Get the Benefits and Stay Within Budget
As we celebrate our seventh year in business, we are gratified to see how the concept of “Fractional CMO” is gaining wide acceptance and popularity. When we started our firm, the term “Fractional CMO” was brand new and unfamiliar. Back then, I would tell business owners that they don’t have to choose between all or nothing – “You can ‘rent’ me”, I often said.
Many companies, especially small to mid-sized ones, cannot afford or justify in their budget the hiring of a full-time Chief Marketing Officer (or Director of Marketing) for their organization.
As reported by Salary.com, in 2021, in the United States, the median yearly salary for a full-time CMO was over $250,000. However, the benefits of having an experienced and well educated CMO are much needed in today’s competitive and challenging business environment. The challenge these businesses face is how to get the benefits of a CMO and stay within the budget.
Over the years, I have shared with you the many benefits of hiring a Fractional CMO – from the planning of your strategy to overseeing the implementation and execution of your marketing efforts. I am happy to share with you that many more companies are now realizing the advantages, and are hiring Fractional CMOs to help them take their businesses to higher levels of success.
A recent article in Forbes Magazine titled “The Benefits Of Hiring A Fractional CMO (And How To Choose One)” does a good job summarizing the reasons for and benefits of having a Fractional CMO. There are additional reasons and benefits that are specific to your type of business, and we will be happy to discuss them with you.
If you are interested in accelerating growth and increasing profits, consider enhancing your current team with a marketing leader like Fractional CMO & Marketing. Call us to review challenges your organization is facing and learn how we can help!
Duke Merhavy, MBA, Ph.D.
President & Chief Marketing Officer
What Is Fractional CMO & Marketing?
Fractional CMO & Marketing is ‘Your Outsourced Marketing Department’ when you need expert marketing leadership and marketing services to accelerate growth and improve profitability, but you’re not quite ready to hire a full-time Chief Marketing Officer or your own marketing department.
Our unique arrangement is the most efficient, innovative, and cost-effective formula for you. Click on the image to the left to watch a short video.
We Help When You Need To:
- Generate more of the right kind of leads
- Close more sales faster
- Get repeat sales
- Formulate a more effective message
- Produce powerful sales tools
- Establish brand awareness, recognition, and preference
- Differentiate your brand from the competition
- Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Develop lasting relationships with customers
- Introduce new products
Podcast Series: 2022 Podcast Predictions (Part 3)
By Ginger Mace, Editor and Producer
Back in 2020, we started our Podcast Series of articles. Intro to Podcasts discussed the five main formats, and Why You Should Consider Starting a Podcast outlined 3 benefits to your business of doing so. These audio – and sometimes video – content wonders aren’t going away anytime soon, but what can we expect in 2022?
Marketing Your Podcast Will Be More Important
Considered a young industry, podcasting is still going through growing pains. Those who create the content must be aware of the platforms to advertise on, their metrics, and the copywriting used to attract listeners.
Previously, podcasts have grown rather organically and without too much strategy or planning, but in 2022, the purposeful marketing of them is expected to increase. The options for fans are abundant, so to attract listeners who are engaged, podcasters will have to be more aware of strategy and work harder to find and keep their audiences.
Crowdsourcing for Content
Yes, there are tons of podcasts, but the market is not even close to saturated. Finding your niche is the best bet for success, and what better way to figure out what your audience wants to hear than to ask? Starting in 2022, it is expected that more feedback will be solicited to ensure podcasters are really connecting to their audiences with the content being published. Social media offers a robust way to find out this information, with options like posting an open-ended question, poll, yes/no questions, surveys, or inviting opinions and reviews to be submitted. The results will help guide future content creation and work to ensure a captive and engaged listener base.
Solutions for Data-Driven Podcast Analytics (Including ROI)
The library of podcasts is vast, and there is always room for more. However, the sheer volume of options makes finding your specific niche – and the audience it will resonate with – all the more important. This is where analytics and data come in, as they allow decisions about your podcast to be based on numbers rather than emotions or your own personal preferences. After all, a common mistake of those eager to get behind a microphone and broadcast is to think that just because they enjoy particular topics, the listeners they want will also. Another frequent misstep is to continue investing time, money, and effort into a venture or strategy that isn’t “bringing home the bacon”. While it usually does take considerable resources to get podcasts to the point of profitability, without knowing your ROI (return on investment), you won’t be able to gauge whether or not you’re gaining ground toward the greenbacks… or losing it.
Unfortunately, the availability of metrics and data for podcast performance is not near the level of what’s accessible for other forms of content like blogs and videos. Experts in the industry believe that 2022 will bring more solutions and resources to help podcasters and brands that utilize podcasts to evaluate and nurture these online endeavors.
