Virtual CMO: 8 Reasons For A Virtual CMO | Blog Post

For startup companies or companies during a transition, we offer a level of service called, Virtual CMO (vCMO) or a Fractional CMO. A Virtual CMO (outsourced Chief Marketing Officer) is an experienced senior-level marketing person you can hire on a “fractional” basis. The basic reasoning to hire a Virtual CMO is to get immediate and quality marketing expertise at a fraction of the cost and without a long-term commitment.

Many of our clients have chosen this service level, with our agency founder, Olivier Sartor or another one of our team members serving as the Virtual CMO for the client.

Virtual CMO

8 Reasons To Hire A Chief Marketing Officer

Why does your company need a Virtual CMO?
There are many reasons why startups or mature companies should consider bringing on a Virtual CMO. Some companies have never had a permanent CMO, while others need an interim fix while looking for a new CMO. Here are the most common reasons we are hired as a vCMO.

  1. Cost: At this time, a company can’t afford to hire a permanent CMO.
  2. Time and Focus: The founder, CEO or management team is too busy to work on sales, operations, product development, etc. AND marketing.
  3. Complexity: Marketing has become very complicated and competitive. Expertise and experience is the only way to achieve marketing results.
  4. Immediate Need: Your current CMO is leaving for another opportunity or poor performance and it will take at least 3-6 months to bring in a new one.
  5. Build a Marketing Foundation: A couple of companies have brought us in to build a solid marketing foundation so their new CMO could hit the ground running.
  6. Marketing Expertise: The current marketing team and outside freelancers do not have the experience or skillset to implement a comprehensive and integrated marketing operation.
  7. Marketing Results: What worked before is not working now.
  8. Outside Perspective: Sometimes, an outside perspective is just what is needed for the company.

Benefits of Hiring a Virtual CMO from EGM

There are many benefits of hiring a Virtual CMO from our agency.

Cost efficiency
Hiring a qualified, permanent CMO in a major market like Boston or New York will not be cheap according to Salary.com, while we are a fraction of that cost depending on the engagement.

Robust Skillset
Our Virtual CMO team members all have deep experience in our provided services including marketing strategy, content marketing, social media marketing, digital advertising, search engine optimization and website design. Additionally, these members can provide Go-to-market strategy, personnel management, technology assessments and recommendations plus operational process recommendations.

Marketing Focus
Our Virtual CMO team members have worked with dozens if not hundreds of companies. They have seen it all and they know what works. Their focus on your marketing needs, combined with their years of experience, leads to better marketing execution.

Team Training
We try to seamlessly work with your team, sharing our marketing best-practices to improve their marketing skillset.

Providing Outside Perspective
While an outside perspective is sometimes identified as a need by the client in advance of bringing us in as a Virtual CMO, in almost every engagement, we find a critical marketing deficiency based on an incorrect assumption. Over time, through no fault of their own, every company builds assumptions about what works and what doesn’t. We review these assumptions and question why?

Conclusion

Hiring a virtual CMO from us or from another resource is a compelling option for companies to gain deep, strategic, marketing expertise with expending substantial resources to find, hire and onboard a CMO.

Thank you for reading our post about why to consider hiring a Virtual CMO. We hope that you will consider our Virtual CMO level of service now or in the future. Visit our Services page to learn more about levels of service and all our digital marketing services.