I want to really unpack something that came up from a conversation with a client just yesterday. I was talking to them about an A/B split test we did on a campaign.

This is something, if you’re not familiar with A/B split testing, an A/B split test is effectively running maybe some traffic to a particular landing page that maybe will serve a different landing page for 50% of the traffic and another landing page for 50%, and we’ll see what the conversion’s like. And you can do A/B split tests on things like email subject lines and all kinds of different things. If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re a CEO, founder or fractional CMO, you should really know what an A/B split test is.

But fundamentally, I have talked to a lot of clients over the years, they’ve wanted to do this. This particular client, very good size email list, we took a tranche of 15,000 people from the mailing list and we put them through this A/B split test.

And there was a gut feel from the owner and founder of the business that one side of this split test would win. And under my kind of breath and behind the scenes, I disagreed with him completely and I thought the other one would run. But I didn’t really voice it, because what I want to do is I want the data to actually tell us.

We ran this A/B split test for 14 days for these 15,000 people, and we saw double the conversion on my side, let’s call it A, than his gut feel, which was B. And we were able to prove with real data that this worked.

This is a really important thing. As a fractional CMO, you are there to bring marketing leadership. Founders and CEOs are amazing people. They’re entrepreneurs, they have ideas. They just go get it and it’s just like, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. But sometimes that can exhaust a marketing team. That can exhaust a marketing director. That can really fatigue the activity within the business, because what sometimes happens is there’s an idea on a Friday afternoon that needs to be implemented before close of day, ready for Monday morning, because they just had an idea.

And whilst we want to honour, respect, and choose to, you know, be led by the CEO and founder of the organisation that we’re working with, a fractional CMO’s role is to kind of pull the reins on some of these things sometimes and just pull back.

The idea around this A/B split test came from me basically saying, well, how do we know that that idea is going to work? His gut feel for this promotion that could have gone out to hundreds of thousands of people? We had this sort of, he had this gut feel that this promotion would work in this particular way, and I said, well, let’s just, can we just put a pin in that for 14 days? Let’s just run a test with a segment of non-buyers, and let’s send that segment of non-buyers the same message, but send them to a page that then has a split test around that particular offer. And we’re going to test your gut feel, but I also feel like we need to test it against something else that it was almost like the direct opposite.

And like I said, the conversion was amazing. The conversion on A, from those 15,000 was around 4%. And the conversion on B, which was his gut feel, was around 1.2%. And that for me, it was enough data to be able to say to the rest of the customer list, we need to now plan a campaign around A, because it’s proved that it works that way.

If you do an A/B split test like this, you need good numbers. If we’d done it maybe on a sample of around a 1,000, we probably would not have got the statistical data enough to be able to make the intelligent call for this. And what I mean by that is sometimes data can be skewed if you don’t have enough of a data set to be able to actually help people deduce what’s going on. You can have statistical anomalies within a data set. So if the data set is too small, then you need to think about getting that data set a little bit bigger.

Honestly, an A/B split test, for instance, on email marketing for email headlines, throw that A/B split test at 10,000 records before you make a decision. A campaign and an offer like this, again, 10,000 is a really good sweet spot for people to be able to come in, see, and you’re not going to get as many statistical anomalies in this.

This is just from my own experience over years of doing this, with different clients in different niches, different industries, with different messages, very different products and services as well, but it always comes back to the same thing. We need to test over a period of time, rather than just an instant hit and just see what happens. We need to communicate and test in a good way.

Plan that A/B split test as a campaign, not just as a simple promotion or a simple communication piece. Plan it, and run with it. Do that, you’ll find an offer that will, or a way in which your customers will respond, that probably goes against your gut, if you’re a CEO and founder, and you come up with these feel ideas. Trust the data and just let the CMO pull the reins a little bit, test it, and run with it. You’ll thank them afterwards.

Because if we can get more than almost a quadruple conversion rate on the split test that we ran, it shows that actually sometimes it pays to just be a little bit more patient with it and plan it properly.

So, A/B split tests, huge fan. Use a good statistical, you know, section of your audience, your list, whatever it might be. Don’t just do it on small volumes, do it on a good chunk of your volumes. Maybe run it twice as well. That’s the second, that’s the next thing that we’re going to do. We’re going to run it on another 15,000 just to see if we get a very similar kind of result.

That’s me. I’m Ant Hodges. I’m a fractional CMO. I work with clients who are doing over $1 million, scaling up to $50 million, and I’m helping to bring in marketing leadership to remove the CEO and founder from those Monday morning marketing meetings and all of the decisions around marketing, so they can focus on growing their business in the way that they want to grow it.

