional CMO services usually uncover the fact that even eCom stores doing relatively well could be doing a lot better, especially with proper attention to content marketing and SEO/SEM.
Our Chicago fractional CMO services help Chicago and national Ecommerce businesses:
Ecommerrce businesses looking to take things to the next level often find DAP’s Chicago fractional CMO services to be the piece they never would have guessed that they were missing.
Most manufacturers and wholesalers in Illinois would benefit heavily from Chicago fractional CMO services. Marketing tends to be a weak spot for manufacturers—making quality products is enough of a heavy lift without having to worry about how to find the best end-buyers or retailers.
As such, for all the expense and effort they put into making the best products, they put little effort into maximizing their revenue per buyer and usually end up underperforming compared to their potential.
DAP’s Chicago fractional CMO services usually start with a complete digital overhaul and updating of a manufacturing client’s website to make it an appropriate hub for a significant digital marketing effort. This includes:
Considering how few manufacturers have invested properly in their digital customer experience and marketing efforts, a substantial opportunity exists for manufacturers to stand out with the help of our Chicago fractional CMO services.
Legal expertise is a funny thing. The exact qualities that make Chicago lawyers great—logic, tenacity, persuasiveness—actually work against them in their marketing. Marketing is a more subtle, often counterintuitive art. Our Chicago fractional CMO services often lead Chicago attorneys—some of the best in the world—in directions they never would have expected.
Our Chicago fractional CMO services focus on web strategy, including SEO, SEM, and content marketing to answer the burning questions that potential legal clients are searching for in Google right now. Legal services are highly-localized, so a Chicago fractional CMO service can provide legal practices with valuable insight into what works in Chicago. This is where out-of-town marketing services usually fall short. Lawyers shouldn’t settle for less than laser-targeted, market-specific solutions.
Our CMO services typically help attorneys and legal practices address:
DAP marketing officers have extensive experience producing results for Chicago legal practices. Local attorneys can realize huge growth by partnering with DAP for Chicago fractional CMO services. We can also help national firms expand their Chicago footprint with localized CMO services.
Professional and B2B services are a vast category. These companies are often highly niche-specific and struggle to hone in on the marketing strategy that will laser-target their buyer-qualified leads, acquiring them at an affordable price. DAP’s Chicago fractional CMO services excel at mirco-niching, helping professional service agencies identify their buyer personas and target the right customized messaging to them. This drastically reduces the cost per lead, increasing their marketing ROI in a substantial, sustainable, and scalable way.
Our Chicago fractional CMO services help B2B and professional service agencies strengthen their marketing efforts by:
Every professional service company must approach marketing differently to effectively reach its target audience. DAP’s Chicago fractional CMO services help professional service agencies hone in on the strategy that leads to efficiency and prosperity.
Biotech companies are the definition of micro-niche enterprises, often targeting particular vexing medical conditions with cutting-edge research and breakthrough developments. But casting a wide net with biotech marketing can drain your marketing budget in record time.
DAP has extensive experiencing helping biotech companies with our Chicago fractional CMO services. Your CMO will help you micro-target and customize the customer journey for the highly-specific buyer persona that forms the target market for biotech services.
DAP’s Chicago fracitonal CMO services for biotech companies include:
Few Chicago fractional CMO services have the kind of specialized experience in biotech marketing that DAP does. As a future-seeking, cutting-edge marketing agency, we have a track record for helping game-changers and industry disruptors, including leading biotech luminaries.
Have questions about whether your company needs a Chicago Fractional CMO? Schedule a consultation with a DAP Fractional CMO today and find out what we can do for you.
DAP’s record speaks for itself. Our Chicago fractional CMO services have produced tangible results for industry leaders ranging from startups to Fortune 500 companies. We also have a knack for producing results in sophisticated niches and cutting-edge industries where other fractional CMO services don’t know how to help.
Many agencies over-promise; we make a point of over-delivering. If you have been burned by delays and overages in the past, we sympathize and we’re here to reverse that narrative. DAP considers it a point of pride to deliver on our promises on-time and on-budget. Check out our testimonials for proof.
We don’t do it for the awards, but we’re proud when they happen. Your soon-to-be CMO has earned recognition from Chicago marketing specialists for their mastery of their trade.
DAP keeps an eye on the future of digital marketing with an intensity that borders on obsession. We know that the key to remaining competitive is to stay on the cutting edge. We bring that future focus to every marketing project we take on as fractional CMOs.
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Our team represents a breadth of experience in every facet of digital marketing. You don’t have to shop anywhere else—whatever your brand needs, DAP has marketing officers who can get it done.
We haven’t met a digital marketing innovation we didn’t embrace and exploit to its highest potential. Digital is amazing because it is both inexpensive to deploy, easy to quantify and split-test. Expert digital marketing is transparent, affordable, and effective.
Having a general idea of what needs to be done is just the start. You probably know you need content marketing, but that doesn’t mean you know where to start. DAP has established, proven processes in place that we can deploy on your behalf, and arm your marketing team with for continuity, sustainability, and scalability.
Our CMOs know how to tune a marketing team into a well-oiled machine. Once their efforts are unified, sustainable, and produce results, we know how to scale those efforts to produce double, triple, 10x the results with the same team.
Not every KPI is created equally. In fact, your average analytics suite contains an overload of data, some of which might be useful to some organization … but not your organization. DAP fractional CMOs know how to cut through the noise and identify the KPIs that actually matter to your growth and objectives.