If You Can’t Afford a CMO, Listen to This

The marketing world is quietly reorganising itself around one idea: hire the best people for the job, even if they are not full-time. We talk about fractional leadership and fractional work from the inside, including the weird reality that a fractional CMO can feel like a full employee when they are embedded with the team and owning outcomes day to day.

From there, we get practical about building a modern marketing function with specialists. Think SEO, web development, social media, content, and paid media, all working in focused lanes. The upside is expertise on demand. The risk is losing quality control if nobody knows how to judge the work. We share the mindset that fixes that: set clear measures of success, know what “good” looks like, and manage outcomes instead of activity.

Then we shift into B2B marketing tactics that you can actually test. LinkedIn ads are a commercial hub, and the holiday period around Christmas and New Year can be a hidden advantage. Even when buyers are not signing straight away, they are still online thinking, planning, and noticing who shows up. With many competitors pulling back, costs can drop and performance can spike. We also explore a counterintuitive paid LinkedIn strategy: start with broader audience targeting so the AI has room to learn, then let optimisation find the real buyer cohort over time.

If you want sharper thinking on fractional marketing strategy, LinkedIn advertising, audience targeting, and marketing metrics that matter, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who runs B2B growth, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway.

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Transcript

Cold Open And Fractional Roles

SPEAKER_00 0:00

I didn't know we were filming it. No, no. Well it's just in case. It's on fractional leadership and fractional work. What first question first. Do you consider yourself as uh fractional chief marketing officer in that definition?

SPEAKER_01 0:25

Definitely in a sense, yeah. But depending on the client. So there's one client that I have which is where they are my main client, and I spend probably 80 to 90% of my time on them. So in their instance, it's probably not fractional, but for other clients, definitely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

Do you think they see you as fractional? Because clearly you're not on their books officially as full-time, but they see you every other day. How do you think they feel about you? Do they feel that you're full-time and does it really matter, I guess?

Why Fractional Leadership Is Surging

SPEAKER_01 0:51

I don't think it matters, but I think they definitely see me as full-time. Okay. Yeah. They definitely see me as an employee. Yeah. Um certainly why they they treat me like an employee and one of the team and all that. Maybe not to that extent, but no, no. They definitely treat me like an employee, like part of the team, rather than an external provider.

SPEAKER_00 1:06

Well, I'll show you the stats. So here I've got um stat number one. Fractional leadership has doubled in just two years. That's that the number of fractional professionals grew from 60,000 in 2022 to 120,000 in 2024. Now, this is a USA website, so I'm not sure whether this is uh simply the numbers from USA or whether it's global. I've got some more stats that are even more juicier. Uh, this is globally now. A fractional market hit 5.7 billion globally. That's that global fractional executive market has stopped 5.7 billion is growing, I get this, 14% annually. So it's quite incredible. I and I'm reading this and I'm not surprised because in in our business, I'm looking at different streams of marketing where I'm needing just the very best experts. So uh the very best uh content creator, the very best um Google Android person, the very best um SEO person for organic SEO, the very best for advancing conferences. And to pick the best, you kind of need to silo people off and go, okay, so this is the best. This is the best for this role. And then me, I just go in and tie them up. Are you surprised with these numbers? No, I'm not.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

No. I think these these days, I mean, consulting is such a big, such such a big thing these days. Um, and it makes sense. I mean, there's a lot of marketing and a lot of media out there talking about um, you know, specialty and being able to specialise, whether it's in a niche or or a particular industry or a particular within the marketing space. And I think it's good to it's good to have your eyes focused on that and say, well, you know, the the experts that are in that consulting space are available to me rather than an employee. So it's good to have access to that and technology gives you that ability to be able to track those people down and I think find the right people.

SPEAKER_00 2:41

I think the most important thing for like for someone who's um uh hiring the the special skill sets is you at the end of the day, I see it as you still need someone that knows enough in order to ascertain whether the work coming through is quality. Like, do you know enough about marketing enough? Um I'm not the best at it, but I know good work when I see it, and I know bad work when I see it. Yeah. There's a couple of things that are really interesting here as well. So there's a 72%, uh 73% of fractional professionals have 15 years of experience, 15 plus years, um, and the demand for fractional leaders grew 68% year and year. Do you yourself use um marketers, like you know, fractional marketers for specific streams of work? Yeah.