If you’d like to talk to me, then head over to www.anthodges.com or email me directly, [email protected]. Let’s have a conversation. Let’s see if we can bring marketing leadership into your business, get you out of it, and see you start to scale.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

The thing for me this week is I was trying to look at LinkedIn. And LinkedIn, we all know, is a great tool for business to business, marketing, lead generation, engaging with the right kind of audience that you want to grow your business if you’re a service provider in that sense.

And as you start to talk about subjects on LinkedIn, as you start to talk about things, you will see more of those subjects and people who are interested and talk about and engage in those subjects. We’ll also see more of your content. It’s an interest based social media tool now. It’s not necessarily just going to serve you the content that you’re connected from people that you’re connected with and following. It’s interest based.

And so what I see a lot of CMOs doing is talking about how the world of the CMO has changed and how things have changed and how they do things differently. But the reality is, if every single fractional CMO is saying the same thing, then they’re doing nothing differently. They’re just blending in like the crowd.

Founders and CEOs, they’re my typical target customer. They’re the people I want to speak to. I want to speak to CFOs who are struggling to kind of balance the books with all the money they’re putting in marketing, and they want marketing to actually produce a decent ROI. They’re the people I want to speak to.

So if all I was doing was I was talking about how fast the CMO world has changed and how the modern day CMO needs to be different... I do talk about that a little. But I don’t talk about it an awful lot. But I see every fractional CMO popping up on my feed saying the same thing day in day out. Why don’t we change the record?

I think a fractional CMO today should be out there telling stories, talking about how they’ve transformed the businesses that they are working with. Even if you can’t talk about it because you’ve signed a non-disclosure or there’s commercial things there, you can still talk about: I worked with this client and we had this challenge and we worked through it, this is the result that we got. You know, it’s legitimately sharing how you’ve transformed things. It’s not about trying to defend the role that you’ve stepped into, because that’s what I feel like all this content does. It’s a real defense mechanism, to go, well, I’m different. Look at me. I’m not the same as everybody else, when actually it doesn’t work.

If you are listening, because I know I have a lot of fractional CMOs who listen to the podcast as well, do something different. Start talking story. Demonstrate your expertise in different ways. Don’t just jump on the bandwagon that everybody else is on. Zig when everybody else is zagging.

And if you’re a CEO and you’re a founder and you’re looking for a fractional CMO, those people that are in that defense mechanism mode, I know you’re not listening to them, because I’m talking to my clients and they’re saying, well, yeah, I’m seeing that all over the place, Ant. A conversation I literally had with a client this week was about this whole subject, and he said it just puts people off more than anything else, when somebody is in LinkedIn and they’re just trying to flog their services by saying how they are standing out and they are different from the world when everybody else is saying the same thing.

And I guess that’s the thing with any marketing, within any niche, within any industry. We’ve got to stand out in a way that demonstrates our uniqueness as an individual, or our uniqueness as a brand, as a service, as a product, however we want to position ourselves or need to position ourselves in the marketplace. Being just you, being unique, zigging when everybody else is zagging, all of that kind of stuff, going against the grain helps you to stand out.

My challenge to fractional CMOs that might be listening to this podcast: what are you doing that is just the same as everybody else? And can you stop it? Can you flip it on its head? Can you do something else differently? Can you be a little contrarian against the other peers that you have in your niche and in your industry? Can you actually start talking in a language that your customers are actually having in their own mind? Talk about their frustrations and how you can help them. Talk about their ambitions and how you can help them. Talk about the challenges within team, challenges within structure, the MarTech stack that is completely underutilized and wasting budget where the CFO wants to make savings. Talk about the things that matter to your clients, not just about building you and your brand. Because your marketing shouldn’t be about you, your marketing should be about your clients.

And as a CEO and founder, if you’re listening to this message, it’s really important to understand for your brand, it’s about connecting your product to your customer through story. And I really do not believe that you need to do anything more than look at the marketing in your operations that does that one job. If you are not connecting your customer with your product through story, then actually the marketing is going to be missing a trick. There’s got to be a way that you can humanize the brand, make a stronger connection, and story is probably the best way to do it.

I’m Ant Hodges, fractional CMO and host here at the CMO Field Notes podcast. Make sure that you’re subscribed over at www.cmofieldnotes.com or wherever you’re listening to this podcast, and I will see you again next time. Bye for now.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

Some of you may have noticed there was a bit of a gap in the podcasts from probably the beginning of May to the beginning of June. We had almost a month off. Crazy, crazy busy times. I’m back in the habit, and we’re getting back into the swing of things again with the three short episodes per week. These are meant to be bite-sized insights into the world of working as a fractional CMO, specifically helping CEOs and founders understand the world of a fractional CMO, understand the benefits and the value this can bring to your organization, and how you could save an absolute shed load of money rather than employing someone full time and paying six-figure salaries, multiple six-figure salaries, and paying far less for a fractional who could come in to work with you that may never have worked with you in your industry.

