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The demand for digitally transforming content is growing. As it does, most companies fall short of providing the required marketing strategies in order to maintain relevance. This is partly because of their continued employment of traditional marketing strategies and content execution teams.
So what is fractional content marketing? Fractional content marketing is a process in which companies outsource a fraction of the marketing department to part-timers who are specialists in a specific field. This way, an in-house marketing team is still employed by the company, but the gaps in their execution and real-time customer demand satisfaction in all aspects are filled in by part-time professionals.
From the term itself, fractional content marketing involves filling in the fraction of the marketing team that has gaps in order to fully satisfy content demands with an excellent marketing strategy execution.
Companies can’t always look for the best in every specific field of marketing among all of their hires. To have access to people who have skills that can best accommodate the company’s needs and cater to the target market’s demand for content, companies now need to outsource. This practice has been common in content marketing for a while now.
However, fractional marketing isn’t simply limited to consultancy or marketing staff roles. Fractional marketing can also involve leadership roles in the marketing department, which allows companies to enjoy the services of an expert marketing leader without the need to hire them full-time.
This expert marketing leader is also known as a fractional chief marketing officer (CMO). With fractional marketing, companies can have the best marketing campaigns and content strategy for only a fraction of the original cost if they employ veteran CMOs full-time.
Fractional content marketing involves a combination of full-time in-house employees, as well as an outsourced fractional CMO and fractional content marketers. This allows brands to have a more defined strategic direction and more optimized content without the cost associated with employing every team member full-time in-house.
Other than having lower costs for expert services, fractional content marketing teams can also be employed on a per-project basis to keep content ideas fresh and relevant among the intended audiences.
Fractional content marketing still involves the stages and processes that are generally involved in content marketing, which is further enhanced by the hybrid nature of fractional content marketing teams.
Fractional marketing gives companies access to the best digital marketing services in a cost-efficient manner through freelance specialists and professionals. Looking for people to comprise a marketing team would be costly, especially if you’re looking for someone with extensive experience in digital marketing campaigns.
So brands need fractional content marketing for the following reasons:
Depending on seasonal needs, brands need to have strategies that will enable it to scale at will. This is possible for in-house marketing teams, however, it may not be sufficient.
Fractional marketing allows you to have more people working on a specific campaign. So if brands invest in the transformation of their team into a fractional marketing team, it would allow them to meet digital content demands in a much more efficient way than employing in-house teams.
This is also possible because of the capability to create diverse strategies that these fractional content marketers and fractional CMOs have because of their vast set of experiences.
Fractional marketing allows brands to create content that actually converts, delights, and retains target audiences. Because of the vast experience of fractional content marketers and fractional CMOs, they have obtained a sufficient amount of information on a diverse set of people.
This makes it easier for fractional marketing teams to generate engagement and conversions without having to spend as much as employing experienced marketing professionals full-time. Instead, the budget that’s originally intended for these marketing professionals could be used for more quality content in a content marketing campaign to generate a meaningful impact on the company.
Fractional marketing can help brands scale as much as they need in a more efficient and cost-effective manner. Scaling involves a continuous process of expanding needs, which is not a big issue in fractional marketing because you can simply fill in the gaps with more fractional content marketers as they exist.
Additionally, you can get access to the services of expert fractional CMOs without having the need to pay as much for an in-house CMO. With a fractional CMO who has extensive experience in the marketing field, the strategic direction of the marketing campaigns will be much more clear and more cohesive with the brand’s very own vision as a company.
Fractional content marketing allows you to stay ahead of the competition because of the opportunity to obtain employees who are versatile in updated campaign strategies and tools that are constantly being developed.
This also allows you to choose from many qualified freelance fractional content marketing specialists or experienced content marketers who are offering their services for a much lesser fee than having a full in-house marketing team.
Diverse strategies
There are also instances when certain content seems to hit and miss targets. A fractional content marketing team can provide a more reliable perspective and insight through their ideas on diverse strategies for content creation to make sure that each piece of content shared by the brand is compelling enough to generate engagement.
With a flexible team of expert marketing professionals through fractional content marketing, you can top SEO rankings by having content that’s aligned with a well-defined brand persona.
