Digital Authority Partners is an award-winning agency based in Chicago, IL. We offer CMO services that have a solid track-record of planning and executing successful marketing campaigns. Our SEO, PPC, and additional online and offline marketing strategies take your company to the next level.
DAP is proud to work with government organizations, non-profits, and B2B/B2C firms.
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-time CMO
Days average time needed for a Fractional CMO to help a business
More leads for companies who hire a Fractional CMO
Increased year-on-year leads 10% for an environmental monitoring solutions firm
Increase traffic 14x for a cryptocurrency trading platform
Secured 100,000 mobile app downloads for one of the biggest names in audio
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Schedule a consultation with a DAP expert today and find out what we can do for your business.
Think of the marketing process as a funnel. At the top of the funnel, prospects are unaware of your offerings. Moving toward the middle of the funnel prospects become interested, curious, and develop demand. At the bottom of the funnel, they come to view your solution as best suited to their needs. They are at the point of highest demand. Once they have passed from prospect to customer, retaining and recycling them through new funnels, each with different goals continues.
CMO services provide thoughtful, experienced, strategic guidance for your marketing process. Fractional CMOs evaluate your company’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats and develop goals and plans for meeting those goals. CMO services help businesses either lacking the need or resources to hire a full-time CMO, needing an interim CMO, or that have reached plateaus and need fresh perspectives from an outside consultant.
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Fractional CMOs transform your business by providing planning, strategy, and leadership in communicating the value, and elevating awareness, interest, and demand for your offerings to prospects, customers, and partners. CMOs may have specific expertise, but moreover have a breadth of knowledge and experience understanding the whole picture.
CMOs understand the external forces affecting the “4 Ps” of your marketing mix, product, price, place, and promotion such as trends, technology, partnership and distribution channels. CMOs also guide the internal marketing environment such as brand image, human marketing resources, internal technology, sales management, product, and loyalty and retention strategies.
Our fractional CMOs provide expert marketing consultation to take your business from where you are to where you want. We’ll analyze every aspect of your marketing including your internal and external factors. We work with your team to develop a strategic plan for increasing sales and leads, boosting customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.
Once our experts have a thorough understanding of the competitive landscape, your current efforts, capabilities, and resources they will make recommendations, establish objectives and key results (OKRs), and provide guidance along the way as you execute strategies outlined in your plan.
Our goal is to extract maximum value from your budget, human, and technological resources by optimizing and systematizing the 20% of your marketing producing 80% of results. You’ll have many “ah ha” moments and gain valuable insights, experiencing the outcomes of your marketing transformation.
Marketing is tricky and can quickly turn into a money-pit without proper guidance. Piecemealing marketing together happenstance is inefficient, unoptimized, and can cause a host of issues negatively impacting your business. CMO services provide consistency, cohesion, and alignment with your brand’s mission, vision, and goals.
Our experienced CMOs have worked with multiple businesses and industries over many years. They’ve learned the hard lessons of trial and error, and have also experienced the drivers of marketing success. This experience is invaluable in establishing a course of action for extracting maximum results from minimal resources.
The best way to understand the benefits of CMO services is to schedule a consultation with a member of our team. Even a short introductory call can illuminate you on the transformative value of fractional CMO services.
We know you want results and the quicker the better. Balancing immediate needs with long-term results is built into our strategic planning process. Results are our number one goal. They’re the reason for seeking our services in the first place.
You’re intelligent and understand, the time to see results depends on many factors–your financial, human, and technological resources, competitiveness of your market, and your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Once we understand your business, we’ll advise you on what to expect near and long-term. We work together setting realistic expectations. With transparent communication and regular reporting, you’ll always know where we stand in meeting objectives and key results (OKRs).
We like to think our services cost nothing because they more than recover any costs by what they add to your bottom-line. Safe to say, our CMO services undoubtedly cost less than hiring a full-time CMO, and likely, less than hiring even a less experienced, full-time marketing professional such as a marketing manager.
Actual costs depend on your needs and time our CMOs spend identifying, planning, and aiding execution of your marketing strategy. Expect higher costs during triage and strategic planning phases which require the most time. Once the plan is in place, we turn over execution responsibilities to your team, with minimal time spent coaching and guiding them along the way. Contact us for a free estimate now.
Questions about your next project? Schedule a consultation with a DAP expert today and find out what we can do for your Fractional CMO needs.
