Newest jobs in Martech:

Sr. Marketing Operations Manager @ TigerConnect (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $89,500 – $189,500 (est.)
• Manage, maintain and continually evolve our lead scoring, lifecycle models and operational fundamentals.
• Maintaining data integrity and data governance through operational programs and automated processes.

Manager of Demand Generation Marketing @ WorldSync (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $88,000 – $112,000 (est.)
• Build and lead a marketing function that includes collaboration with Product Management, Sales Leadership, Customer Success Management, and Executive Staff. 
• Build multichannel campaigns (inbound and outbound) that align messaging to the target audience and buyer journey.

Growth Marketing Strategist @ NewNorth (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $120,000 (est.)
• Develop marketing strategies for clients that drive real, measurable results.
• Engage with clients and delivering your expertise with confidence, expertly managing expectations.

Marketing Manager – B2B SaaS @ Localize (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $70,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Contribute to the development and management of 1WorldSync’s global demand generation campaigns across channels (e.g., email, SEM, digital advertising, web, events.) including strategy, content planning, campaign setup, A/B testing, reporting, and optimization.
• Partner with Product Marketing Manager as well as Go-To-Market (GTM) and Sales teams to develop and optimize campaigns according to the product roadmap and 1WorldSync’s pipeline and revenue goals.

Director roles:

Principle Marketing Analytics Analyst @ Shutterfly Inc. (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $90,000 – $114,000 (est.)
• Answer measurement and data integration questions: define analytics approach, retrieve, and manipulate data needed to perform analysis, and deliver actionable insights to Marketing Management team. 
• Create and share out weekly reports to clearly communicate Email channel and campaign performance. Identify trends and draw insights and test results to help guide future planning. Dig into the category performance and drivers. 

Senior roles:

Sr. Growth Marketing Manager @ Backblaze (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $190,000 (est.)
• Lead growth marketing initiatives to ensure the best lead experience by creating awareness, promoting free trials or sales leads and ultimately converting leads to paying customers.
• Report out key performance metrics on a weekly/monthly basis and develop monetization trends and sales strategies to optimize our investment for ROI.

Global Lead Product Marketing Manager @ LiveRamp (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $130,000 – $160,000 (est.)
• Collaborate with product management to ensure market needs are translated into new product capabilities, and new product capabilities are effectively rolled out to the commercial teams.
• Draw from deep expertise of the product to clearly articulate how a given feature uniquely addresses customer use cases.

Partner Marketing Manager @ Lambda (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $103,000 – $165,000 (est.)
• Field incoming co-marketing requests, identify new areas of opportunity, and prioritize activities according to impact and reach.
• Work closely with the Sales team to strengthen GTM execution around new and enhanced partnerships.

Sr. Marketing Data Analyst @ GameChanger (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $100,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Support the Marketing and Partnerships teams in tracking, reporting, and analyzing the effectiveness of marketing and go-to-market activities through the entire marketing funnel from awareness to retention.
• Build reports, data visualizations, and dashboards that clearly communicate findings to stakeholders.

Sr. Marketing Operations Manager @ Cotiviti (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $94,000 – $115,000 (est.)
• Build and execute strategic, best-in-class, multi-channel marketing campaigns for enterprise and line of business audience segments.
• Perform workflow set up in HubSpot including audience selection, dynamic content, etc. to ensure accuracy of campaigns.

Sr. Consulant, Go-to-Market Strategy @ Shift Paradigm (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $90,000 – $130,000 (est.)
• Execute on diverse client consulting projects, with a focus on strategic initiatives and their execution.
• Develop solutions for complex marketing, sales, and organizational challenges in collaboration with the support of specialists across delivery areas.

Marketing Operations Manager @ Britive (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $80,000 – $100,000 (est.)
• Proactively identify areas of improvement in campaign operations to continually evolve a best-in-class marketing automation system. 
• Own and improve supportive structure directly impacting a steady volume of campaign requests by creating and maintaining Hubspot program templates and documentation for Demand Generation and Field Marketing teams.

