What does it mean to actually think like a CMO?

It's time to stop letting meta dictate your marketing and start thinking BIGGER, looking at the whole picture of your marketing and creating a marketing ecosystem. This episode dives into exactly what that shift means for you and your business. 

Connect with me on Instagram and TikTok

Book a free clarity call with me here to discuss your marketing: https://sarahjeanco.com/clarity-call

Want to get email updates when new episodes drop and special deals on marketing support? Subscribe here

Learn more about how we can help you with psychology-led Marketing & Messaging 

NOTE: we are not currently accepting pitches for guests 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Think Like a CMO, the podcast for entrepreneurs who are ready to stop doing random acts of marketing and to start thinking like the chief marketing officer their business actually needs. What's up? I'm your host, Sarah Gemmel. I'm a marketing strategist and consultant for small business owners, helping you to really build a marketing ecosystem that actually creates predictable results in your business. Around here, we talk about what it looks like to really step into your role as the CMO, to see the big picture, to lead your marketing with strategies, stop wasting time with productive busy work that just isn't getting you anywhere. This is all about no fluff, honest conversations, potent strategies, and practical insights you can actually use right now to make your marketing work smarter. So let's get right into it. One of the most important things we're going to cover on this podcast is what does it mean to actually think like a CMO? And sometimes I get mixed reviews when I say CMO, but CMO is the chief marketing officer. And when you are the entrepreneur, when you are the business owner, when you are the solopreneur, and you wear all the hats, you don't have a dedicated marketing team. A lot of times what happens is you get caught up in the day-to-day. You get caught up working in the business, and it gets really hard to find the time to work on the business in general. And there's just so many aspects of working on the business, right? There's the CEO side of you. This everyone knows they're they're the CEO, right? You know that you're the one that has to make all the decisions, and you're doing offer development and business development and you know all of these things. You're even the CFO, you make all the financial decisions and the bookkeeping and all these things. How often do you really step back and look at your marketing through the lens of a CMO? What happens, and I see this over and over and over again, is you often get caught up just being the social media manager, just being the email marketer, right? What the CMO does is the CMO really starts to look at marketing as a whole and not just one platform. It's not just about how do we grow on Instagram, how do we start showing up on TikTok? What should I post on threads? What email should I send? CMOs have to think so much bigger at looking at the marketing as a whole, as a big picture, as a as a vision, right? Because marketing is not just content. It's not just one platform. It's figuring out who are we talking to, where are we sending them? Where are you showing up strategically? And how do all of these things feed each other so that you're not doing just random things. You should know exactly what you need to do daily, weekly, and monthly as the CMO in order to get visible to the right people and in order to nurture and convert the people you already have. Right? Marketing exists in two areas. You have your visibility platforms, your awareness platforms, and then you have your nurture platforms. Understanding that everything you do in marketing serves a different purpose, right? And then the other part of thinking like a CMO is tracking the data and the performance and making decisions based on data and not based on how you feel. Creative downloads are great and wonderful, and I don't want you to ignore them. But the CMO is someone who makes decisions based on data and not creative downloads and not feelings and not good vibes, right? We have to look at what marketing is performing, what are people reacting to, what's not working, so that you can know exactly what to lean into and what to change. If you are spending so much time on a marketing platform that is not giving you an ROI, then you need something to change. There's no reason why you should be spending hours and hours creating content or sending emails or networking or anything like that in a place that is not giving you an ROI for the amount of time you're putting into it, or if you're paying someone to do it for you. The thing about being a CMO versus being really reactive in your marketing, chances are what's happening with you right now is that you are showing up reactively, right? You have to post on Instagram today, so you're sitting here trying to think of something to create it on Instagram, you're trying to send an email that's gonna go out tomorrow. Everything is reactive in your marketing, you're you know, following trends, or this person says to get on TikTok, so you're getting on TikTok, whatever it is, right? And we talked about tracking data, we need to understand that each and every platform has data, and each and every platform has its own KPI or its own purpose. So if we are uh putting effort into a visibility platform where you're gonna get in front of new people, the KPI really should not be related to sales because this is all a cold audience and we're just looking to build visibility and brand awareness. So pick a different KPI, right? And just kind of backtracking a little bit, KPI is a key performance indicator. So every marketing platform, every marketing effort should have a KPI. Is it building the email list? Is it building the following? Is it building uh the SEO and the website traffic, right? What is growing due to this effort? Are we booking more sales calls? Are we getting more people to add something to their cart? Are we getting more um opt-ins to a freebie, more speaking engagements, more, you know, whatever that is? Each individual marketing platform or marketing effort should have its own KPI because it serves a different purpose. So that's where we talk about tracking data and performance. And I want you to start making decisions based on performance. If something is getting a lot of time and effort, but it's not performing, then the strategy needs to change. If you change the strategy and you do another 30, 60, 90 days and it's still not performing, then something needs to pivot, right? There might be a blessing release. If we know that we're doing a little bit over here, say you're like doing some text marketing, and you're like, cool, the text marketing is working because sometimes I lose track of it. I'm not super consistent, we don't send a whole lot, where