SEO rankings require a continuous process of adapting to market needs in order to stay relevant. So it’s important to keep updating content and optimizing it to make it more SEO-friendly.
This can be more effectively done if you don’t employ permanent employees for the job. Certain aspects of SEO may be a per-project basis, so it may depend on seasons, content calendar, and changing market needs.
Through a fractional content marketing team, the strategy can also be continuously updated with relevant perspectives to stay on top of SEO rankings.
The versatility and expertise of a fractional marketer and fractional CMO may lead to faster detection of issues and more efficient prioritization of marketing needs. This also further enhances current marketing efforts so it can lead to meaningful results. In a way, fractional content marketing allows you to bridge the gaps in your in-house marketing team.
In-house team members can focus on their own respective roles instead of filling the gaps in the marketing team themselves so you don’t spread your team members too thin and make them wear multiple hats.
Fractional marketing allows companies to enjoy the services of marketing professionals who already have a reliable track record without the need to hire and pay for them full-time. Some of the people that can be hired in the fractional marketing team are a fractional CMO and fractional content marketer, which are of equal importance.
Fractional CMOs aren’t beginners in the field of marketing, yet you pay for their services within budget, and only when you need them. Their expertise is rooted in handling multiple diverse sets of clients, making their campaigns and strategies more effective upon execution. The role of fractional CMOs primarily involves providing the direction of the marketing campaigns to allow their seamless and effective execution.
CMOs are worth the investment, but looking for a potential CMO with the experience required by the fast-paced data-driven, and digitally demanding marketing landscape can be unnecessarily costly. On the other hand, a fractional content marketer is similar to a fractional CMO as they’re also employed part-time. These two roles differ primarily in responsibilities.
Fractional CMOs are more inclined to a leadership role to provide direction both for the team and the strategic campaigns while fractional content marketers are focused primarily on content creation.
It’s important for fractional content marketers to have a much deeper understanding of business goals and customers to meet the company’s strategic vision. In addition, it’s also essential for them to have great operational resources.
Unlike fractional CMOs, fractional content marketers are more than just service providers. Fractional content marketers are actually regarded as partners in the business. So companies must be more careful when choosing or hiring a fractional content marketer.
If you intend to employ everyone in your marketing team, most people usually approach your job posts and apply for a position.
But when looking for a fractional CMO and fractional content marketer, it’s different. It’s the company that has the power to choose its fractional marketing team members depending on their desired set of qualifications.
In the earlier section, it has already been established that fractional CMOs must already have meaningful experiences. Other than that, here’s what you have to look for in a fractional CMO:
Additionally, the qualities mentioned for fractional CMOs are equally important for fractional content marketers, particularly their ability to deliver results.
Fractional content marketers have a more active role in the effectiveness of the marketing strategy of the company, so it’s important to look for the qualifications stated above when hiring a fractional content marketer.
Fractional content marketing allows you to identify the brand’s marketing needs and build a reliable mechanism designated to fulfilling these needs. This is important in content marketing as digital transformation gave way to the adoption of the new belief that content is king in marketing.
Each stage in the content marketing funnel, as well as every step involved in the content marketing process, requires fast-paced adaptation to establish and maintain relevance at an efficient rate.
A full-time in-house marketing team may be costly, and simply employing freelancers or marketing contractors won’t be sufficient unless they have sufficient fractional marketing experience.
Fractional content marketing provides flexibility in customizing every personality of marketing team members. This allows brands to have access to the services of a marketing professional that can give much more value to a campaign depending on a specific season.
This can also provide more capability to scale for as much as the company needs or desires to do so without the constraints present in full-time in-house marketing teams.
Fractional content marketing provides brands with endless opportunities to scale by generating more meaningful lead conversions through constantly engaging and fresh content. When the term marketing is mentioned, social media always comes to mind. However, search engines as a marketing platforms are also becoming increasingly popular.
Having a diverse set of marketing team members does wonders for every marketing aspect, including SEO. With fractional content marketing, you can get access to expert services to stay relevant in search engines and other marketing platforms at any given season. The best part is, your company can have the best marketing strategies without having to spend as much as they have to when employing in-house marketing professionals.
