Liz Papagni January 18, 2022 
If you’re ready to scale your ecommerce business in 2022, marketing is a must. And not just marketing, but a comprehensive marketing strategy that defines and supports your brand, provides cohesive messaging, grows brand and product awareness, and provides measurable results. That requires more than one social media “expert” at the wheel. You need real marketing leadership.
Companies that dedicate a large portion of their budget to marketing usually have a full-time CMO. With this option, you have a member of your executive suite who is privy to all business choices and, generally speaking, gets paid as such.
There are also fractional CMOs, an outsourced solution to your marketing efforts as opposed to full-time. Much like with accounting, payroll, and other outsourced business operations, fractional CMOs have multiple clients, and you pay only for the time dedicated to your business. This provides greater flexibility and usually a lower cost, as you’re only billed fees that reflect the fractional nature of the role.
Why would you choose a fractional CMO for your ecommerce business rather than bringing in someone on a full-time basis? Well, there are plenty of reasons—and not all of those involve the cost. Let’s take a look.
Business Growth
No one begins an ecommerce business hoping that it will stay stagnant. Growth is always at the forefront of business planning, and marketing is a great way to focus and analyze your company’s growth. When you’re ready to scale your business, marketing leadership is crucial. You need someone with the experience necessary to take your business from where you are now to where you want to go—and beyond.
This type of growth requires more than just marketing leadership. To manage all tasks, you need a stellar marketing team. My CMO services can either help you locate and hire that team, or we can give you access to our incredible, experienced team—again, at a fraction of the cost.
Budget
We can’t talk about growth without discussing the budget. Financial flexibility is essential when beginning a new ecommerce marketing venture. Marketing campaigns rarely result in significant success right away. Some tweaks are always necessary after regular measurement, which means you should plan for no less than six months of effort before determining success.
Hiring a fractional CMO frees up valuable cash flow that you can direct into the campaigns themselves, rather than sinking those funds into executive salaries and benefits. This can be especially helpful to a smaller business that may not have the revenue to support a full-time CMO or offer the benefits full-time executives demand.
Outsourcing your marketing efforts doesn’t mean that you won’t have a dedicated and professional leader for your marketing team, but it could mean you won’t be paying outside of your budget.
Strategy/Experience
Full-time CMOs focus on one company at a time, and as such, they can be limited in their experience and inspiration. With a fractional CMO, you can access a much broader array of marketing wisdom, including digital marketing and traditional advertising. More experiences of trying, learning, trying again, and succeeding.
The wider the experience of a CMO, the more opportunities they have to try new things, hone their skills, and produce the most vital strategies. With experience in multiple industries and access to vetted professionals, a fractional CMO can build a strategy for your company that is customized to your needs.
Insight
Perhaps your team has been putting in the ecommerce marketing efforts, but you don’t know how to measure success. You may not have an experienced employee who can assist and direct your team, and you don’t want to sacrifice that type of leadership to keep your budget intact.
A fractional CMO will not only have the skills to lead your team to marketing success but will also have a fresh perspective, valuable insight and tools, and connections that you may not find with a full-time employee.
Flexibility
One of the most significant benefits of outsourcing your marketing leadership is the flexibility that comes with this model. You will find that your business experiences better time management, your permanent employees will be freed up for other tasks, and you will get all of the same professional leadership you would with a full-time CMO
It also gives you the flexibility to choose the direction your company goes without the financial fallout that could occur with having to pay out severance to those CMOs who don’t quite fit your vision or deliver the results you’d hoped.
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