The Key Roles & Responsibilities Of A Chief Marketing Officer

Are you thinking it’s time to hire a marketing leader to drive growth, but you’re not exactly sure what they should do? If so, this episode is for you. Whether you are looking to hire a Chief Marketing Officer, part-time or full-time, I’m going to break down what they should be responsible for. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe you must remove your revenue roadblocks if you want to accelerate growth and get where you want to go faster. Also, that marketing shouldn’t be difficult. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. Super excited to dig into this with you today.

Now, the job of a CMO or a Chief Marketing Officer is to orchestrate your company’s marketing efforts. They are not tactical people. They are strategic. So please do not hire a CMO and ask them to create social posts or write blog content. It is a complete and utter waste of their talent and your money because you could be paying somebody far less to do that work. So if that’s the case, what the heck should they be doing? I’m going to run through the six roles of a CMO or a Chief Marketing Officer with you right now. This is a super short, tactical, hopefully a very helpful episode for you. But here are the six roles of a CMO.

The 6 Roles and Responsibilities of a Chief Marketing Officer

One, strategic planning. What the heck is strategic planning? It is defining the marketing vision of your company. This is where we are outlining your goals, your objectives, and actually creating your plan or your roadmap of what you are going to do to get from where you currently are to where you want to be. Strategic planning, in my mind also means that we’re looking to make sure that you’ve got the fundamentals in place. Have you really honed in on your target market? Do you understand who your ideal clients are within that market? Do you have a very strong marketing message that is going to engage and attract those ideal clients? And are your services and your offers in alignment with that market? If you do not have those fundamentals in place and you’re just jumping right to tactics, you’re putting the cart before the horse, you’re going to waste time and you’re going to waste money. That is what is happening in the strategic planning process. Super, super important.

Second role of a CMO is brand management. It is the CMO’s role to increase the perceived value of your brand, of your company, and build a loyal customer base that fuels profit. Overseeing your overall brand and are the activities that we are doing and implementing from marketing standpoint, from a sales standpoint, are those supporting the brand and building the brand in a way that we want it to be built and we want it to be perceived.

Number three is a CMO oversees your marketing campaigns. They oversee the implementation and the execution of those campaigns. It does not mean that they are actually doing the implementation work. There are plenty of great implementers. And like I said, if you are paying a CMO to do implementation work, you are paying too much for the implementation work that is being done. You can hire other people, you can hire in-house, you can outsource it to freelancers, you can hire a marketing agency. Far better use of your marketing dollars to have somebody else do the implementation. But it is the CMO’s role to oversee that and make sure that it is happening and to hold people accountable.

Number four is analyze the data and frankly, hone in on what data is most important. There are so many marketing metrics. It can be just information overload. Which marketing metrics matter? So many people have a hard time really honing in on the right marketing metrics. And because of that, they either don’t track them or they track the wrong metrics, which means you don’t have the information you need to make great decisions about what course corrections you need to make to just continually optimize your marketing efforts. So it is the CMO’s role to outline which metrics should be tracked and then analyze that data and interpret what it actually means and use that to help guide the decisions that you need to make for your marketing to continually be optimized and help you get you where you want to go.

Fifth job, fifth role of a CMO or a Chief Marketing Officer is budget management. It is the CMO’s role to put that budget together, your marketing budget, how much are you going to be spending, and where that budget should be invested and make sure that you are on budget. It’s their job.

Number six is team management. That can be, again, in-house. It can be outsourced, whether to a freelancer or an agency or a combination of all three of those. But it is the CMO’s role to manage the team, keep everybody on the same page, hold people accountable, and make sure that all the pieces are working together to help you get where you want to go. So team management, another key role.

Conclusion: The Key Roles & Responsibilities Of A Chief Marketing Officer

So as I go through those six, and again, let me run through them one more time, strategic planning, brand management, overseeing marketing campaigns, analyzing the marketing data, budget management, and team management. Those are the six roles of a CMO. If you are the owner, owner of a company and you are running marketing with one of the five, six plates, however many plates you’re spinning, marketing is one of those. Be honest. Are you really doing all six of those things? Do you have the skills to do it? If you don’t, it’s okay. There’s plenty of people that are in that space, but it just means that it might be time to look at hiring a Chief Marketing Officer. And again, you don’t need to just jump over the gap and hire somebody full-time for this. If you’re not ready for that, that’s where people like me come into play as a fractional, outsourced or part time CMO. Somebody like me can jump in, oversee your marketing efforts so that you can have somebody that’s doing all six of these things for you sitting on your side of the table looking out for your marketing investment as if it is their own to help you get where you want to go. You don’t need to hire somebody full-time. You can hire somebody part-time on a fractional basis. But if you’re investing in marketing and you don’t have somebody that can handle all six of these roles, then there’s an issue. You’ve got some gaps that need to be filled. By the way, one of the biggest mistakes I see businesses make is they hire a marketing agency thinking that they’re going to get all six of these things done. If you are working with a marketing agency, you’re lucky if you’re getting number three and six, which is implementation of marketing campaigns and analyzing the data. Sometimes they’re analyzing the data, sometimes they’re giving you the data that’s not really that important. They’re absolutely doing marketing campaign implementation, but who’s actually overseeing the implementation and holding them accountable? That’s the big question. So please don’t make that mistake. Marketing implementation really needs to be separate from marketing strategy, planning, leadership and management. Now, that’s the subject for another podcast episode, which I will do, I promise you. But these are the six rules of a CMO. If you are investing in marketing and you’re not getting this currently, it’s time to look. Either look at hiring full-time. If you’re in that boat and you really need a full-time, but if you’re not in that boat, most companies in that 2-20 million range do not need a full-time CMO. Look at hiring somebody part-time or on a fractional basis.

If you’ve got questions about this, you can always reach out and connect with me over at our website, which is Rialtomarketing.com. That’s R-I-A-L-T-OMarketing.com. Another tool I’ve got for you is over at RevenueRoadblockScorecard.com. If you want to accelerate growth and get where you want to go faster, you have to remove your Revenue Roadblocks. If you want to know which of the nine Revenue Roblox are slowing down your growth, you can do that at RevenueRoadblockScorecard.com It takes less than five minutes. Head over there, check it out. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I really appreciate you and I hope you got a ton of value from this and I look forward to connecting with you again soon. Till next time, take care.