A fractional CMO is a fractional chief marketing officer — literally someone able to take on the role but at scale and on a contract basis.
Why hire a fractional CMO?
Did you recently found a startup?
Does your startup have funding?
Does marketing bewilder you?
Would you like to avoid being gouged as your startup funding meter runs down?
If you said yes to any or all of these questions, you probably need a fractional CMO.
How to hire a fractional CMO
Do a search for your area and see what and who pops up. For instance, fractional CMO Chattanooga shows me — a lot, usually starting somewhere close or at the top of the page. That’s a good way to go, as it should be doable for any fractional CMO worth their salt. After all, it’s a little SEO and SMM here and there and really just due diligence.
What to expect from a fractional CMO
Here’s what you can expect from a fractional CMO:
Help researching your niche
Identify key competitor models you can learn from in key, specific ways
Audit your own marketing presence and programs with a logical SWOT
Come up with a roadmap…
with a suitable funnel model representing your true business goals with your feasible prospective resources
a go-to-market (GTM) / scaling plan able to show the when, how and how much and even a full one-year timeline
and detailed execution by channel and dimension for the execution team who will actually be rolling all this out
That’s exactly what my audits do, and I’ve been doing them for about 10+ years now for established Fortune 5000 companies, startups and midsized companies (25+ years in total in digital marketing, 22 of those at an agency digital strategist level).
How to start
Create a list of priorities you feel are missing from your current marketing direction and programs.
Call a stakeholder meeting of your investors, executives, and other stakeholders.
Ask your stakeholders to list off their concerns and desires, ideas, a reasonable budget range, and any relevant marketing experiences that might be relevant.
Edit this list after the meeting until you have distinct priorities with details on relevant obstacles and resources at your disposal or where to get them — this should be detailed enough to seem viable as a starting point to the onboarding of a fractional CMO, once selected.
Contact a list of viable candidates to interview each separately.
If you’d like, add me to that list by contacting me at https://iguanasage.com/contact/ after reviewing our site, but whomever you go with, make sure they’ve actually got an historical understanding of the web properties who are sitting on your potential success. You can’t get around these properties and we all know who they are — Google, Yahoo, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, even the dreaded TikTok is probably a factor in your digital presence for your business.
> Get a digital marketing audit that factors all offline and online aspects into a single and cohesive marketing plan, funnel model and GTM roadmap suitable to gain organization-wide, stakeholder-wide support.
Recently, after living and consulting for 3 consecutive years from the 5th-largest Chinese city with ample public transportation and only the most foolhardy of lawai (ie., foreigner”) drivers, coming back to the states, buying and then wearing out a used Jeep Compass to the point of becoming a new take on Schrodinger’s famous question (the new take being “is the engine under the hood really dead or alive?”), our family decided we needed a brand new car, trouble-free, not a used like new car, but a relatively affordable new car with all the interior extras.
I avoid buying many typical consumer products as long as possible. Yes I eventually broke down and bought an iPhone, an Apple Watch, and yes even a new car. Work, and life, has its demands at my age. But I still believe in the adage that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So much for the culture of economical, light living.
I asked around and got tips from a few people in my extended family as to the best place to buy a new car. Eventually, I headed for a local dealership named Long of Chattanooga. and after deliberating between a slightly used Volvo midsize and a top-of-the-line 2024 Tucson Limited from Hyundai. I opted for the ladder since, I thought, the Volvo gets up and goes, but the Hyundai has all the luxury interior features my wife was expecting, not to mention the right color and leather seats, so as you might imagine I bought the somewhat more practical Hyundai.
Upon discovering a first paint defect, sloppily covered up with touch-up paint, pained, I make many calls and pointless, fruitless journeys back-and-forth between the service department and our home before they actually would honor my appointment at the service desk.
The first paint defect “rock chip” on the side of the car Hyundai “new car” warranty eventually, gradually approved…
We were supposed to get a rental car, but in the end that proved to disruptive to my work life since I work from home — my home office — trying to do the virtually endless task common referred to as “running a business”.
Does this look like a “rock chip” or deteriorating paint that has emerged from under touch-up paint? …Exactly.