We helped an environmental manufacturing company grow year-on-year leads by 10%
We increased email subscribers by 41% for a leading fintech company
Increased a national grocery chain’s search volume by 10%
Increased revenue 140% for a billion-dollar healthcare company
Increased organic traffic by 20% for a custom software development company
Helped a local daycare center rank on Page 1 of Google within 2 months
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CMOs are at the top of the marketing ecosystem. Roles and responsibilities vary by organization size and industry but nearly always include leading marketing strategy and marketing profit and loss (P&L) responsibility. In other words, they own organization’s marketing efforts.
In larger organizations, CMOs have broad strategic responsibilities for the 4Ps of marketing, product, price, place, promotion and a 5th P—positioning. These may include market research, brand management, product development, lifecycle marketing and customer experience, partnerships and channel development, advertising, public relations, and reputation management, and pricing strategies.
In smaller organizations, CMOs have more of a commercialization role, extracting profit and driving revenue by communicating the value of your products and services in the marketplace. They may be less focused on product development and more focused on brand management, advertising and public relations, strategic partnerships, and customer experience, with the goal of increasing sales and profit.
CMOs analyze markets to define one or more strategic objectives. Objectives may include increasing market share (more customers in the same market), market expansion (new markets existing products), diversification (new markets new products), product development, or strategic acquisition.
Depending on your needs, our team of experienced CMO consultants are available to help with any of the above capacities.
Minimally, our CMO services include:
Analysis
Definition
Planning
Implementation
Monitoring and Management
Whether your goals are growth, revenue, or generating short and long-term profits, a skilled CMO can take you there. Many business owners who’ve traditionally led their company’s marketing find our CMO services during a rapid growth phase when they’re feeling overwhelmed and unprepared. Others come to us frustrated by what could be called reactionary marketing, cobbling together disparate resources and strategies as they’ve grown, with no cohesive, unified strategy. Our CMO services help you rein it in and get results.
At an average salary of $175,000, the cost of hiring a full-time CMO is prohibitive for many businesses. With fractional CMO services, you get the benefits of a full-time CMO, for a fraction of the cost. Reinvest the money you save in other areas of your business.
Regardless of whether you can afford one, you may not need a full-time CMO. Fractional CMO services are great because you can schedule more or fewer hours depending on your needs. Our CMOs typically spend 10-40 hours per month on your business.
Another benefit of using fractional CMOs is that because they have only limited interactions with your team, they aren’t caught up in office politics. They’re only there to deliver results.
As stated above, CMOs own and lead marketing efforts. Nearly all CMOs share at least some degree of the following responsibilities within an organization:
Specific CMO responsibilities vary by industry and organization but fall broadly into three focus areas.
The more verifiable wins your CMO has had across a range of industries and organizations, the more likely they’ll win for you.
In most cases, CMOs need a breadth of knowledge across many areas, understanding of positioning, and know how to communicate value and create market demand. There’s no substitute for experience, but there are qualities all CMOs should possess.
The marketing industry revolves around being able to think outside the box. Innovation and critical thinking skills are amongst the most important factors for impactful marketing, meaning you should keep them at top of mind when hiring CMO services.
Strong communication skills aren’t just for keeping project roadmaps on track, they play a key role in how the public perceives your brand. CMOs convey ideas verbally and in writing, making clear and engaging communication a top priority for anyone looking for CMO services.
For effective marketing and communication, ideas are only one piece of the puzzle. To make those ideas come to life, CMOs need to assess whether they actually work. CMO services include looking at company data and metrics to identify which practices are working and where adjustments need to be made.
CMOs lead marketing departments and need strong leadership qualities, including passion, charisma, integrity, humility, and persuasiveness. They also need to understand how to motivate, delegate, influence, and inspire.
The short answer is value, need, and commitment. Organizations can get the benefits of a CMO without committing to the $175,000 average annual cost of a full-time hire. And, that’s the base annual cost of a full-time employee, not including benefits, bonuses, vacations, general and administrative costs, and overhead which multiply the cost by an average of 1.99. So the average true cost of hiring a full-time CMO ($175,000 X 1.99) is $348,000/annum.
Depending on the scale and complexity of your marketing, you may not need a full-time CMO. You may just need someone to analyze your current strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, formulate a plan, and lead your team toward implementing it. Monitoring, adjusting and providing guidance along the way.
If you plan on hiring a full-time CMO in the future, working with a CMO consultant can help you better define, understand, and align expectations and responsibilities of the role before committing. Try-before-you-buy, limits risk and helps avoid costly future mistakes. For instance, working with a fractional CMO can help you decide which of the three focus areas (strategic, commercialization, enterprise-wide) work best for your CMO role.