And that’s really what I just want to unpack a little bit today: this difference between people looking for a fractional CMO who’s had maybe 10 to 15 years experience in your industry, and also the people who’ve never worked in your industry.

I feel like I get shot down quite a lot when talking to businesses I feel I could really help. When we get into conversations, I can see that my job as a fractional CMO is to help connect their product to their audience, to lead a strategy, and to have marketing leadership ingrained within the company that does that one job. And then we measure the revenue that’s generated from the marketing activity, from what we do.

So if my job is to connect your ideal customer to your product, the main thing through our marketing that we need to really focus on is the payoff. What is it? What’s in it for them when they purchase? What’s in it for them when they buy? What result are they going to get? What transformation are they going to experience and achieve? And it really doesn’t matter what industry a marketing professional has come from, because in essence the company themselves, the history, the values, the stories that have come from all the business that company or that brand has actually transacted, the products they’ve sold to customers, the lives they’ve changed… those are the stories that can then demonstrate that transformation.

If marketing leadership in your organization is set on the path of pulling together that information, pulling together those stories, and then executing tactical marketing strategies to get those stories out in the public domain, that’s going to be the biggest win you can have in your marketing today.

I see so many brands and so many companies forget that storytelling is important. They focus on features, they focus on the product itself, they focus on themselves as a brand and telling their story or their founder’s story. Those things are valid and they’re important. But in my mind, where we’re at right now in the age of disconnection, human disconnection, with so many AI bots doing the job of connecting brands with customers, bringing the human back into all of this means sharing story and being real.

And if you’re looking for a fractional CMO and you’re putting on that job description, or that advert, or that post you’re putting up on Indeed or any job board, and you list a requirement for 10 or 15 or 20 years experience in your industry, you’re going to get somebody who has been conditioned by that industry. The things people take as the norm, the things people in your industry just settle for, because that’s the way it’s always been done… that’s what they’re bringing to the table.

When you bring somebody with the experience of taking products to market and leading the marketing within companies for maybe 10 or 15 years, and they don’t have experience in your industry, they’re going to bring a fresh way of thinking. They’re going to be able to bring some nuances to things. They’re going to help you to, you know, row against the tide and find your blue ocean of customers.

And I really feel like I need to champion this. I need to champion this idea of expertise not necessarily being the prerequisite for finding the right CMO. The experience of taking products to market and seeing results in different niches will help you see that they’re good at their job, particularly if they’ve worked in lots of different niches as well and had success, because ideally you can then see it really doesn’t matter about niche.

When you’re looking to bring somebody in to assist you in building the marketing leadership in your organization and in your brand, don’t just focus on industry expertise. Focus on results they’ve already got for clients.

If you’re having conversations now in your board meetings, or with your senior management team, about bringing a CMO into your business right now, consider flipping the conversation and just asking the question I’ve posed today. Should we be bringing somebody in with industry expertise, or should we be bringing somebody in with proven knowledge and expertise and results from multiple industries, and help apply that to our business?

If it’s something you want to have a conversation with me about, then you can dive over to www.anthodges.com or even email me directly at [email protected].

I’m the host here at the CMO Field Notes podcast. Three bite-sized podcasts every single week, helping you understand the very nature and thinking of modern-day CMOs and how they can help your business.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

“Logo guidelines and messaging documents take priority over commercial outcomes for the first stages of any CMO’s contract.”

Yeah! That was a trainer who is there helping CMOs grow their business. And what she told me on a webinar this week… well, she didn’t actually just direct it to me, but to the whole webinar audience. She went on to say that “marketing exists to look good and to be attractive to the audience. Sales generate the money, and the success for marketing should be talked about in terms of sentiment and perception.”

Wow. What planet is she operating from? I thought every piece of marketing has a commercial purpose. The brand still matters, but it works for the business rather than existing as a separate project. If an activity doesn’t connect to growth, it should be questioned.

Every piece of marketing content should connect directly to a commercial outcome.

* Your content on social media should get people to raise their hand in interest.

* Your emails should start the conversations.

* And your website should convert visitors ready to buy into buyers.

If you add in a human contact or connection wherever possible, that’s when your marketing wins. All of your marketing should be working together for purpose, in my opinion.

When this shift happens, you stop measuring how many people saw your content, how many people liked it, how many subscribers you’ve got, and you start measuring it on how many people acted on it. Your brand will become the reason prospects chose you over competitors, not because of the clever tagline, but because every touchpoint demonstrated real expertise and value.