And when I finally was able to pick up the car approximately three weeks later, (even though I was told three days), the original spot on the side door had been fixed. And even though having taking extensive photos all over the car before taking it off a lot and driving home.
Guess what I found when I pulled up in the driveway?
Yes, that’s right, a newly revealed paint defect, also being called a “rock chip” by the dealer.
Fast forward… after talking to the body shop, they say they’re going to fix this, after still disclaiming any ultimate responsibility.
I pick up the car, and they
That little grease spot I thought was a grease spot on the front —- which shouldn’t have even been there if this $46,500 new Limited Edition car had actually been washed as is standard practice and what they claim to do — was not, in fact, a mere grease spot, but was in fact a pain defect mixed in with grease spots. In our driveway, I squat down again and look at the grease spot front bumper. Apparently, the front bumper used to be perfect, but some paint came off (just like on the original side door issue) so that now this is the second time this emerged from an apparently faulty paint job (at the factory?).
“How can this be happening to us?” I asked myself, stunned and more than a little panicked as my heart began to sink. Each time we drove the car either from or to the dealership. We did not take the interstate why because I’m avoiding that as much as possible — sure we’ve been on the interstate before but never in coincidence with the issues(I am meticulous with the checking and the photos), question and as seldom as possible — so that I am literally freaked out a little every time I take the interstate in this $46,500 new car. I have to use the car for work sometimes, part of the incentive to go ahead and buy it, but nonetheless this car is too precious to me and my dear wife to be on the interstate one second beyond what’s required.
So I call up the dealership service department. And you guessed it he says “Oh just bring the car back again,” and I do. At my appointed time. And I’m told “oh the Guy isn’t here today”.
First world problems, right? Except I paid $46K for a new car, and that’s what I expect to get out of it, a “like-new” new car, not a “like-used” new car.
I make another appointment. Same thing happens as last time. Canceled. Now another month or so has gone by. I think to myself, “this is getting ridiculous!” I drive back home with the salesman on the line. “Call the general manager”, he says.
At this point, I’m thinking this might not ever end. Little did I know it was just the beginning.
I drive back home a few days pass. In fact the whole week passes. I don’t hear back. I call back the next Monday and what I’m told is a lot of nonsense about “oh…well…we don’t have an answer back yet on that…you know because it’s a bumper”. They’d actually told me that at the appointment that I finally got in, too, but there’s a problem here… They sold my family a new car with hidden paint defects, one of which has already been admitted by Hyundai as paint defect (even though we only saw it as the touch-up paint began to show during washes), and now another such paint defect on the front bumper is just revealing itself for the first time — it’s not like this is some in completely unheard of thing at this point, I mean, it’s already been established and admitted to have been sold with at least one paint defect. Clearly, this car has an underlying problem with the factory paint job. Nothing else adds up.
I file a fresh new complaint with Hyundai, the second this far in our Hyundai journey. Hyundai, I’m told by service, informed the dealership that they don’t cover bumper paint problems. They sell cars with bumper paint problems, mind you, they just don’t cover them in the warranty.
I counter with the fact that the car has already had established to have been sold to me with one paint effect already. A paint defect only discovered after watching the car numerous times and tracking it he sudden emergence of a hole in the paint where apparently misshapen touch-up paint once had been.
Is it really so unbelievable that this car has multiple paint defects at this point?! Apparently such a detail is simply unbelievable to Hyundai corporate HQ and the dealership that literally sold me the car with the stealthily added touch-up paint over paint defects in the first place, alike. I return HQ’s call to be told by my case manager this is their final decision.
Okay. Deep breath. In. Out.
Come Monday, I called the general manager. He’s prepared. I can tell he smiling a crocodile smile while talking to me. He’s trying to make me feel like everything‘s okay somehow, since it’s not actually his car. I explained to him that the car seems to have been sold “like used”, and not what you would expect in a new car. The mileage was 110 when we bought it. Did they roll it back? Does our car have a secret history? I wondered, but didn’t press it.
