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Most businesses don’t have a shortage of marketing ideas.
There’s always something else you could be doing. Another social platform. A new ad campaign. More content. SEO. Email. Video. Networking. A website redesign. The list never ends.
The harder question is: Which of those things actually makes sense for your business right now?
That’s where strategic planning matters, and it’s one of the most valuable things a Fractional CMO can bring to a growing business.
Instead of starting with marketing tactics, a Fractional CMO starts with the business itself: where you’re trying to go, what’s standing in the way, what resources you have available, and what marketing needs to accomplish to help you get there.
A Fractional Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) gives a business access to experienced, executive-level marketing leadership without hiring a full-time CMO.
For small and medium-sized businesses, that can fill an important gap. You may already have employees, freelancers, agencies, or vendors handling different pieces of your marketing. What you may not have is someone looking across all of it and asking whether those pieces make sense together and support your actual business goals.
That’s the job of strategic marketing leadership.
If you’re looking for a broader explanation of the role itself, you can learn more about our Fractional CMO services. Here, we’re focusing specifically on how a Fractional CMO helps with strategic planning.
Strategic planning isn’t creating a list of marketing tactics for the next twelve months.
It means deciding what the business needs to accomplish, determining what marketing can realistically do to support those goals, and then making deliberate decisions about priorities, budget, resources, execution, and measurement.
This sounds obvious. It often isn’t happening.
A business wants to increase revenue, but its marketing team is focused on increasing engagement.
The owner wants to attract more profitable clients, while campaigns are optimized to generate the highest possible number of leads.
The company wants to grow one particular service, but most of the marketing budget is still supporting everything equally.
Or everyone is simply doing what they’ve always done because nobody has stopped to ask whether it still makes sense.
A Fractional CMO starts with the business goals and works backward. That might mean marketing needs to help:
Once you know what marketing is supposed to accomplish, you can make much better decisions about what marketing should actually be doing.
You cannot do everything. Well, technically you can. You can spread your budget and your team’s time across fifteen different marketing tactics and do all of them poorly.
But … I don’t recommend it. Burnout, anyone?
Strategic planning forces you to make choices. A Fractional CMO evaluates the opportunities available to you against your goals, customers, budget, internal capacity, competitive position, and existing results.
Good marketing strategy isn’t about finding more things to add to your plate. Sometimes it’s about clearing away everything that isn’t helping.
Once the priorities are clear, you can build the actual marketing strategy around them.
Depending on the business, that may require looking at:
The important part is that these aren’t separate decisions.
Your messaging affects your advertising. Your positioning affects your website. Your customer acquisition strategy affects your budget. Your sales process affects whether the leads marketing generates ever become customers.
When each piece of marketing is managed independently, you can end up spending plenty of money while getting less from all of it.
Our integrated marketing campaign case study shows what can happen when disconnected marketing efforts are brought together under one comprehensive strategy.
A marketing budget shouldn’t simply be last year’s budget with 10% added to it.
And it definitely shouldn’t be divided among marketing channels just because that’s how you’ve always done it.
Your budget should reflect your priorities.
A Fractional CMO can evaluate marketing investment against things like:
That doesn’t necessarily mean spending more.
Sometimes strategic planning reveals that you’re already spending enough money. You’re just spending it in the wrong places.
You may have duplicate tools, overlapping vendors, campaigns producing low-quality leads, or marketing activities that nobody has evaluated in years.
Finding those problems can free up budget for the things that are actually working.
More data doesn’t automatically mean better decisions.
You can have dashboards filled with impressions, followers, clicks, views, engagement rates, and dozens of other numbers without being able to answer the question that matters:
A Fractional CMO helps determine which metrics and KPIs actually connect to your objectives.
Those might include:
The right metrics depend on what you’re trying to accomplish.
If your goal is profitability, generating twice as many leads isn’t necessarily an improvement if those leads cost more and convert worse.
If your goal is growing a particular service, overall website traffic doesn’t tell you whether that service is gaining traction.
Knowing how to use marketing analytics for better ROI helps you make decisions based on what’s actually producing results instead of what looks impressive in a report.
One of the biggest strategic problems I see isn’t that businesses don’t have enough marketing help.
Sometimes they have too much help, and everyone is going in a different direction.
The SEO company is focused on rankings.
The social media person is focused on engagement.
The PPC agency is focused on clicks and conversions.
The web developer is focused on the website.
Your internal employee is trying to keep up with email and content.
Each person may be doing exactly what they were hired to do. But who’s making sure they’re all working toward the same business goals? (I’ve seen what it looks like when that is not happening, and it’s costly.)