Associate roles:

Jr. Marketing Operations Associate @ Fictiv (U.S. remote)

• Salary: $70,000 – $80,000 (est.)
• Manage, or assist with data cleanliness, database health reporting, normalization, data cleanup, etc. 
• Responsible for maintenance, troubleshooting and ad hoc improvements across Martech systems like Sales-outreach (Outreach.io, or Salesloft for example), Marketo, scoring, enrichment and deduplication tooling.

Revenue Operations Analyst @ Goldcast (U.S. remote)

• Salary:$57,500 – $72,000  (est.)
• As the first person in the revenue ops function, you will report into the Head of Sales and act as a connective tissue between Marketing and Sales.
• You will connect data and systems, build workflows, and generate insights and analytics to empower marketing and sales to drive more revenue.

The post The latest jobs in martech appeared first on MarTech.

Q: How did you get where you are today?

A: I started as an HTML e-mail developer for Richmond American Homes. So this was almost 17 years ago, before there were platforms for deploying emails and automations and all kinds of things and automated e-mail sending. From there I started dabbling in website design and HTML pages and that evolved into contracted work to build websites mostly using WordPress. 

Then clients started asking things like, ‘We see that there’s a form that can be filled out and can you somehow reach out to the people that reach out to us for a new HVAC system or a new whatever?’ So I started to do that, literally growing with the marketing technology industry as we know it. 

And then somebody said, ‘Well, there’s this lead management thing called Salesforce.’ First CRM ever and the UI for it was pretty, pretty crude, but that was still really cool. Send volume was an issue at that time, too, if you’re using Outlook. Then we’ve got all these different e-mail service providers, everything from MailChimp to Adobe Campaign, Salesforce, Marketing Cloud, and I’ve worked in all of them. So that’s how my journey has gone. 

Q: What do you like about your job?

A: What I love is the creativity that comes with implementing a technical configuration and architecture that matches the business’s needs. I’m someone who understands business and has a consultant’s mindset, but who also is technical enough to know what to tell your specialized developers and help them with technical limitations, or say ‘Here’s what you can do and how.’ We have to help them think it through from their bigger outcome desires Into the technical of what it takes to make those outcomes happen. That’s what I love doing.

Q: What types of problems do you run into regularly?

A: The challenges are the change management and education piece and keeping that documentation transparent, clearly communicated and accessible. What I do as an architect, is I’ve got the business hat and education, change management hats and then supporting the project manager as well as the developers to build technical requirements. 

All this is doable and much better than what I’ve faced in other jobs.

Q: Such as?

There have been challenges of inappropriately balanced power hierarchies. Then there’s silos and the territorialism of data in marketing. [An executive said to me], ‘You know, you don’t need to understand the enterprise data warehouse, you’re meddling, you’re stepping out.’ I said, ‘I’m trying to help you stand up a financial services cloud and marketing cloud.’

Q: Our survey found that women in marketing technology earn an average 24% less than men. What’s your experience with this?

A: I have witnessed it working in traditional business hierarchy-type environments. I’ve seen the disparity of income in myself versus even someone that I managed and hired that they brought on at twice my salary. The problem lies in not enough awareness and advocacy, and also women not having the tools to assertively and systematically, and on a very professional level, state their case … and it’s worse for women of color.

The post MarTech Salary and Career: Jennifer Luby on facing challenges appeared first on MarTech.

Q: So how did you get to where you are today?
How I ended up here is just being exposed to marketing service providers and kind of working my way up through the industry in different areas. It’s been an interesting ride.

I started with a company that initially was doing IT training and I got exposure to a ton of different technologies because I was the person to set up the classrooms for different vendors that were renting classroom space. Then I moved on to a company that was doing consulting. It went from a small business to a medium one and then we actually ended up in the enterprise space. Then the owners of our company decided that it was time to start another practice and they wanted to make the shift into enterprise marketing management.

Dig deeper: MarTech Salary and Career: Saidah Abdulhaqq on the making of a unicorn

We grew the business from three people up to like 30 and got acquired by the Allant Group. And then we just became kind of martech solution architects.