you know, we're kind of just like winging it with what we're saying, but we're getting a great response. We need to put more effort into that platform, right? We can see that video's performing really well, so we're gonna do more video. We can see this email subject line is doing really well, so we're gonna lean into that. We can see this freebie is getting more opt-in, so we're gonna talk more about that. So it's not just about what's not working, it's also about what's working. And going along this same theme of tracking data and performance, I also want you to stop creating marketing based on what you want to say. Your marketing is not about what you want to say, and it's more about what your audience wants and needs to hear and see from you in order to make a buying decision. Just like I said, it's not about your creative downloads and your flow and your vibe, right? It's about data, it's about what's performing. Same thing goes with any kind of marketing creation, any kind of marketing ideas. Ideas are great, but does the idea fit into what we know the audience wants and needs to see or hear in order to make a buying decision? And I'm gonna uh create a couple other episodes on this podcast regarding, you know, marketing psychology and messaging and market research and all those things. So make sure you check those out. Because it's really important that you start looking at your marketing through the lens of your ideal audience and your ideal buyer. Who are the people that are actually gonna buy this? The last thing I want you to really think about is I want you to think about creating the ecosystem of what we talked about in the beginning of this episode is the idea that right now you're showing up like the social media manager. You're so worried about what you're gonna post on Instagram, or you're acting like the email marketer because you just want to figure out what email newsletter to send. So now that you're starting to really zoom out 3,000 feet and you're really starting to look at, you know, SEO and website traffic and getting in front of new audiences through collaborations and speaking and you know, freebies and email marketing and text marketing and print marketing, and there's all these things that you can do. I want you to think about what is the ecosystem. How are you attracting, nurturing, and converting dream clients and treat all of those things separately? Where are you getting in front of new audiences? How are you bringing in new audiences on a regular basis? And then what are you doing to nurture those audiences, to shorten your sales cycle, to build the no-like trust quicker, to get them into a buying decision quickly? And then what is the conversion event? By creating this ecosystem, all of your marketing efforts should feed each other, they should work cohesively together. You shouldn't have a separate strategy for every single platform, right? This goes obviously for content. We know repurposing and content is so important, but even outside of content, if you're spending all this time creating a podcast, your podcast is not going to be a visibility platform, right? Your podcast is usually a nurture platform. So how can your other marketing efforts feed your podcast? And then once you're on your podcast, where are you sending them from there so that you can feed all the other all the other efforts, right? How can you create more of an ecosystem? Because in this online entrepreneur world, right, in this digital age, I don't want you to get so caught up in thinking that you need one or two social media platforms and an email list. That's not a marketing plan. Relying solely on word of mouth is not a marketing plan. We have to think bigger than that. We have to really diversify where you're showing up. Create more of the we keep going back to this word ecosystem because I want you to think about what an ecosystem is, right? An ecosystem is multiple species living in one place, working together, right? One uh species poop is feeding another species, and this species over here is kind of killing them off and managing their population. And I'm not a scientist, but that's exactly what I want your marketing to look like. I want it to look like an ecosystem of multiple species that work together for a thriving environment. When you step into this role as a CMO, and when you start looking at your marketing through the lens of a CMO, you are going to step into a whole nother season of your business. You've been in the game for a little minute. You've been doing this for a few years. You're not new to this, you're true to this. So now you hit this point of pivot where you really have to make a change in how you operate and how you market if you want to continue to grow, right? We can't have it be where your marketing is feeling like Mount Everest and then it dies off the minute you get busy with life or with client work. Right? You can't be spending hours and hours and hours a week on social media, and then that social media is not bringing in any leads, right? You can't have a marketing plan that solely relies on other people sending referrals. So I want you to sit with this, I want you to really sit with this and think about how you can, just a quick recap here, how can you look at your marketing more as a whole? How can you better track data and performance and start making databased decisions and even think about without doing any major data tracking, think about what has worked for you really, really well in the last three to six months? What has brought you the most visibility, what's generated you the most leads, and how can you get back to that and copy and paste and rinse and repeat. And vice versa, I want you to think about what have you spent a lot of time and energy on that hasn't produced? Because that needs to be visited as well. And then creating your marketing based on what your audience needs to hear, not what you want to say. If you continue to create marketing only based on what you want to say, you're gonna continue to struggle with marketing. It's all about your ideal audience and your buyers and what they need and what they want. And then the last part was creating the ecosystem. How can we really diversify and make all of these efforts feed each other and work more cohesively so that it can be more streamlined, so that it can work smarter, not harder. Thank you so much for tuning in to Think Like a CMO. If this episode helped you think about your marketing in a new way, I want you to go ahead, follow the show, make sure you don't miss the next one, and share it with a friend. Leave us a review. If you're ready to tighten up your strategy and create a marketing plan that actually works, go ahead and check out the free resources, or you can book a clarity call, put everything in the show notes. But remember and remember, you already are the CMO of your business, so let's make sure you're thinking like one.