Podcasting Platforms and Exclusivity
You might have heard about Joe Rogan’s deal with Spotify, but if not, we give it a quick overview in our previous Intro to Podcasts article. The multi-year deal brought his highly successful podcast to Spotify in May 2020, and in September of that year, new episodes could only be found there (per the terms of the deal). Looking to move beyond just a music streaming platform, Spotify realized that its technology could stream voices that were talking too, and it entered the big-time podcast game with a bang, bringing The Joe Rogan Experience into the fold. In 2021, the streamer didn’t slow down, acquiring more and more podcast shows (like Call Her Daddy and Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert) and companies (such as Podz and Findaway). Not to be outdone, Amazon bought exclusive rights to SmartLess, hosted by comedy and acting favorites Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, and Sean Hayes. Last year, Apple introduced a podcast subscription platform with monetization for creators, and 2022 is likely to bring more in this industry from the company.
The exclusivity arrangements were all big, expensive deals worth several dozens of millions of dollars each. But were they even that risky or bold for juggernauts like Spotify and Amazon to invest in, considering the public’s fascination with famous people and that these celebrity hosts bring in their celebrity friends, co-stars, and contacts as guests? Actually… believe it or not, maybe it was. It looks like we’ll see more podcast shows getting scooped for exclusivity in 2022, but part of what has made podcasts so successful is the number of platforms and avenues of listening available.
Time will tell how currently successful podcasts without the celebrity influence will do when there’s only one place to go to listen, but it seems The Joe Rogan Experience might have been affected from the Spotify exclusivity, based on an August 2021 investigation by The Verge (which “examine[s] how technology will change life in the future…” according to the website). Spotify doesn’t release stats on podcasts, so using Social Blade to track Twitter follower bumps after guests appeared on the podcast, The Verge examined the numbers between December 2019 and July 2021 (pre-exclusivity and post-exclusivity) for every guest with fewer than 500,000 followers right before their episode aired. This was done to exclude bigger names (like celebrities), as it was more likely that these guests would bring social influence to Rogan, not the other way around. In a nutshell, it seems the move to only Spotify has diminished the promotional value of The Joe Rogan Experience.
Pre-exclusivity, generally speaking, over the 7 days subsequent to the release date of their appearance, guests would see an influx of about 4,000 new Twitter followers each, with some guests enjoying a whopping increase of 18,000 over the same time period. Even though other factors may have been at play, such as those Rogan interviewed releasing a new movie or another project they wanted publicity for, a surge in Twitter followers after being on The Joe Rogan Experience was consistent. Post-exclusivity, the number dropped in half to approximately 2,000. This implies a drop in listeners, according to The Verge.
Can this particular result be attributed only to the move to just Spotify hosting the show? Like any good investigators, those conducting the research realized there could be other reasons. Perhaps some of the audience who became fans of the podcast during the first year of the pandemic stopped listening in the first half of 2021, or fans of Rogan’s could have been using Twitter less than they had been around December 2019. But it cannot be denied that the timing of the seemingly decreased influence lines up with the transition from different platforms hosting the podcast to only one doing so exclusively. It doesn’t seem a far stretch to surmise that a large chunk of devoted, enthusiastic, engaged fans of The Joe Rogan Experience has been lost in the change.
Marketing Lingo: Editorial Calendar
An editorial calendar visually lays out content plans according to a time frame (whether monthly, weekly, or daily). It helps organize and schedule the types of content being released, the channels it will go through, who in your organization will be putting it together, and the planned dates for publishing. Consider it a road map for content creation, which should include topics to be covered, buyer personas to target, the process to approve content, and the frequency of publication that will best support strategy, upcoming events, goals, and other company-specific interests. A simple spreadsheet or calendar event entries can house your editorial calendar, but there are also apps designed for creating and managing them.
* ‘Marketing Lingo’ is a regular column in which we define, or otherwise explain, terms often used in marketing but not necessarily correctly or properly by some
😲 Bad Logo Designs: Mama’s Baking
This unfortunate logo belongs to Mama’s Baking, a café in Greece. The decapitated head and missing arms are odd choices, and bring to mind some terribly tragic accident involving poor, hardworking Mama toiling away in the kitchen and an excessively sharp bench scraper or the dough hook from a stand mixer gone wild. Surely the café is trying to tap into childhood memories of their customers’ moms baking up delicious treats, but we’re not so sure the more-than-ample bosom is an image that anyone wants to go with those memories of their own mother.
The final visual insult involves the lower half of the logo, and depending on what you see when you view it, confusion or horror arises. Is Mama standing in front of an open-flame stove? Is Mama’s clothing on fire? Did Mama have a horrible combination kitchen accident that decapitated her, amputated both of her arms at the collarbone, and set her clothes on fire?
Mama’s Baking is still using this imagery today, a look at the eatery’s social media revealed. There’s a lot we’d change about this logo! If you’d like us to take a look at yours, and find out how we can help take your business to the next level, get in touch with us today.
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Call us at 888-412-2236 or use the button below to request a complimentary Marketing Needs Assessment, or to ask us a question regarding your most pressing marketing or sales challenges.