Q: What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to martech?

A: Technologically speaking it’s the pure depth of the marketplace right now. The fact that we went within years from the martech 1000 to now it’s the martech 10,000. Keeping up with all of that has been interesting. 

It breaks down into a series of services that you have to understand. So there’s still campaign management, there’s still data management, there’s still social, there’s still all these different things. And then within those spaces, there are multiple players that kind of overlap. 

A lot of times you have customers who are coming to us and saying, ‘Do you support this specific stack?’ and we’re like, ‘Well, no, but we don’t have to. We can figure out what you’re doing because they all do the same thing.’ It’s like knowing one programming language and learning another. It’s very easy once you understand the structure of it. You just have to move through the different services that are available.

Q: What are you seeing when it comes to people changing jobs?

A: On my LinkedIn network, there was a time at the beginning of 2022 when I’d see 50 people a day posting, ‘I’m starting a new position at … .’ And that’s all marketing technology people. So I saw a lot of people moving around, moving up, moving over, doing, you know, everybody was kind of rearranging. Now I don’t see that velocity at all. It seems like people are staying put. Everybody’s trying to retool and understand how they can best use the investments they already have in place.

Q: What do you like about your job?
A: I think there’s always something new to uncover. I’m always learning because it’s changing so rapidly. We went from traditional database marketing and then digital came around and as digital came, it opened up this whole new world that nobody had really played in before. And now there’s opportunities in UI UX, there’s opportunities for programmers, opportunities for data guys, it’s just all over the place. I’m kind of an architect, a technical architect, so for me it’s like a playground, right? It’s a giant sandbox where I can just take all the toys and move them wherever. 

The post MarTech Salary and Career: Greg Morales on the joy of always learning appeared first on MarTech.

These opportunities contribute to high satisfaction among those who work in the thriving field. 74% of those surveyed reported being at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs. 

“Given that one-third of our respondents were promoted or got a new job in the past year, relatively high happiness levels seem justified,” said Scott Brinker, VP platform ecosystem at HubSpot and editor at chiefmartec.com. “Overall, great to see martech pros are feeling good about their jobs.”

Increased salaries. Survey respondents had a wide range of experience in marketing. Nearly half had more than 10 years of experience and 60% had more than seven years in the profession.

When looking at the average compensation for various levels of experience, the survey found that compensation increased, on average, consistently at each stage after the third year. 

After seven years, the bump in pay was most dramatic, climbing from $118K, on average, for marketers in their sixth and seventh years, up to $154K for those in their eighth and ninth years.

Dig deeper: Marketing technologists earn more on average than marketers

Promotions. More than three-quarters of respondents were promoted in the last two years, either within their organization or as a result of changing jobs. This was true for marketers at all management levels.

At the managers/staff level, more promotions came in the first year. For directors and above, more promotions were awarded after the first year than for lower-level marketers.

Why we care. The vast majority of marketers report that they are at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs, and the data about pay increases and promotions support these sentiments.

The opportunity for advancement in a competitive job market also explains the high churn rate. In this context, switching jobs isn’t a result of job dissatisfaction so much as on way by which employees gain promotions.

Churn accelerated in 2022. More than 70% of respondents said they noticed an increase in churn at their organization in the last year.

Nearly a third said that the increase of churn was significant, as opposed to a moderate increase.

The survey. The survey, conducted jointly by MarTech and chiefmartec.com, was taken by 419 marketers in December 2022 and January 2023; 401 of those provided salary information. Nearly 70% (286) respondents live in North America; 15% (63) live in Western Europe. The report’s conclusions are limited to responses from those individuals only. Others were excluded due to the limited number.

Respondents answered more than 20 questions related to career roles, salary, technology and job satisfaction and challenges/frustrations. They were from all job levels — C-suite to managers and staff.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

The post Frequent promotions and salary increases contribute to thriving martech careers appeared first on MarTech.

