Reluctant to hire a Virtual CMO?
You’re not alone, a lot of business owners feel the same way.
That’s why we wrote this guide – to help you understand what a virtual CMO is, what they do, and how they can help your business grow.
Keep reading to find out if hiring a Virtual CMO is the right decision for your company.
What is a Virtual CMO?
The term “Virtual CMO” (virtual chief marketing officer) is used to describe a Chief Marketing Officer who works remotely, often from another city or country. In many ways, virtual CMOs are similar to traditional CMOs, but there are some key differences.
A virtual CMO is an independent individual that businesses can hire in order to have someone manage their marketing efforts. He or she can be outsourced from a marketing agency or from freelancing sites. The virtual CMO is responsible for all aspects of marketing, including strategic planning, brand management, advertising, public relations, social media and more. They work closely with other members of your company’s marketing team to ensure that the organisation’s marketing efforts are aligned with the overall business strategy.
Unlike a traditional CMO, virtual CMOs do not work in house for a company. In other words, they are not considered official employees of a business. This allows them to be more flexible with the services they provide and can work with you for a few hours, a week to full-time, or even on a project basis depending on the needs of the company.
How Virtual CMOs Help Businesses
A virtual chief marketing officer can help businesses in a number of ways. From creating and executing a marketing plan, to tracking and measuring its success, as well as providing advice on how to best utilise marketing tools and resources that result in better growth and revenue streams for the company.
Below you’ll find some of the top reasons why businesses should consider hiring a virtual chief marketing officer.
Save More Money
Marketing is often one of the most expensive departments in a company, but by outsourcing a virtual chief marketing officer, businesses can save on costs and stay within their marketing budget as compared to hiring a full-time chief marketing officer as an official employee.
Better Focus on Core Competencies
With the help of a virtual chief marketing officer, everyone in the marketing department, including those in a leadership position or an executive role can focus on what they do best, while being guided by expertise.
Seamlessly Scale Your Marketing
When a company grows, it often needs to scale its existing marketing programs and overall marketing strategy to reach new customers as well as maintain its existing patrons. Virtual CMOs can help businesses do this without hiring a full-time marketing team or allocating additional resources to hiring a new in house CMO.
Helps With All Aspects of Marketing
A good virtual chief marketing officer will have experience in all or most of the various areas of marketing. They are able to help create a strong brand identity as well as build and maintain a strong online presence, along with establishing a more solid strategy to acquire new customers through various marketing channels.
Depending on which areas of marketing you’ll need help in, the best virtual CMOs are essentially an expert in all aspects. Ideally, they should bring a wealth of knowledge and experience to your business.
Provides Existing Marketing Team With Proper Marketing Leadership
So what exactly does this mean?
Simply put, a virtual CMO works with your marketing team by providing the proper marketing leadership that your marketing department needs in order to be a successful unit that achieves the goals that were set.
A virtual CMO can help develop a cohesive marketing strategy, create and execute effective marketing campaigns, and manage day-to-day marketing operations, which not every marketing manager, marketing leader or business owner has the time or expertise to do.
By providing your team with the right guidance and direction that it needs, a virtual CMO, however, can help to take your marketing strategy and efforts to the next level.
Establishes Highly Effective Marketing Programs
A virtual CMO is an expert in establishing marketing programs for companies to utilise and re-implement in the future. It is without a doubt that these marketing programs will help engage customers and promote the company’s products or services to increase sales.
Provides Guidance on the Necessary Marketing Tools
Apart from everything else mentioned above, it’s important to note that when you hire a virtual CMO, they are more than capable of suggesting the necessary technological advancements that help with data analytics, market research and anything else, that your company needs. Since they have a proven record of knowing how to transform and scale marketing for many businesses.
Assist With Brand Management
A Virtual CMO can help develop and manage a company’s brand. They will work with the company to create a unique selling proposition (USP) and brand strategy that will differentiate the business from its competitors. They can also help create and maintain a consistent brand identity across all of the best marketing channels.
In essence, if you are looking for a way to improve your marketing team’s performance, along with the overall transition and growth of your marketing as your company expands, consider hiring a virtual CMO. With their help, you can ensure that your small scale marketing team has the ideal marketing leadership and direction that it needs to execute a more solid strategy.
What Can Virtual CMOs Do for You Exactly?
