Why you need an extended CMO

A startup’s founder came to us with a critical business need. She wanted to increase sales.

Her startup was about two years old around then. She is a veteran in the luggage business. Her company makes backpacks for school kids, young adults, professionals and travelers.

She had a five-member in-house marketing team. She also had contracted with a digital marketing agency to handle social media promotions for her brand.

But after a full year of spending on the team, on the agency, and on several promotions, she had come to the conclusion that her approach to marketing was not working. She fired her team and the agency.

“I am not against spending on marketing. But I need to see our sales going up. I want to see our brand being talked about. I need more accountability from whoever is leading our marketing effort,” she emphasized, even as she gave firebrand labs (FBL) the mandate to be her startup’s outsourced chief marketing officer/office (CMO).

FBL brought to this founder and her startup the benefits of our powerful, outsourced, extended CMO (ext. CMO) model. As a marketing advisory, FBL offered this client its services on several critical fronts: creative thinking, designing, advertising, problem-solving, research, analytics and writing.

Resultantly, in just over six months, sales at this startup rose by 20%. Also, analytics of the performance of the brand’s social media campaigns showed a 25% organic growth in engagement levels and followership.

These results have been achieved at a budget that is 25% lesser than what the company would have spent had it retained their earlier marketing model, of working with an in-house team and a digital marketing agency. Importantly, while the company did not see any significant sales coming from their marketing initiatives in their initial years in business, they saw tangible, measurable results in just six months of working with us.

This client story points to a few truths that marketers must recognize and hold dear:

1. Marketing has two key roles to perform: It must grow awareness of a product and service in such a way that this awareness delivers increased sales. And, simultaneously, marketing must grow the aura and reputation of the brand.
2. In a world that is heavily reliant on digital communication, marketers, brands and companies imagine that gaining followership on social media platforms and advertising on them are the only ways to do marketing. This is not quite true. Digital marketing and advertising on social media are just additional ways to market a product, service or brand. You still need to effectively use the traditional marketing channels: print media, TV, radio, outdoor media, events and public relations.
3. The agency model of marketing is dead. You can no longer count on hiring an agency to handle your advertising releases for a percentage of your advertising budget. You need a partner who has their skin in the game.
4. As new, young talent comes into the mainstream of the professional workforce, business leaders must realize that this talent pool lacks experience in the traditional and timeless principles of marketing. Only an outsourced, ext. CMO, led by marketing industry veterans with over 25 years of experience, can bring ownership and high-quality creative thinking to the table.

One of the key strengths of FBL was evident in the way we fulfilled this backpack startup’s mandate. We painstakingly reasoned the rationale for every rupee that the client had to spend and linked their budget to results. This is how performance marketing works. This is the unbeatable value proposition that an ext. CMO brings to your enterprise: It thrives on execution excellence and not just on creative ideas. It delivers business results.