The businesses I work with that make this shift typically see their cost per lead drop significantly within the first 90 days, not because they spend less on marketing, but because every dollar starts with a proper job. That’s the job of the CMO, in my opinion: to keep all of this in check.

As a fractional CMO, I’m working with business owners who have probably reached the million revenue threshold and are looking to scale to their next 5 or 10 million in their business. We focus on the work that connects marketing activity to revenue. We put away the crayons until we need to. We assess the brand, make sure there’s full alignment across values, across the value proposition, and the transformation message that needs to get out there.

But fundamentally, taking a contract with a client, my first job is not “let’s redesign the website, let’s have a new logo, let’s get all pink and fluffy, let’s look at value lists.” All of that matters. But when somebody approaches me to help them from a fractional CMO perspective, 9 times out of 10, the first job is to connect the marketing activity to revenue and ultimately to profit.

I want to get the CFO onside as an ally in that business, because I will want more money plowed into the marketing budget. If I can demonstrate that marketing is actually generating the revenue it needs to, and that it’s producing a positive ROI, then I’m going to get more money to put into marketing and grow that business.

It’s not just about making things look good and sound good. That’s the job of the brand, and it should be part of the mix. But it’s not, like this trainer said, the thing to focus on in the first stages of any CMO’s contract.

If you want to talk to me, if you want to get in touch about how I can help you as a fractional CMO or interim marketing director, then head over to www.anthodges.com or email me directly at [email protected].

Subscribe to the podcast wherever you’re listening to it, and please share this with your marketing department or anybody else asking these key questions. Let’s get revenue connecting to our marketing activity more than the pink and fluffy stuff.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

Welcome to another episode of CMO Field Notes. My name is Ant Hodges. I’m a fractional CMO, and I work with clients, both large and small, who are looking to have definitive marketing leadership in play in their business, so that there is a coordinated strategy around marketing. And it’s not just a constant battle in that Monday morning, 11am marketing meeting to go, “What are we going to try this week? What are we going to do there, here, and what are we going to do that,” and rely on ideas from the founder or the business owner themselves.

So how does this change? How do we respond in this world?

Let me just share a bit of a personal story, it’s something that has happened this week in the field. That’s why these short podcasts are called CMO Field Notes, because this is me in the field as a fractional CMO, working with businesses.

So, something interesting happened. We’ve just had a bank holiday weekend here in the UK, and over the bank holiday weekend, the CEO of a company that I’ve been working with emailed me because I wasn’t going to be able to make the Monday meeting. The Monday meeting that normally takes place at Monday at 12. It’s either with his marketing team or it’s with him. So, every other week, the meeting is different. This Monday would have been his day, and we had scheduled it for Tuesday at 12.

But the email that came in over the weekend was basically him canceling our contract, as we were due to talk about the renewal of it, because we’ve been working together for a year. I had submitted the results based invoice, because I operate from a results based perspective with my fractional CMO work, and he has decided that he wants to take the work that I’ve been doing and the tools that we’ve integrated, the reporting system and the way in which I’ve been leading the marketing over the last 12 months for him (and yet I’m getting a results payout, because we have increased and grown the company over the last year together) and he’s redistributing the tasks amongst his other C-suite employees.

I think this is a decision that a lot of businesses are making right now. I’ve recently read on Forbes that there is this trend to effectively take the CMO function out of the business and redistribute the different things that a CMO would do amongst the different C suite people.

From a perspective of budget and finance, that’s going to the CFO. From a perspective of things such as like operations and AI, that’s going to the COO. If it’s anything to do with sales, then it’s going to the sales division.

And, you know, there’s also newer roles that have been kind of created along the way. I’ve seen banded around a lot a Chief Brand Officer, and having worked with one for a few months last year, it was an interesting dynamic - because the Chief Brand Officer was more concerned about the message and the colour of things, rather than actually the results that were coming in.

This is where I feel like the role of a modern day CMO has changed dramatically.

The role of a modern day CMO is supposed to be about the campaigns and the numbers, looking at how is marketing activity directly correlated to the results that are being brought into the business. And it’s really difficult to measure for some companies because they have no idea. That’s why strategic leadership in their marketing is needed.

But in this new age of distributing the marketing leadership away from the role of a single CMO, I feel like there’s going to be a bit of a technology mess, because nobody’s really looking at it all. You’re going to have the marketing team operating at one level, the COO operating at another level, trying to bring in AI across the whole company, dealing with maybe an IT manager or an outsourced IT support. Plus, you’ve also got all the finance side of things, and the financial reporting. There’s nobody really looking at it all. There’s no executive oversight around the entire martech structure and the budgets associated with it.

I feel like if there’s nobody leading the marketing from a perspective of quarterly sprints, which is how I would operate, then who’s actually taking the way in which we should operate campaigns and build in the right way? Is it just going to be down to the different teams choosing to do what they want?