Q: How did you get to where you are today?
A: My career path has been an irregular one, to say the very least. I have a degree in English, which certainly works towards marketing, but since I work in marketing technology, it kind of makes less sense to most people. After I did my degree, I worked a lot in early internet communications, like the keyword stuffing type of online articles and things to bring people in to websites.

I moved more into generalized content and then, through the recommendation of my husband, into more of an analytics role. This made use of some additional training for understanding programming languages, not necessarily being able to be a programmer but to understand the context around them. And from that moving into more specific digital marketing, which is very data-driven experience. 

Dig deeper: Marketing technologists are well-rewarded

I’ve been working in really highly privacy-focused marketing, for Medicare and Medicaid organizations before getting into the role that I am in now, which is specific to marketing technology, but also still very much focused on the privacy operations kind of element of marketing. 

I wouldn’t necessarily call myself truly a marketer because I don’t do any of the brand content, SEO, e-mail, marketing automation or anything like that. It’s more of the foundational elements 

Q: What’s the biggest challenge for martech?

A: The biggest issue that I’ve seen in marketing technology truly [at previous places I’ve worked] is a lack of understanding and awareness of the value at the leadership level. In my experience a lot of leadership will be very operations focused. It’s kind of like the short term wins focus mentality. The thought they have about marketing is that marketers make things pretty. It’s a long-term perception that marketing and advertising are the same thing, which they are not. 

Bringing in the data and the analytics is a really important layer that a lot of leadership are only just starting to understand. Not having that understanding means that they don’t give the buy in, they don’t invest in the technologies. They don’t think about the foundational marketing tool strategies or governance strategies and things like that. 

Dig deeper: 20 ways to make your marketing team more productive

As a result, it winds up being very reactive when it comes to marketing technology. That’s not the case with the work that I’m currently doing because [Enterprise has] much more of a proactive take on the importance of marketing technology. They’re starting to really look at it as an important foundational element and putting in the budget. 

Q: I know you want to expand your team, are you having trouble finding people with the skills you need?

A: Yes. The reason why there are very few people who can do marketing technology in the way that it needs to be done is because we tend to be very much unicorns. There’s a certain subset of us who grew up with the internet and who saw the changes and worked in them. 

I personally have worked in just about every part of digital marketing technology and digital marketing from content to wireframing websites, to implementation, access management, implementation of advertising and implementation of an analytics platform. Because I’ve had this much experience, I’m able to look at the privacy operations part of it from a very different lens. 

That’s the way things went for every member of my team. We’ve got some members of the team to focus on tagging and analytics operations, some that focus on site speed, some that focus specifically on how best to optimize content on the site.  Each of us went kind of in our very, very unique paths and there’s not a lot of people who have that experience or knowledge or even interest in doing many different things to get that one particular focus.

There is the potential for that to happen with training, but I think it will take some time. It will also take a unique subset of individuals who are interested in both marketing and technology and are willing to do that super deep dive into one very specific area. It’s hard to be a generalist in marketing technology. You definitely have to be a specialist to really do the work that we do well.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

The post MarTech Salary and Career: Saidah Abdulhaqq on the making of a unicorn appeared first on MarTech.

Those members of the marketing operations team more focused on tech and operations (“maestros”) than the design and execution of campaigns earned, on average, $25,000 more than their campaign-focused peers.

More maestros promoted. A marginally higher proportion of maestros were more likely to have been promoted over the last year than marketers (49% vs. 46%); and 61% of maestros said “demonstrating/proving a positive impact on the business from martech” was the most rewarding aspect of their job (against 58% of general marketers).

Responding to these findings, Scott Brinker said:

Marketers design and run campaigns. Maestroes manage and integrate the stack, design
the processes and workflows, and — importantly — train and support marketing staff on using martech.
Maestros are the giants whose shoulders marketers stand upon.

Scott Brinker, VP Platform Ecosystem at HubSpot and Editor at chiefmartec.com

Dig deeper: What is marketing operations and who are MOps professionals?