A Fractional CMO provides that strategic direction. That can mean setting priorities, coordinating efforts, evaluating recommendations, identifying gaps and duplication, holding vendors accountable to the right outcomes, and making sure everyone understands how their work fits into the larger marketing plan.
You don’t necessarily need one company or one person to execute every piece of marketing.
You do need someone making sure all those pieces work together.
A strategic marketing plan isn’t something you create in January, put in a binder, and obediently follow until December.
Things change. Your customers change. Competitors change. Costs change. Technology changes.
A marketing channel that performed beautifully six months ago may become more expensive. A new service may suddenly have more demand than expected. Your business may reach capacity. A competitor may change its positioning. Your data may tell you that an assumption you made when developing the strategy was simply wrong.
Strategic planning includes reviewing what’s happening and deciding whether the plan needs to change.
The important part is making those adjustments deliberately instead of chasing every new marketing trend that shows up in your feed.
A Fractional CMO can help separate a meaningful change that requires action from the latest shiny object that doesn’t deserve your time.
More leads aren’t always the answer. More customers aren’t always the answer either.
If you’re already operating at capacity, pouring money into lead generation can create a completely different set of problems. If one service generates twice the revenue but half the profit of another, growing the higher-revenue service may not be the smartest goal. If acquiring a new customer costs substantially more than retaining an existing one, your growth strategy may need to put more emphasis on retention.
Strategic planning looks beyond “How do we get more?”
It asks:
What kind of growth actually makes sense for this business?
A Fractional CMO can help balance short-term marketing opportunities with profitability, capacity, customer retention, positioning, resources, and longer-term business goals.
This is where businesses often get marketing backward. They start by asking:
Maybe.
But those aren’t the first questions.
The first questions are:
Then you choose the tactics.
That’s the difference between doing marketing and having a marketing strategy.
At Unscrewed Marketing, that’s also how we approach Fractional CMO work. With more than 30 years of marketing experience, including CMO-level leadership and work ranging from entrepreneurs and small businesses to large organizations and Fortune 500 companies, I don’t start by handing you another list of things you should be doing.
We look at where your business is trying to go, what you’re already doing, what’s working, what’s wasting money or resources, and what’s getting in the way.
Then we build the marketing strategy around the business.
The biggest difference is the level of responsibility and strategic leadership.
A CMO determines the overall marketing strategy: what the business should prioritize, which customers and opportunities to pursue, how the budget should be allocated, how marketing supports business goals, and how success will be measured.
A Marketing Director typically turns that strategy into coordinated marketing plans and manages the people, campaigns, vendors, and channels responsible for executing it.
A Marketing Assistant supports the day-to-day execution of marketing, such as preparing content, coordinating campaigns, updating materials, managing schedules, and handling other marketing tasks.
A Marketing VA generally provides task-based administrative or production support. They may schedule social posts, update email campaigns, enter data, format content, or perform other defined marketing tasks.
Put simply: a CMO decides what marketing should do and why; a Marketing Director manages how it gets done; a Marketing Assistant helps execute it; and a Marketing VA handles assigned tasks.
That’s why you should always start with a CMO, yet most businesses go wrong by starting first with a VA.
A traditional CMO is generally a full-time executive responsible for leading the company’s marketing strategy and function. A Fractional CMO provides executive-level marketing leadership on a part-time or fractional basis, giving small and medium-sized businesses access to experienced strategic leadership without the cost or commitment of hiring a full-time CMO.
A Fractional CMO can provide experienced marketing leadership, align marketing with business goals, establish priorities, improve how marketing resources are allocated, direct teams and vendors, identify wasted spending, and establish meaningful ways to measure results.
A Fractional CMO connects marketing strategy to business objectives, determines marketing priorities, helps establish budgets and KPIs, develops the marketing plan, directs marketing resources, and adjusts the strategy as business conditions and results change.
A Fractional CMO can provide strategic direction across digital marketing channels such as SEO, paid advertising, social media, email marketing, content marketing, websites, and video. Rather than simply managing one channel, the Fractional CMO determines how those channels should work together to support the larger business strategy.
Yes. Brand positioning, differentiation, messaging, and consistency all affect marketing performance. A Fractional CMO can help make sure your brand strategy supports the customers you want to reach and the business goals you’re trying to accomplish.
A Fractional CMO helps make sure marketing decisions support sustainable growth rather than simply producing more activity. That can include improving customer acquisition, retention, profitability, positioning, marketing efficiency, and the systems and strategy needed to support future growth.
Fractional CMO Sessions Available
Individual 1-hour sessions, hourly packages, or recurring monthly sessions are available to assist you in growing your business.
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