It’s not just about colouring it and making things look pretty. It’s about seeing what works, what doesn’t work, doubling down on what does, and stripping back and simplifying by removing the stuff that doesn’t work.

I think for me, my plea to any founder, any CEO, any entrepreneur who is operating at a level that does not have this integrated marketing leadership in place... the human judgment that comes from being able to see from experience what’s working, what’s not, how we test, how we measure, how team fits into all of that... that’s never going to ever be something that you can replace by taking the role of a CMO and splitting those tasks and putting additional pressure on other C suite members of staff. And it’s certainly not fair on them.

I truly believe that there is a role for a CMO that should be present in every single business, no matter how big or how small. If you’re just an entrepreneur, you’re a solopreneur, having someone who is assisting and working with you from an accountability perspective about your marketing is the kind of thing that I offer, right through to working with my largest client who is running at around $110 million a year right now. It’s that strategic work around a marketing team. It’s that strategic work around the conversations in the boardroom and how that filters down and how projects are managed and how results are measured.

I really feel like there is this generalist kind of view - that the CMO is a marketing generalist, not a specialist in certain areas, but a CMO taps into the specialisms of those who are focused on their task, and brings it all together. It’s about that cohesive marketing leadership. If you distribute marketing leadership across different functions, you end up with something that’s just completely dysfunctional.

Commit to a genuine integration of a CMO in your company. You might celebrate the fact that you are without your CMO, because you’re saving a few $100,000 a year because you’re not employing somebody at that level, and then those short term wins mean that maybe people are excited that they’ve got a bit more autonomy around things. But what’s likely to happen is underperforming marketing over the next few years.

Transformation in your marketing will come with definitive marketing leadership.

If you’re asking the question of CMO or specialists right now, keep your marketing leadership in play, and then allow them to work with the specialists. It takes all of the weight off your shoulders as the CEO and as the founder of your company, so you haven’t got to be worrying about it. And that’s the whole point of having either a fractional CMO or a CMO employed.

If it’s something that we can talk about, how I can really show you how that marketing leadership will work, the best thing for us to do is just jump on a call. Head over to www.anthodges.com, book a call with me. Just click the “Work With Ant” button, and then you can just fill out the details and book a call.

Let’s get on a call, and let’s see how we can transform things for you by keeping that marketing leadership in a centralized space, and you focus on growing the business with what you do as a founder and CEO.

Go ahead and book that call over at www.anthodges.com.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

Most founders, CEOs and business owners that I speak to aren’t short of marketing information. In fact, they’re drowning in it. And everyone seems to be an AI expert, because they live on their ChatGPT or Claude tab on their browser, and whatever they need access to, they simply tap a few questions and get the answers they were looking for. Whether the answers they get back are right or wrong for their business, they feel that because they got a detailed response... you know, a silicon chip gave you an answer that feels good because you’ve got a 12 page report on it all, it doesn’t mean that it’s right.

And for those not dabbling in AI, it’s no different. You’ll subscribe to dozens of newsletters, sat through seminars and webinars, bought the courses, stacked up the books. You’ve even jumped into some lifetime or annual high ticket program that gives you access to a mentor at an unprecedented level.

Information on marketing is not something you need more of. What you’re short of is implementation that actually fits your business.

What worked for that bro marketer, or that course creator, or the guru that you followed for the last decade, it won’t drop into your business and work out of the box. Their audience is different. Their offer is different to yours, and their context is different to yours.

So how do you take what you’ve learned and actually use it?

Because I’m a trainer, I’m a coach. I do a lot of this, and I want people who listen to me to actually implement some things and get things working. So what I tell them to do is three simple things.

1. Test whether it’s even relevant for their business or not, because actually, most strategies aren’t, and you only need one or two strategies for your business to actually make things work well.

2. You run a simplified version of it to see if your market responds, and you can do that through your email list or your already existing audience.

3. And then you measure success based on the sales that you make, not on the metrics that make the strategy look good on paper, like likes or comments or clicks or something like that. You actually need to count the money.

I see this all the time. When running strategy sessions with business owners to create a simplified strategy for growth, they’ve followed the mentor’s playbook for the last 90 days and seen nothing move, and then blame the marketing, not the strategy.

Their ego is so great they can’t admit that what they’ve bought into is the wrong person, who operates a business that is totally different from theirs. But they still keep plowing on because they think they’re going to get a result eventually.

Let me tell you, if over 90 days of maintained visibility you keep the calls to action sharp, you’ve communicated your message consistently and shown up, the marketing didn’t let you down. The strategy was wrong for your business.

The strategy should always be the thing that gets tested first, not the execution.