Graduate degrees no impact. It was no surprise that, the larger the employer the higher the compensation. Perhaps less predictably, having a graduate degree had no impact on salary. Directors earned, on average, much more than managers and other staff.

Why we care. It’s important to us to take the industry’s pulse each year and track the opportunities opening up for marketers and maestros and their levels of satisfaction with their work, their compensation and their promotion prospects.

What we clearly see is an industry in which two predominant self-identified types are emerging — those individuals primarily concerned with operations and techology and those primarily concerned with devising and executing campaigns. The place where those professional capabilities intersect is what we call — martech.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

The survey. The survey, conducted jointly by MarTech and chiefmartec.com, was taken by 419 marketers in December 2022 and January 2023; 401 of those provided salary information. Nearly 70% (286) respondents live in North America; 15% (63) live in Western Europe. The report’s conclusions are limited to responses from those individuals only. Others were excluded due to the limited number.

Respondents answered more than 20 questions related to career roles, salary, technology and job satisfaction and challenges/frustrations. They were from all job levels — C-suite to managers and staff.

The post Marketing technologists are well-rewarded appeared first on MarTech.

Nearly 65% of those surveyed defined their organizational roles as assisting marketing, such as “Marketing Technology/Technologist” or “Marketing Operations”

“Marketing technology and operations pros are a legitimate profession that’s different than traditional marketing roles,” Chief Martec Scott Brinker says in the report. “They’re a part of marketing  — martech is marketing  — but with their own identity and specialization.”

An astounding 74% of marketing technologists reported being at least somewhat satisfied with their jobs. That number was the same at all job levels.

This year’s survey

The survey, conducted jointly by MarTech and chiefmartec.com, was taken by 419 marketers in December 2022 and January 2023; 401 of those provided salary information. Nearly 70% (286) respondents live in North America; 15% (63) live in Western Europe. The report’s conclusions are limited to responses from those individuals only. Others were excluded due to the limited number.

Respondents answered more than 20 questions related to career roles, salary, technology and job satisfaction and challenges/frustrations. They were from all job levels — C-suite to managers and staff.

Gender inequality improvement

There’s good news hidden in the bad news about the pay inequality between men and women. This year women earned an average of 24% less than men ($116,000 versus $143,000). However, that’s a lot better than last year’s 30%. Also, this year found 50% of women were promoted, as opposed to 46% of men.

Other key takeaways:

• Average isn’t bad: The average salary was $138,000. For VP/C-level leaders the average was about $195,000; for marketing staff it was just over $95,000.
• More degrees, not more money: Mar tech professionals are nearly three times more likely to have an advanced degree than the general population (37% versus 13%). However, the grad school graduates earned about the same as those with a four-year degree.
• Big companies pay bigger bucks: Average salaries for those at companies with 500 or more employees: $152,000. For those at companies with fewer employees it was $120,000. 
• Seven (years) is the lucky number: As you might expect compensation increases the more experience you have, with the most pronounced increase coming after year seven of employment.

Thank you for your help

We are very grateful to those of you who completed the survey. We send special thanks to those who agreed to be interviewed. Some of their comments, as well as Scott Brinker’s commentary can be found in the survey itself. We’ll be digging deeper into the survey results in the days to come.

Download the survey here (no registration required).

The post MarTech Salary and Career Survey shows a profession coming into its own appeared first on MarTech.

But the importance of digital marketing looks unlikely to recede. With it comes increased emphasis on digital content and digital experience, the expansion of ecommerce across almost every vertical and the interest in virtual events. What does that mean? You guessed it: the growing importance of the digital martech stack,

The “great marketing reboot.” We’re also seeing big changes on the human side of marketing. Many marketing professionals have left the space; others have switched from regular positions to freelance or contract work. There are big opportunities — as well as challenges — for people in the early stages of their careers, whether as marketers or marketing operations professionals.

Data scientist and MarTech contributor Chris Penn calls this the “great marketing reboot.” We’ve introduced a new question into this edition of the survey asking if you’re witnessing the same phenomenon, whether in your own marketing organization or others.

