We’re excited to announce and introduce our newest partner, Hawke Media! Hawke Media provides the resources of a full-service marketing agency with the attention of an in-house team. They are your outsourced CMO, and they meet you where you’re at. Do you need a lot of marketing assistance across multiple channels? Are you looking for insights on just one channel? We love that Hawke Media offers month-to-month contracts and a la carte options for our customers who all have unique needs.
Today, Hawke Media wrote a guest post for us all about the value of an outsourced CMO: What is an outsourced CMO? Why would someone need one? And more.
Top 3 Reasons to Hire an Outsourced CMO
There’s no denying that marketing is a foundational element in the success of an eCommerce business, or virtually any business model. With digital ad spend projected to reach $627 billion this year, there appears to be an understanding that marketing has a positive impact on profitability. However, many businesses aren’t making the proper effort to develop their marketing team.
While it may make sense financially to hire freelancers or jacks-of-all-trades to support your efforts, you’ll still be missing the overall strategic direction to create cohesion between your marketing channels and the other arms of your business. With the right strategies in place, it will often lead to opportunity, innovation, and revenue.
If your marketing has hit a point where it has started to decline or become stagnant, it’s time to reach out for some expert help.
What is an Outsourced CMO?
An outsourced CMO is a chief marketing officer that a company works with on a contractual basis. They provide guidance, planning, and execution to launch, grow, and invigorate a brand. While a business owner might be great at making their product, they might not necessarily understand marketing, which is an inherently vital part of scaling their business.
With an outsourced CMO, you can expect executive-level marketing that will oversee all your marketing efforts. They’re not measuring success solely through the lens of returns, but also working on brand-building strategies. Focusing on short- and long-term planning, they’ll embrace a full-funnel approach that supports multiple, necessary touchpoints within the customer journey.
Why Hire an Outsourced CMO
Approaching marketing the right way is every organization’s goal but, at some point, you’ll come across the decision to keep it in-house versus working with a consultancy.
Find and Nurture Talent
The ability to adapt to new companies with a tailored approach is vital for success. The right marketing agencies come with a wealth of experience so you don’t have to waste time, effort, and money training or finding a team. This allows you to improve your marketing performance without draining resources from other departments.
The right marketing agency has worked with businesses of all sizes across every industry vertical and business model to tailor strategies specific to your brand, as opposed to a boutique agency that focuses on one type of customer profile that creates “cookie-cutter” strategies. Freelancers are typically unreliable and often too costly.
With an agency, you’ll also benefit from all the internal and external partnerships. They’ll have access to their other team members to share learnings and new insights on proven strategies to accelerate growth. Agencies will also have partnerships with dozens of platforms to stay up to date on the marketing landscape and new features before they’re released. With the ongoing cookie changes happening, for example, social platforms and search engines will have regular trainings with agency partners to adapt to the changes and find unique ways to continue to collect and elicit third-, first- and zero-party data.
Reduce Overhead Costs
With 61 percent of small businesses struggling with cash flow, it’s a no-brainer to be prudent with all business expenditures. However, there’s a misperception that marketing agencies are more expensive than hiring an in-house team.
By working with an agency, you get CMO-level expertise without the cost usually associated with expertise. Once a CMO is hired, they’ll typically need to hire an entire marketing team to execute. It’s not enough to just have a social media manger. For expert marketing, you’ll need an organic social media expert and a paid social media expert with deep understanding of all platforms. They’ll, in turn, need to be supported by photographers, copywriters, videographers, etc.
Once you have the right people in place, you’ also need access to the latest tools and technologies. Without the right tools, it’s hard to do anything else. You can see how the figures to manage everything in-house become daunting rather quickly.
Maintain Cohesion with Marketing and Strategy
If a brand were to be frugal and forego the CMO position by hiring individuals to make up their marketing team, they’ll miss out on the overarching marketing strategy for the brand to reach their goals.
With a broad range of digital marketing expertise under one roof and a focus on data-driven plans, it becomes seamless to maintain cohesion across all marketing efforts. The influencer marketing team shares content with the lifecycle team to provide social validation within the welcome flow series. The lifecycle team shares their email list with the paid social team to generate lookalike audiences. The SEO team shares keyword strategies with the paid search, paid social, and content teams to fine-tune their strategies. Nothing is ever a standalone effort. There’s so much synergy needed within the different channels as they complement one another.
Hawke Media, Your Outsourced CMO
Identifying the right agencies to work with is crucial to your marketing effort’s success. There are only a handful of agencies that are great at what they do, but they are typically too expensive for startups and smaller companies, and/or require long-term commitments.
Hawke Media has worked with over 3,500 brands across virtually every industry and business model in scaling their marketing efforts. We provide month-to-month contracts making it possible to outsource marketing responsibilities without restrictions for single complex projects or short-term busy seasons. We also provide a la carte services allowing clients to pick and choose what they need–and not pay for what they don’t need or already have in-house.
If you’re interested in exploring how Hawke Media can help serve as your strategic partner, schedule a free consultation here.