That’s why I do the work inside of a strategy session with clients. Before we even get into implementation, we map out four 90-day sprints across 12 months, built around what will work for you in your business. And as your fractional CMO, I can work with you over the next period of time to help you implement, or you can keep them and work on them yourself with your team.

If you want to understand strategies that will work for your business right now, then simply book a call with me over at www.anthodges.com and let’s see what we can do to actually make a plan that will work for your marketing efforts in your business, not just on paper or from the horse’s mouth of that mentor or coach that you’re listening to thinking, “Will this work?”

Let’s find a strategy that will work for your business. Book that call over at www.anthodges.com.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

My focus is on one thing, one thing only, simplification, and when we simplify, we streamline things. Part of the first job that I do is I look at how we connect the marketing activity to revenue, because it has to be linked.

When marketing is seen as a cost center, it’s because marketing has not been linked to revenue.

I was on a call a few months back with a founder who said something that stuck with me all weekend. He said, “I need to cut my marketing budget by 30% because revenue is down.” I asked him, obviously the right kind of questions, “what’s the return on your current marketing spend?” and things like that - I was trying to dig into the challenges. But his response was, “I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it just feels like it’s too much at the moment”,” and that’s the moment I knew we had a bigger problem than just marketing budgets.

In businesses where marketing is treated as a cost center, the first thing that gets cut when revenue dips is marketing. The logic goes, revenue’s down, costs need to come down, marketing is a cost, so let’s cut marketing, let’s even chuck AI into the mix and reduce headcount.

There’s all kinds of different things that happen, and what happens then is when revenue drops further because the one engine that was bringing in new customers got throttled. Then there’s a bigger challenge!

In businesses where marketing is treated as an investment, the conversation is completely different. When revenue dips, the question becomes, which marketing activity is producing the best return, and how can we double down on it - together with and how can we simplify and strip back the activity that isn’t producing revenue?

The difference between those two conversations is not the size of business, it’s not the industry, it’s not the budget, it’s whether the CMO has done the work to prove that marketing is an engine, not an expense. That is on us as CMOs.

If the CEO and CFO see marketing as a cost, it’s because marketing has presented itself as a cost, campaigns, creative agency fees, video studio time, platform subscriptions, headcount, all of it shown as money going out, but there’s no clear picture of money coming back in.

The modern CMO has to flip that switch. Every dollar of marketing spend needs to be tied to revenue, outcome, a pipeline, contribution, a customer lifetime, value, not as a post event report, but as a live view that the finance team can see at the same time we see it.

When marketing is an investment the CFO becomes your ally, not your enemy. This is because the CFOs job is to align capital to the highest returning activities, and if marketing is one of those, the CFO will fight for your budget harder than you will.

So if you’re a founder and you’re about to think about cutting marketing because revenue’s down, just pause for one moment ask the question…

“What’s working? What’s not? And what could happen if we doubled down on the things that were working and stripped back the things that weren’t?”

That’s a very different conversation to let’s cut 30% of the marketing budget.

If this resonates with you and you want your marketing to turn from just a cost center to an investment with measurable returns, email me [email protected] or find me on LinkedIn.

We need to make sure that we’re stepping into the right situation, the right conversations, with the right numbers to show a return on investment, not just showing our pretty graphs and campaigns, which all just really talk about the costs that are going out.

Please share this with colleagues who also need to hear this message.

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I was in a boardroom a few months ago, sat on a quarterly review meeting with a business I’d been advising. The CFO, quite a calm guy, no drama, asked the CMO one question “What’s the cost of acquiring a customer this quarter, and how does it compare to last quarter?”

The CMO froze - not because she didn’t have the data, she had tons of data. She had a 40-slide deck full of it ready to present impressions, reach, engagement, stats, follower, growth, email, open rates, website sessions, bounce rates, top performing posts, all of it, but she couldn’t answer the one question the CFO actually asked.

Here’s what’s going on in so many businesses right now. The marketing team is producing beautiful reports. The CMO is presenting dashboards from six different platforms, and none of it rolls into one single number that CFO can drop into a spreadsheet and work with.

When the board is making decisions about where to put the next dollar of investment, they’re not weighing up reach against pipeline. They’re weighing up marketing against sales, hires against product development, against R&D, and marketing loses the argument every single time when it can’t speak in a language of finance, the modern CMO has to learn to translate.

That’s every campaign, every channel, every activity - it has to have a traceable revenue number that sits in the same system the CFO is using not a marketing attribution tool that produces its own version of the truth, the actual finance system.

And if you can’t answer the CFOs question about the cost of acquisition, lifetime, value, payback period and contribution margin to your top campaigns, you’re not running marketing. You’re running a content operation, there’s a difference.