Social Metrics And Algorithm Reality

SPEAKER_01 3:23

Perhaps for you know SEO or yeah, we have certainly haven't before, certainly um web developer. Like we've got a very specialized web developer that's not um not necessarily a search marketing expert or or an SEO expert. Yeah um and then for social media, we've got net you know expertise in that. We've used an agency previously, and they're again very specialized, very focused on that one channel. Yeah, I think you need to understand the measures of success. So back to your point. How would you know? What those measures of success are? And I think in social media, everyone talks about you know vanity metrics and view counts and clicks and things like that. Um, the starting point, yes, is views, and you need to have a lot of views. We're in that attention age. Uh, so that's very important. You've got to make sure that you're ticking that box first before anything else comes off the back of that. But it's also quality. Who's viewing it? Is it your commercial audience that you're trying to target? Are they the right fit for your business? Or is it just the general public who want to laugh? And sometimes there's a mix of both. There's two schools of thought. You can either build a really big following of uh a lot of generic and sort of a general population of people, and then within that subset, you'll have those that are gonna buy from you, or you can be very targeted about who you approach and just engage that one particular channel who are your ideal buyer.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

There's a complexity that I'm gonna throw into the mix with that one because I totally understand marketing leakage. You know, the people that are viewing your content, they're not your your customers, maybe they're literally a child. But the spanner I'm going to throw into the mix is the way the algorithms and your matters, uh your TikToks, how they operate. I've I've read somewhere that the TikTok algorithm is especially insidious, where it's just incredibly powerful on just capturing and displaying items that people they think that you want to view. And it matters in this conversation because to tickle the algorithm in any of these platforms, you need to have content that essentially is shown to your five-year-old that's engaging with it, through to their 80-year-old grandmother that's engaging with it. And only by then is the algorithm tickled enough to make it go viral. I've always struggled, uh my wish list was oh, I only want Aussie customers, me to be, and I want them to be ages between 20 and 40 only. I don't want to talk to anyone else. But if I was to do that, and if I was successful in doing that, I know that the AI would penalize me so much that I'm never going to achieve my objective. So that's the span I'm gonna throw in the bigs.

SPEAKER_01 5:50

Yeah, and that and that would draw back to, I suppose, trying to build that big general audience and fuel on the back of the colour. Because that's that's what it's going to be AI. Yeah, yes by the aggregate. I like it.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

Particular the bots.

SPEAKER_01 6:01

I like it, yeah.

LinkedIn Holiday Ads That Win

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Well, that's the first one that I wanted to share from your end. What what interesting stats have you got?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Yeah, definitely something interesting. So um my specialty is in B2B marketing, particularly around the professional services space. Um, but this would apply more specifically to LinkedIn B2B marketing. And for anyone that knows my day-to-day, LinkedIn is my favorite place to advertise. Um and certainly I think it works very, very well if you know what you're doing. Um, if you've got some good advertising on there, it works really, really well. It's a commercial commercial hub, essentially. So here's a tip: uh if you're a B2B advertiser using LinkedIn, uh, the holiday period around the Christmas and New Year's is a golden opportunity to be advertising and be marketing on there. Um, I hear from a lot of business owners that during that period, you know, no one's making buying decisions because they're going on holidays, you know, uh they're off work, all those kinds of things, which is all very true. So that's absolutely true. People are not going to be making those big decisions around the Christmas holidays, but that doesn't mean they're not going to be thinking about what changes can I make in my business.

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Especially business owners, they might as never switch off. Exactly on vacation in Venice, I swear to God, they would still be thinking about work.