Gauging the economic impact of office politics is difficult to gauge, but worth considering. Fractional CMOs have limited interaction with your team. They provide strategy, leadership, and guidance without getting caught up in political climates which could hinder their effectiveness.
Finally, if the relationship with a CMO consultant works out, there is always the possibility of converting them to a full-time employee.
A Fractional CMO (also known as a CMO consultant, interim CMO, or outsourced CMO) is a third-party service provider who provides part-time marketing help to any business.
They handle similar tasks as an in-house employee but do not work full-time with a particular organization. Most fractional CMOs work with multiple companies at the same time.
Some of the major tasks of a fractional CMO include:
Some of the more common reasons for hiring a fractional CMO include:
The short answer is growth and profitability from a dedicated marketing resource. One of the most common reasons clients come to us is because they are growing beyond the capabilities of their current resources. Rapid growth creates many challenges and opportunities. As businesses grow pressure is placed on every functional unit.
Startups or small businesses where owners, or founders have typically filled CEO, CMO, and COO roles are especially taxed by rapid growth. In startups it’s common for one employee to wear multiple hats, even when they aren’t the best fit.
Hiring a fractional CMO gives you a dedicated marketing resource enabling you to free up resources better suited to other tasks such as operations, accounting, sales, logistics and human resources. Freeing up resources alone is a force multiplier. Plus, you get the sought benefit of increased marketing ROI.
One primary reason for stunted growth is a lack of solid marketing strategy. CMO services help overcome this handicap. Marketing can become ineffective or plateau over time. Businesses often get stuck on the assumption marketing that worked for them in the past will continue working. They have difficulty breaking free of messaging, positioning, channels, strategies, processes, and systems even when those fail to produce results they once did.
Fractional CMOs can provide innovation and disruption with strategies that renew interest in your offerings. Fresh perspectives and forward-looking approaches can help you push past plateaus and avoid stagnation. Old Spice is a great example of a dying brand brought back to life with a refreshed marketing strategy.
Assessing your CMO will likely involve many interview rounds with you and your team. Aside from gut-instincts, dive into candidates’ experience, reasoning, and results. Past wins are good indicators of future performance.
Familiarize yourself with industries and organizational types they’ve worked with. Have they worked for startups, growth-phase, mature businesses or a combination? More experience across a range of businesses at different stages may make them better equipped to lead your marketing efforts.
Attributes you want in a CMO are:
Here are some interview questions to help you assess your CMO for the above attributes. Look for situation, task, action, and results (STAR).
According to DCAA cost accounting standards, the true cost of hiring a full-time employee is 1.99 times the base salary. This number accounts for overhead and administrative costs, technology, training, corporate costs, vacations, annual leave, bonuses and other costs full-time employees contribute to.
Average full-time CMOs have base salaries of $175,000. Multiply that by 1.99 to discover the average true cost of a full-time CMO is $348,250.
Fractional CMOs bill hourly on retainer between $300 and $350. According to a leading CMO firm, “Fractional CMOs offer all the benefits of a full-time CMO at a fraction of the cost. Some businesses don’t need a full-time CMO, and the majority of the goals can be accomplished in about 10 hours per week.”
Our experience shows clients need the most help during the first three months. Once the triage phase is complete and you have a solid strategic plan, our fractional CMOs can step back and let your team implement plans while providing guidance, monitoring, and adjusting strategy to align with KPIs.
Based on this scenario, you may be looking at 40 hours a month for the first three months and then scaling back to 10 or 15 per month during the remaining quarters for a cost of $71,500/annum or $5958/month. Big savings over a full-time employee for the same benefits.
Of course, the cost of your CMO services is determined by your wants and needs, and internal and external factors enabling efficient use of your CMOs time.
Whether discussing full-time or fractional CMO costs, we’re really just talking about upfront costs. What can you afford to get your marketing on track right now so that you can start seeing positive ROI?
If your CMO is worth their salt, you should see the value added to your business early on. CMOs will develop short and long-term goals along with KPIs that prove their worth. If they aren’t hitting revenue targets and meeting KPIs, cut your losses and move on.
Put cost in the background and hire the best person you can afford with your current resources. You can pay $348,250/year for a full-time employee or $350/hr for a contractor, if either can get 5 or 10 times multiple your spend, they’ve paid for themselves.
Contact us now to learn more about fractional CMO’s experience and how they can bring value to your business now and in the future.