If you’re a CEO or you’re watching your CMO present dashboards that don’t connect to the P&L it’s a warning sign. The fix isn’t more dashboards, the fix is rewiring the measurement so that marketing activity and revenue are in the same conversation.

Email me [email protected], or find me on LinkedIn. Let’s have a conversation about how to simplify the measurement and get marketing speaking the language of finance. Step away from vanity metrics and into the numbers CFO actually cares about.

If you’re a CMO realise that we’ve got a different job to do today than we did yesterday. As a CMO in the modern marketing world, it’s about connecting revenue to the marketing activity that’s being produced. That’s what’s going to keep your job longer than the average one and a half year position.

Side note… You know, a CFO, on average, is around 4.5 years in tenure. The average CMO is a 1.5. Start talking the language of finance, and you’ll keep your job.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

I’ve just come off a call with a client. And it’s kind of one of those calls that you kind of wish you’d had a few months before, because this client was somebody that I worked with.

I acted as an interim CMO for a period of about 6 months while they were really looking at recruitment for a new full-time CMO in their business. It was as a direct result of somebody leaving the company. So, they needed somebody interim while they recruited and give like a 30 day handover and all of those kind of things.

For the project itself, we started in the same way I do with all of my clients. We had a full one day meeting, it started with the CEO and his co-founder, and then it progressed to working with the marketing team, and then the sales team and then the sales team and marketing team together. That was the whole day in their office and it was an amazing time.

We, I gathered so much information, we worked out so many different things, we looked at what we could subtract and simplify. As a direct result, the next week I delivered a full strategy for the next 6 months containing 2 different identified sprints and simplified KPIs that we would measure for the direct implementation of simplified campaigns - and we hit the ground running. There was really no kind of delay or anything like that.

I got asked questions like, do you think we should simplify our brand? Do you think we should change our logo? What about this? And none of that came up because what I was focussed on were the numbers. It’s about, for me, a CMO is about connecting activity to revenue. What’s the return on investment for the activity that you’re producing?

That was the first 6 months we had less than a 30 day handover because the person who was due to be starting as their new CMO was recruited, and they were delayed by starting by a week, and my contract was ending within 3 weeks - it was okay, the CEO was cool with this.

In hand over. I focussed on what we were doing, the KPIs that we measured, the simplification that we brought into the business. I the call I just got off with was the CEO of the same company.

It’s been 2.5 months of the new CMO in place and he called me up and he said, have you got capacity to take us on again? And I’m like, “Oh what’s happened?” And what’s happened is the typical thing that a CMO will do when they come in.

They did a brand audit, which took the 1st month. And that brand audit was, is everybody compliant around messaging? Do we need to change it? They did a survey of customers. They did an internal survey and then month 2 was the start of a rebrand project.

The CMO’s focus From the moment that they started was not necessarily around. The campaigns and the measurement of things, they basically just let the marketing team run with those things. But the focus was on brand, on colours, colouring in, and logos, and how pink and fluffy things looked.

(Their brand is not pink and fluffy, but you get what I mean!)

It’s the things that really don’t matter too much when a business is wanting a CMO to come on board to really focus on how the marketing is performing. In my mind, this role of a CMO, as I’ve said, is to connect marketing activity to revenue. That’s got to be the number one priority.

But the number one priority in so many CMOs is, are we positioning the brand right? Do we change who our target audience is? Is our messaging right? Do our logos match? Is our stock photography? Is our video? All of this, all of the positioning elements, is that right?

This is not a wrong thing to focus on, but when you’re getting into the new role of a CMO, you want to make a big difference. You want to improve the bottom line and actually, fundamentally, this is why I start with a simplified day. One day to get all of that kind of strategy nailed, to see what we can simplify so that we can hit the ground running where we jump into a retainer. When we jump into a retainer, we focus on those elements that need to be worked on, that will connect revenue to activity. Once those systems are working well, and you’ve got a well oiled machine, that’s where you can start to redefine what you’ve got and ask the question, do we need a rebrand? It’s not the 1st question you ask when you’re coming in because you need to understand and work from data. Do these campaigns work? Does this activity work? All of that kind of stuff.

If you’re coming in new as a CMO to any kind of organisation or business, you need the data to be able to make those judgements. So, run the campaigns for at least the first month, 60 days, 90 days even, before you even get into making things look pretty, changing the colour of the logo, putting the pink and fluffy elements to everything.

Step away from the crayons and step into the data. That’s my big thing.

Connect revenue with marketing activity.

If I can help, if there’s something that, you know, has resonated with this and you’re a founder or CEO, of a company, where you need strategic marketing leadership, where you find that you’re the de facto marketing officer for the business and you’re involved with all of the marketing decisions. Let’s have a conversation, just email me, [email protected], or find me over on LinkedIn - let’s have a conversation.