Follow the money. We’re also asking, as always, whether circumstances are impacting salaries, in positive or negative ways, as well as your career trajectories.

As before, we’re partnering with Scott Brinker and chiefmartec.com to field the survey. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete, and we look forward to sharing the results in the New Year.

The post How marketing compensation and roles are changing: Take the MarTech Salary and Career Survey appeared first on MarTech.

Digital marketing talent—especially those specializing in SEO, content, email marketing, and PPC—remains in top demand.

With 92% of hiring managers reporting difficulties finding skilled talent, it’s never been a better time to be a qualified job seeker.  If you’re looking to advance your career, change jobs, or expand your digital marketing team, Conductor’s 2023 Digital Marketing Salary Guide has you covered.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download Conductor’s 2023 Digital Marketing Salary Guide & Hiring Trends Report for access to:

• Exclusive salary range benchmark data
• In-depth hiring trend research
• Additional recruiting trends and retention strategies

The post The 2023 Digital Marketing Salary Guide is here! appeared first on MarTech.

However, most likely, you don’t need a CMO. At least, not yet. 

Why argue against hiring such a pivotal figure in your C-suite? There are plenty of reasons to hold off on hiring an in-house CMO, ranging from the effect on your bottom line to a CMO’s inability to build successful marketing efforts without an established sales cycle to extrapolate from — let alone a team to build out content and campaigns.

For companies and funded startups under $10M in revenue who are seeking demand generation marketing, the following information on fractional leaders should be helpful.

What is a chief marketing officer (CMO)?

Before we dive too far into the conversation about why you might not need to hire a CMO just yet, let’s establish a baseline. What is a CMO? What do they do? How does their presence (or lack thereof) affect different organizations?

Many business owners, CEOs and other decision-makers will find that the role of the CMO has evolved a great deal in recent years. Once upon a time, CMOs were just experienced marketing professionals who oversaw the marketing department and liaised with other executives. There was a lot of trial and error and measuring results was more than a little challenging.

All that has changed with the advent of digital tools and modern marketing methods. Today, CMO positions are more than just higher-level marketing supervisors. They blend technology with traditional marketing capabilities while thriving in a chaotic, ever-changing environment and masters of creating demand. Once separate from other executives, CMOs are now part of the C-suite and can help you achieve strategic goals.

Consultants vs. CMOs

Marketing consultants have their place but are quite different than CMOs. Consultants tend to focus on a very specific, niche area to help you get out of the mud, so to speak. (Like D2C marketing.) Full-time and fractional CMOs are there for the long haul, solving a multitude of problems you have and avoiding ones you don’t have yet. 

In the case of a brand strategy consultant, a strategic marketer can make good sense, since branding, for example, is typically a big, “one-time” thing that you establish and continue to adhere to and build out indefinitely.

Of course, CMOs can consult on specific needs. But most often, they’re more interested in being part of a bigger solution, like go-to-market planning and execution that achieves your business growth plan.

Responsibilities of a chief marketing officer

What does a CMO do? Today, they have four primary roles within the organization. Regardless if they focus on products or services, they:

• Take specific actions to drive growth.
• Are an innovation catalyst.
• Are a capability builder.
• Are your brand’s storyteller. 

Let’s take a closer look at each of the main chief marketing officer responsibilities.

Growth driver

CMOs are responsible for creating and managing a profitable growth strategy. However, many do not feel prepared to actually drive growth in important areas like market share and gross margin. 

This disconnect between responsibility and ability can create big problems for organizations that are relying on their CMOs to help them grow.

Change agent

Innovation is critical to creating stand-out brands and marketing collateral that truly moves the needle. However, it’s not just a vision that must be harnessed to fuel innovation and forward momentum.

It also requires data and intelligence, which means the CMO must be tied into relevant data streams and those often lie outside the traditional boundaries of the marketing department. Dig deeper into the need for innovation and the challenge surrounding it.

Brand storyteller

I will admit, branding can be a big departure point between CMOs. There are mostly numbers-focused CMOs — and for billion-dollar brands milking a cash cow, that’s probably perfect. 

