The best marketing strategies leverage a range of tactics, including lead generation, branding, and conversion rate optimisation, which can quickly take a toll on your budget. So, how can you maximise the impact of your marketing strategy without overspending? Enter fractional marketing.
What exactly is Fractional Marketing?
Fractional teams are made up of professional marketers who work for your business on a contract or part-time basis. This flexibility allows businesses to put together a strong team with different skill sets and expertise.
7 Best Practices to Keep In Mind
So, you’re on board with the idea of putting together a fractional team, but how exactly can you ensure that you get the most out of your team from the outset?
The Importance of a Diverse Skill Set
With a well-rounded team, you are far less likely to find yourself needing to disrupt the flow of your existing team by hiring additional marketers to address skills gaps. So, you will likely want to ensure that your team features individuals who understand different areas such as SEO, PPC, brand management, social media, analytics, public relations and digital marketing.
Think About Hiring a CMO
With a CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) on your side, your fractional team will always have a dedicated individual to look towards for leadership. The best CMOs understand how to implement and guide strategies to drive growth, sales, and more. They can also help you to ensure that each individual marketing campaign will work together in harmony, avoiding unnecessary duplication or friction which could negatively impact outcomes.
Understand Key Performance Metrics ASAP
Fractional teams are able to deliver strong results in very specific areas. However, it is essential that everyone on the team understands which performance metrics are going to be measured in order to guarantee that your team is 100% aligned with the overall goals you want to achieve.
Integrate Customer Success and Sales Teams
Strong businesses understand how to support the vital collaboration between teams that consistently drives positive outcomes. Marketing teams should always work closely with customer success and sales teams because collaboration allows for clearly defined key performance indicators and deliverables. This collaboration will ensure that your marketers always have access to the insights and datasets required to develop, implement and refine marketing strategies that work.
Set SMART Goals
Fractional teams consistently deliver better strategic outcomes when they are working towards clearly defined SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound). These goals help fractional teams to navigate the complexities of their work arrangement by providing clarity, promoting efficient use of time and resources, enhancing teamwork and accountability, and ultimately contributing to the successful completion of projects.
Look Beyond the Short-Term
While, yes, many fractional marketers are hired on a contract for a very specific project, it is important to link the work that they will be doing with your broader strategy. Your business needs to look beyond short-term objectives to really understand how each project will feed into your long-term outlook and how you can continue to drive bigger and better outcomes.
Tools, Technology and Infrastructure
Successful marketing teams utilise tools and technologies to create, implement and manage campaigns. It is important to ensure that your business doesn’t get left behind in this respect, which is why your fractional team should understand how to source, trial and successfully implement new technologies and flows within the projects they are working on, whilst also determining how these technologies might continue to be beneficial for your business into the future.
