If you could “lease” the services of a senior marketer for a few days per month – Is the thought of marketing outsourcing ever crossed your mind?Would you employ a part-time Chief Marketing Officer in your business?
Generally speaking, Small & Medium enterprises (SME’s) can’t afford to employ Chief [anything] Officer. Typically, the Managing Director / Owner, who sometimes title himself/herself as CEO, is very lonely in the C Suite. Those businesses employ the services of an accounting firm to manage finances, a legal firm for legal work, etc. The thought of marketing outsourcing doesn’t often come up, and if it does, it’s not at the right level…
In the marketing space, businesses typically use various agencies to perform various tactical duties, and use an internal resource (young and inexpensive) to manage those relationships and tactical work. Sometimes there will be a marketing agency who oversee all that tactical work, handling bits and pieces of promotional work, branding, social media, websites and optimisation etc.
In the past year or so, I’ve been considering joining a corporate advisory firm (financial and/or legal advisors) and expand their offering to their clients, by helping them not only to reduce cost, but help expand and grow those businesses. Recently I’ve been approached by such a firm for that exact type of function, so I’m asking you:
If you could “lease” the services of a senior marketer for a few days per month – would you employ a part-time Chief Marketing Officer in your business? Is the thought of marketing outsourcing ever crossed your mind?
If you’re unsure, here’s what a senior, part time CMO can bring to a Small / Medium size business:
- Corporate level overall marketing expertise – Client acquisition, retention and expansion strategies and tactics, Pricing, Promotions, targeting, product / services mix, etc.
- Strategic experience – help define / refine the business marketing strategy
- Free up MD/CEO time to manage the business.
- Tell the forest from the trees – as a strategic advisor to the business, the CMO can bring the most appropriate service providers, and orchestrate activities.
- Responsible executive to handle budgets and P/L.
- Contacts – both high-level and suppliers. This is often an overlooked benefit, but most marketers will have a sizeable network.
- Fresh eyes – an outsourced CMO would typically work with a variety of businesses, and can outsmart the competition by using tactics used by other industries.
So let me ask again:
If you could “lease” the services of a senior marketer for a few days per month – would you employ a part-time Chief Marketing Officer in your business?
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