The fractional executive model, from fractional CFOs to CMOs, may be all the rage these days, but chances are you haven’t heard of a fractional marketing manager yet. But your company just might need fractional marketing management more than the support of any other expert!
Not only do fractional marketing managers offer accountability and productivity at a fraction of the cost of full-time employees, but they provide effective leadership to execute your marketing strategies down to the smallest detail. In this two-part article, we’ll share all the reasons why you should make fractional marketing management your new best friend.
When Fractional Marketing Management Makes Sense
The great thing about fractional marketing management is that these services can be tailored to any company with any marketing need. Startups, small businesses, and enterprise companies alike can benefit from a fractional marketing manager.
With marketing job turnover at 17%, the highest of all job functions according to LinkedIn, marketing is a uniquely challenged department. This high turnover isn’t just costly, but it makes executing long-term marketing strategies tough. Hiring is an added challenge: the average time to hire a full-time marketing employee is 50 days.
Turnover is especially hurtful when you factor in how specialized marketing roles have become, from PPC specialists, to SEO experts, to content marketers, and social media managers—just to name a few. It’s impractical for most small-to-medium sized businesses to maintain all of these roles full time. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a need, though: there comes a time when most organizations need an injection of specialized marketing support, whether it’s a new product launch or expansion into a new market—or accommodating for unanticipated business growth until HR can catch up with new hires.
That’s where fractional marketing management can make all the difference, offering both high-level oversight and a skilled team to get the job done.
The Benefits of Fractional Marketing Management
There are many reasons to hire a fractional marketing management service. Here are the top benefits, with a few real-life case studies thrown in to boot.
- They’re Budget Friendly
No matter what industry you’re in, hiring new full-time employees is a budget buster. According to the Huffington Post, the cost of hiring and training a new salaried employee can equal 6 to 9 months’ worth of salary on top of their first year’s base pay. Add in benefits like health care and 401Ks, and the cost of a full-time employee balloons quickly.
Fractional marketing managers—and the teams they bring with them—don’t incur the same costs or risks as staffing a full-time employee. Since they’re fractional, your company only gets the help it needs when it needs it, without the HR headache of being overstaffed down the line.
- Access to a Whole Digital Marketing Team
A comprehensive digital marketing campaign has a lot of moving parts. The great thing about hiring fractional marketing management professionals is that they bring together a team of trusted subject matter experts (SMEs) to work alongside your current staff and execute every detail.
Fractional Marketing Management in Practice: Recently, we helped a strategic services company that offers consulting for small-to-medium sized businesses in the aerospace, pharmaceutical, and manufacturing industries. They were getting ready to launch a new executive product offering that required the creation of a brand-new website and marketing plan from the ground up.
Rather than burden their current marketing team with a heavy lift or hire a whole new team, the company brought us on to execute every aspect of their digital product launch, including a new website, logo, video marketing, and much more.
With JABR’s fractional marketing approach, they were able to launch quickly and begin driving new business with a fully-realized marketing approach.
- Bring Diverse Experience to Your Team
Diversity in marketing is equally important at the strategy and execution levels. As our colleagues over at Chief Marketer note, “Diversity can mean many things, from gender to race to age to experience.”
Fractional marketing management removes the difficulty of hiring diverse teams by making a whole host of SMEs with diverse backgrounds available to you. Counting on a diverse marketing team with different corporate experiences and cultural backgrounds can help you avoid viral marketing gaffes like Pepsi’s infamous ad with Kendall Jenner.
You want to go viral for all the right reasons, which is why you’re considering fractional marketing management. Learn more about its benefits by reading Part 2 of this article here.
If your interest is already piqued, contact us today to see how we can put our fractional marketing management services to work for you.