But for SMBs and mid-tiers? You need a storyteller. Brand storytellers create and tell your brand’s story through multiple channels and touchpoints. 

The CMO must act as both a storyteller and an orchestra director, ensuring that all outreach efforts, customer service efforts and the entire customer experience communicates the story you want to tell. Interested in learning more about storytelling for your brand? Check out my piece, How to be charismatic: Marketing with charm, heart and personality.

Capabilities architect

CMOs must also be capability builders. Because of the need for technology, they are centrally involved in the purchase of new tech that will have wide-ranging effects across the entire organization over time and help you avoid the headache of technology. 

To support those roles, CMOs have a laundry list of responsibilities that includes the following:

• Creating and implementing marketing campaigns.
• Overseeing market research.
• Analyzing metrics.
• Overseeing all PR and public-facing communications.
• Working closely with other members of the C-suite.
• Balancing strategic vs. tactical initiatives.

Technology has not only revolutionized the role of the CMO, but also the consumer experience. That means CMOs must now be able to manage all aspects of the business related to customer expectations and service, not just heading up marketing campaigns. 

It’s a fundamental shift from product-centric roles to customer-centric processes. It also means there is a consistent need for innovation in terms of marketing and outreach and greater importance placed on creating a seamless customer experience. 

We also need to respect the fact that a good CMO will come with a vetted, outsourced marketing department or has the capacity of building out a great marketing team, if need be. 

Their understanding of strategy vs. tactics will make all the difference in prioritizing your marketing needs.

​Pulling right from the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS) “rocks, pebbles, sand” analogy… If you fill a jar with large rocks first, the sand easily slips into all the spaces. But if you put all the niche details in the jar first (sand!), the rocks will be harder to fit later. 

Most companies focus on too many objectives at once. However, it is more efficient to focus on the big, strategic stuff (rocks) first and everything else (pebbles and sand) will follow. In marketing, focusing on rocks is a vital tactic to meet your business’s essential needs.

Dig deeper: 5 CMO tips to transform marketing operations from killer to dream fulfiller

Qualifications of a CMO

To uphold and fulfill CMO roles and responsibilities within the organization, a chief marketing officer should have specific qualifications. These include:

• A bachelor’s degree in business administration or a related field, at a minimum.
• A minimum of 10 years of experience in marketing departments, including significant marketing leadership experience. Big advertising agency experience is also a plus.
• A wide range of technical skills that apply to marketing, including SEO, software design, social media channel lead generation, sales management technology, CRMs and email, for instance.
• Strong interpersonal, communication and leadership skills.

CMO salary and pay structure

No discussion of why your organization doesn’t need a full-time CMO just yet would be complete without touching on pay and salary structure. 

PayScale points out that CMOs today earn $89,000 to $273,000 per year, a not inconsequential amount for startups and SMBs that need to maximize profitability to focus on growth and agility. The average is $175,000. Of course, that will vary depending on whether the CMO is in a B2B or B2C or even a D2C brand.

Why you don’t need a CMO yet

Most startup companies don’t need a CMO. In fact, they probably can’t afford one. Small businesses struggle to turn a profit, so paying a large salary to a full-time, in-house chief marketing officer doesn’t make a lot of financial sense. 

It’s also important to point out that early-stage companies rarely have the replicability that most CMOs need to do their jobs correctly. 

Maybe marketing agencies can fill that gap for a while. But over time, you want someone who really understands the levers that make your business grow short and long term. 

Dig deeper: Is it time to say good-bye to the CMO role or just give it a new acronym?

When to hire a CMO

Product launches can be a perfect moment to take that plunge, for example, but it can be incredibly difficult to tell when it’s time to finally decide to hire a dedicated, in-house CMO. After all, if your company is earning less than $10 million, there’s rarely a need for a full-time professional in this role. The sheer cost is the primary downside. 

There’s also the fact that most CMOs require an existing pattern from which to extrapolate — think of an established sales cycle. Startups and small businesses usually lack that kind of history, denying most conventional CMOs the tools they require. 