Let’s see how we can simplify, subtract, and start connecting the marketing activity to the revenue produced.

I work on a performance basis with my retainer because I want to put skin in the game. And the focus is on growth, the focus is on not just making things look pretty. So let’s have a conversation. Email me [email protected].

Oh, and just to finish the round up the conversation, I am engaged with that company again, and they’re letting the other CMO go. It’s not ideal. I don’t want people to lose their jobs over these things, but when the focus is in the wrong direction, and it’s affecting the results that the company want to see, you’ve got to be in line with what the results of the company want to see in the first place. So let’s focus on the right things.

If you’re listening to this as a CMO, start focussing on where the results are coming from.

Focus on data, focus on simplification, and step away from the crayons like I’ve said.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com

My name is Ant Hodges. I’m a fractional CMO. I work with clients anywhere between $1m and $50m a year, under 100 employees, and they’re looking for someone to come in and take away the de facto marketing role that the CEO and founder has ended up doing. I take that away from them and bring in real marketing leadership.

Fractional CMO work is one of the things I absolutely love, because it’s about connecting marketing activity to revenue. And it has to be that way round.

It’s not about spending the first 90 days on vision, mission, values, messaging, branding, and positioning. That’s not what a fractional CMO should be doing. A fractional CMO comes in and connects revenue to activity. From day one.

The right time to hire a fractional CMO is when you as the CEO and founder are running ragged. Every marketing person in your business is coming to you for answers. You’re the one who has to come up with the ideas. You’re stuck in that 11am Monday marketing meeting every week - and you need to get out.

Because your job is to lead and steer the whole company. Not run the marketing.

There’s a number showing up in several pieces of research that I think is worth explaining. The argument is that the point at which hiring a full-time CMO makes more economic sense than a fractional engagement is around $25 to $30 million in annual revenue.

Below that, the maths are almost always different for fractional. A full-time CMO in 2026 is carrying a base salary of between $245,000 and $500,000, plus benefits, plus equity, plus recruitment costs, plus the six months it typically takes before they’re producing at full capacity. A fractional engagement at the same strategic level runs at a fraction of that - and it should start delivering in weeks, not months.

Above $30 million, the business usually needs a dedicated full-time leader. I do work with clients up to $50m, but at that stage I’m often there to provide leadership while they bring the full-time person on board. The decisions are too frequent, the team too large, and the function too complex for a part-time engagement to carry it properly.

But the number itself is less interesting than what it implies. A business between $1m and $25m that doesn’t have a marketing leader of any kind - where the founder is still doing it, or someone on the team has been given the title without the authority or the experience - that’s a real problem.

I worked with a family business last year doing around $8 million. The wife of the founder had been given the CMO title because she had a marketing degree. I was brought in as a fractional CMO because she needed pointing in the right direction. No disrespect to her - she was the first to admit it. But it’s a typical story. You’ve got a solid business, a solid offer, you want to grow and scale it - and the de facto marketing person is well-meaning but not equipped to lead from that level of experience.

Marketing should run without the direction of the CEO and founder. It should run with clarity, with reports that produce real accountability, and a team that knows where it’s going because it’s being led properly.

The business should grow in spite of the CEO and founder not being involved in the marketing. That’s the goal.

The fractional model exists to solve a specific problem. The business has reached the point where founder-led marketing is no longer enough, but a full-time executive is either too expensive or too much of a commitment given where the business is currently at. That gap - between doing it yourself and hiring full-time - is where the model earns its value.

The mistake I see most businesses make is waiting too long to fill it. They wait until the marketing is visibly broken. Until campaigns aren’t converting. Until the team is wandering from AI tool to AI tool without direction. Until the founder is exhausted from carrying both the business and the marketing function at the same time. By that point, the cost of the gap is already significant.

The better question to ask isn’t whether you can afford senior marketing leadership.

The better question is: what is the absence of it already costing you?

For most businesses between $1m and $25m, that number is greater than the cost of the engagement.

And that sweet spot around $25m is also where the fractional role starts to look different - where it shifts from ongoing leadership to helping you bring a full-time person in properly. Some fractional CMOs will have my guts for saying that. But the reality is, if you’re still hanging around as a fractional at $30m, $40m, $50m without moving toward a full-timer, you’re doing the business a disservice. They need someone in full-time at that stage.

If you’re between $1m and $25m, or even up to $50m and in transition - let’s have a conversation. We can have a short chat to see where the gap is and how a fractional role could help. Head over to www.anthodges.com, hit the chat button, or book a call.

Let’s start connecting your marketing activity to your revenue.

I’m Ant Hodges. Let’s simplify.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.cmofieldnotes.com