SPEAKER_01 7:05

Exactly right. So you're still going to have those ideas around it. And yes, you may not be sitting down with a new vendor or a new provider during that holiday period, but you're at least going to be having a bit more bandwidth and a bit more time on your hands, a bit more breathing space to step back and think about working on the business rather than in it, essentially. So the businesses that pull back from marketing during that time, I think are really missing a trick. And the full picture that we have to take into account is, you know, if you're not, if you're not marketing during that period of time, um, you're not understanding that, yes, business owners are still active on LinkedIn at that time. That is when they've got less work on their hands and more time to look at their LinkedIn. So I think you're leaving money on the table if you're not advertising then. And for instance, you know, we do lead gen marketing, a lot of direct response. And, you know, chances are someone's not going to be looking at your ad at that time and going, I'm going to sign the dotted line right now. There's a process. We understand there's a process in BW. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. There's a process of report rapport building and trust building and that whole you know establishment of trust before the relationship actually kicks off, or they sign a dotted line. Um, but with attention and eyeballs, that's the time where you need to be hitting those platforms and being really active because there's two reasons for that. One of them is that, yes, it comes back to the business owner, they've got time on their hands, they're more more likely to be hitting LinkedIn. But the other one is because a lot of companies are offline at that time, they're not going to be able to monitor their ads. They're probably going to be pulling back from their marketing. With you a chance. Yes, that's true. Yes. So it gives you a chance to then push forward and actually be, you know, be in an advantageous position.

SPEAKER_00 8:42

That's very smart. Yeah, because when we do advertising, admittedly, every time we do we ramp up our advertising, we ramp it up during uh the busy periods when everyone is bidding up the ad words and they're costing crazy amounts of money. You're right. When it's off peak season, we don't do nothing. And we realize, oh, the cost per click uh in the case of Google AdWords goes down dramatically.

unknown 9:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:03

And we don't take advantage. So I think I learned something new to take advantage of that.

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Definitely have a crack at it. So I went through some of my stats and my numbers, and I compared the four-week period from mid-December to mid-January. I compared that with the four weeks prior to that. So mid-November to mid-December. Yeah. We have a 55% lower cost per results, a cost per lead, 122% more leads per dollar spent. And that obviously translates to more clients for us and more dollars in the bank. Incredible. So it makes a big difference. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:30

And these are your own stats or are they these industries?

SPEAKER_01 9:33

They're my stats. Yeah. Yeah. So I went into the LinkedIn engine, I've looked at the numbers, I've gone back to HubSpot, compared them with the client numbers and lead lists. And that's yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:41

And to be sure, when you say LinkedIn marketing, are you talking about the LinkedIn paid ones or are you talking about the posts that you put on LinkedIn or a combination of both?

SPEAKER_01 9:49

Definitely paid. But yeah, that's those numbers.

Broader Targeting To Train AI

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Yeah, organic's tricky on LinkedIn because unless you have a big following or big database, it your stuff really gets seen. Unlike maybe Instagram, where there's uh, I think it's the reels they call it, where your your stuff is shown to all the strangers, whereas LinkedIn is quite closed, there's only people you're associated with. Um, I I did learn something quite interesting about LinkedIn uh paid advertising uh by Neil Patel. Neil Patel is this marketing guru guy in America, and he says for LinkedIn marketing, you want to set your audience as broad as possible. Um so even though you uh like me to reiterate you, I want the B2B client, Australia only, I want 18 to 40 year olds, no one else, procurement and marketing preferable. You don't want to narrow down your final to be that exact demographic. You want a wider demographic. The reason being is that if you narrow it too much, the AI doesn't have time to train itself. And so you're exposing yourself to a small piece. So maybe it's not the marketing officer, maybe it's the general manager of companies that make a purchase order. The AI would not know if you narrow yourself. So having a broad range, what it will mean realistically is that your initial campaign would be a lot of marketing leakage, a lot of money wasted, click spin on people that are not your customers. But the great thing is that over time, hopefully short space of time, the AI gets to learn and starts to see ah, the people that are engaging with you are this particular cohort of people. And then over time, in a short space of time, it would start showing these to this specific cohort of people. So that was um, it made perfect sense. In the age of AI, it could learn very quickly. And for the market for LinkedIn, it makes perfect sense as well because the more ROI you get, then the more incentivized you are to advertise more on LinkedIn. So that that was a a mind boggling set, and I am gonna give that a try as well.

SPEAKER_01 11:42

Yeah, I'm gonna have to definitely give that a try. There's an option on there, there's a little tick box where you can expand the audience based on what the platform thinks in terms of and that would probably be followed. That's probably um principle or a similar way of thinking on that. Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool. Yeah, absolutely. Should use that.