Improve SEO and Search Engine Ranking
Virtual CMOs can help improve SEO and search engine ranking by researching the right keywords to target, optimising website content, structure and on-page elements such as titles, metatags, and anchor text for those keywords, and ensuring that a business’ site is getting enough high-quality inbound links. By doing these things, a website can improve its position in the SERPs, resulting in more traffic and visibility.
Apart from the tactics mentioned above, content marketing plays a role in search engine optimisation, making it an essential part of any marketing strategy. It involves creating and distributing high-quality content that is relevant to a brand’s audience, building authority and trust leading to more traffic and improved search engine ranking.
Essentially, virtual CMOs can help with this process by identifying the right topics to create content around and leading the marketing team in the creation of engaging, informative and targeted content that speaks to the needs and wants of a company’s target customer personas.
Furthermore, virtual CMOs will also take charge of developing effective marketing strategies for promoting the content created, through various channels such as social media, email, website and paid advertising.
Generate More Leads and Expand Sales Opportunities
In today’s digital age, industries can become turbulent and constantly evolving just as digital marketing is. This is why it’s more important than ever for a business to utilise digital marketing strategies for all areas of marketing to help attract more leads and close more sales.
Because a virtual chief marketing officer has proven experience in wearing multiple hats surrounding the digital marketing landscape, he or she can easily provide the expertise to start ups or small businesses and their sales team when it comes to generating leads as well as increasing sales opportunities. Therefore, you’ll need to be careful when hiring a virtual CMO, as you will definitely need one that has been an experienced marketer for years, where he or she has successfully led a marketing team.
Further Grow Social Media Following and Engagement
Virtual CMOs can help you grow your social media following and engagement in a number of ways. They can help you create engaging content, target the right audience, and track your results, while you focus on growing your business. Additionally, they strategically leverage social media ads to capture the attention of your target users as well as push them to engage with your brand online.
Boost Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing is a powerful tool for companies of all sizes. However, crafting an effective email marketing strategy can be challenging. That’s where a virtual CMO comes in. A virtual CMO can help you develop an email marketing strategy that meets your specific business goals. Moreover, an outsourced CMO can provide ongoing optimisation and analysis of your email marketing campaigns, ensuring that you’re getting the most out of your investment.
Maximise Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is another important part of any marketing strategy, but it is quite difficult to generate a significant return on investment. A virtual CMO creates a plan and budget for paid advertising, as well as researches the most effective platforms that will best meet the goals of the company.
For example, Facebook Ads and Google Ads are two of the most popular paid advertising platforms. A virtual CMO maximises these two platforms by creating targeted ad campaigns and selects the most optimal ad placements and targeting options. Your virtual chief marketing officer can also help track the results of the ads so that necessary adjustments can be made.
Set Up and Manage Successful Digital Marketing Campaigns
A virtual chief marketing officer can help you develop, implement and manage successful digital marketing campaigns that are aligned with your business goals. Virtual CMOs will take the time to understand your business, your products or services, and your target market. With this knowledge, they can develop a marketing strategy that will help you achieve your desired results.
But what will this entire process look like?
The first step for any virtual chief marketing officer to take is to determine the goals of the campaign by answering several related questions such as, “What does the business want to achieve?”
Once the goals are clear, the virtual CMO can craft a strategy to reach those goals. The virtual CMO will also create and take ownership of all of the content for the campaign, including blog posts, articles, social media posts, whitepapers and email marketing messages.
In addition to developing and managing the content, the virtual chief marketing officer will also be responsible for promoting the campaign on various digital marketing channels to reach the target audience. And of course, the virtual CMO will also track the results of the campaign and make adjustments as needed to ensure that the goals are being met.
By outsourcing digital marketing tasks to a virtual chief marketing officer, businesses can focus on their core competencies and leave the marketing to the experts. With the help of a virtual CMO, businesses can achieve their marketing goals quickly and efficiently while saving time and money.
Conclusion
In summary, virtual chief marketing officers can be an excellent addition to any business, whether it is a small start up or a large corporation. By outsourcing marketing efforts to a virtual CMO, businesses can save on costs, focus on other essential areas and scale their marketing efforts. On top of that, a virtual chief marketing officer can also help with branding, online presence and customer acquisition. If your business is in need of marketing help, consider hiring a virtual chief marketing officer.
Although we completely understand that finding and hiring the right person for the job can be tough. So we offer a variety of digital marketing services that can fit your company’s needs.
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