Does that mean you need to fly by the seat of your pants? Should the CEO handle all the marketing-related decisions? Who’s responsible for all the duties the CMO traditionally shoulders in an organization that doesn’t yet need to hire a full-time professional? How do you make informed marketing decisions that allow you to compete with more established firms?

The answer is simple. Hire a fractional CMO, instead.

What is a fractional chief marketing officer?

Fractional leadership is nothing new. You most likely have encountered a fractional CFO or legal counsel on a need-to-use basis.

A part-time CMO is an unconventional type of chief marketing officer. In this situation, the CMO only works with your organization on a freelance basis. They are usually found in early-stage startups because they are much more affordable.

A virtual CMO usually emphasizes digital marketing and strategy. The position, typically held by someone with experience in social media, content creation, advertising and digital media, is an emerging role in marketing. Don’t feel too bad if it’s unfamiliar to you.

Another way of looking at it is this: A fractional chief marketing officer is a CMO who does not have a full-time position, but nevertheless has the authority to lead and manage your branding, marketing and advertising efforts. They also become a member of your C-suite with the primary responsibility of overseeing all marketing functions, including advertising, public relations, sales promotion and customer service.

CMOs are typically pictured working for billion-dollar brands, yet I find that even the smallest companies need the same thinking implemented just as the biggest companies do. This is why I’ve offered fractional CMO services for my own clients who are seeking longer-term support, whether we run projects through my agency or not.

The CMO spot is a strategic position, so a small company just getting started may not need full-time strategy assistance. Instead, they will benefit more from a quarterly strategy set-up around tactics for internal marketers to execute with a CMO supervising their marketing team. The good news is that a fractional CMO can come in, design everything and set your organization on a course for success and they don’t have to be behind a desk for 40 hours each week to achieve that goal.

At the $3M–$5M revenue mark is where companies start to develop a clear sales cycle and a traditional CMO can step in and drive. However, it’s not unusual for (non-venture funded) companies to take years to achieve $1M–$3M, much less $5M. A fractional CMO can help you get there in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost.

This is important because your content marketing needs to focus on that timeline to speed up the sales cycle. Or if you’re an ecommerce, getting your entire funnel to perform flawlessly and automatically. Quite often, once that is addressed, you may not need a CMO until you are ready for the next phase of growth, like growing from $10M to $50M.

What is the difference between the role of the CMO and a marketing director?

Do you require a CMO, though? Couldn’t a marketing director do the same job?

Actually, the chief marketing officer and marketing director are two very different positions, with drastically different responsibilities and required skills. 

For one thing, a CMO is an executive, whereas a marketing director is not. A CMO also needs to keep pace with other C-suite members, while a marketing director does not. Finally, a CMO has many of the same responsibilities as a marketing director, but also several different ones.

A fractional CMO does all of the above. Quite often, they bring with them an experienced marketing team that can execute things as needed.

Defining your need and choosing the right partner

Whether you need full-time or part-time help is really a matter of where you’re at in terms of business growth, as well as your capacity to meet and match that growth. It may be tempting to hire fresh, affordable talent that’s easy on your cash flow. 

But, again, if finding the multipliers in your business growth more quickly matters to you right now, you may be better off with a seasoned and experienced marketing head who can make a few key decisions out of the gate that can produce multipliers of 10x and as high as 50x ROI. 

At least from my own experience, I know this to be the case. This means that cost is irrelevant since that talent pays for itself.

Before you seek a CMO for hire, understand that creative execution is more important than tech at the beginning of your marketing. You need to nail your story first. I’ve seen that journey take a company years to resolve. 

The right partner can help you get there 10 times faster than if you try to go it alone. Some CMOs know how to develop your brand story, which is the most critical part until you’re a billion-dollar brand.

That said, be aware that a majority of CMOs focus more on metrics based on predictable flow, which is reporting the outcome. The outcome can only be as strong as what you put into it. Hopefully, that means building brand experience.

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