After a month or so of back and forth and missed calls, passed calls, pretending I don’t exist, telling the receptionist to lie to tell me he’s out, I get the general manager on the phone and promises they will fix the bumper paint defect at the body shop. Long story short, they do, but on the other side emerged under yet another faulty area in the front bumper paint job, and in the end I have to take it back again to be fixed by the “body shop”. Yes I am aware of the atypical use of quotes there.
When I finally pick up the car, I realize the steering wheel is about as low as it ever could possibly be in a car. This is kind of odd and I just adjust it back up and I head home, not thinking I’m there could be more to it.
This is the fourth plant defect discovered in a 3-month period. Makes sense? A bad paint job’s touch-ups will naturally begin to fall off after constant sunlight, heat, car washes in about 6-9 months of being applied?
Next day or so happens to be the day I take the family, including my mother, out to eat at a restaurant — her favorite. It’s her special day. This is the first time she’s ever ridden in our car before I put it off for so long but now I began to feel guilty. “After all, what else could go wrong?“ I thought.
I was about to find out.
Getting back into the car after the meal feeling around the steering wheel and then I realize I’ve never felt the back of the bottom of this steering wheel before…. I realize there are a deep cuts on the back of the steering wheel deep into the leather. I take a photograph with my camera and this is confirmed.
The next Monday I call the body shop directly. I know this man by his first name now. That’s how bad my situation has become at Long of Chattanooga strangely. I know not only his name but his hours, his pet peeves, and his bizarre temper to be the body shop guy at a dealership. He doesn’t seem surprised to hear me call almost before I finish telling him what the problem is he says he’s going to do whatever he can… about the front bumper paint defect, but that they should replace the steering wheel normally. But I had just talked to someone at the service department and been told that they probably would not do it. And I don’t know ultimately who at Long or Hyundai factory did it, only that me with my habitual black rubber wedding ring that prevents scrapes and discomfort at the gym, and my wife’s by the book steering and gentle, careful nature, did not do this to our own “new” car.
The fifth cosmetic defect: the steering wheel keather on the bottom handle part of the wheel at the rear of the leather — as if scratched up more on purpose than anything else…but certainly not easy to do for the typical driver with rubber ring and no metal on their hand, wrist or arm anywhere while driving…
So I brought it in to the service department a few days later. The guy at the service department that I always deal with took photos and then over two weeks later finally called me back to tell me that this indeed wasn’t covered per Hyundai HQ.
I’ve gotten better with dealing with the blood pressure thing I mean, I know this is going to keep happening to me forever because I’m the one that has to deal with it for my family and they’re going to be cavalier about it because they don’t care about us as customers. Got it.
I call Hyundai and I file yet a third complaint this time I’m complaining about them at HQ. I told the woman look look, why don’t you just save us all this nightmare and fix this you know you should you know what’s been going on when you already know there’s been something strange happening here with this car you sold us, I think you need to step up and take some responsibility, don’t you?”.
The next day I get an email saying that they tried to call me about my case at a wrong number (checking off that box now…). They have my right number. I’ve made sure of it. This doesn’t make sense. They’re simply avoiding me now. I call them back. They won’t budge. It’s not covered under my new car warranty. Some warranty.
And then it hits me… Every day somewhere somebody is going through this nonsense with these people, but I am one of the very few people in the world that happens to be a 25+ year digital marketing expert, who actually understands how to fight back with a blog post, a few well placed reviews, and make them float to the top. And so this blog post was born.
This blog post may not have any effect on our family’s situation with Hyundai, or give any satisfaction to what we’re paying for a “like-used” expensive new (“next-year”) Hyundai Tuscon, but one thing I know is that there are others like us out there, customers of Hyundai and Long of Chattanooga — no doubt as well as other car makers and car dealerships.
This blog post is for all of us. I hope it can at least spark a conversation about our rights as the perennial suckers of these companies and their dealerships as they sell us the vaporizing dream of the “like-new” new car that never fully materializes and is probably more often mainly just a struggle to get these companies to right their own wrongs.
Have you gone through this with a car purchase of your family’s finally attained dream car? Just angry that corporations like Hyundai and Long of Chattanooga have free license to be irresponsible when selling you a relatively expensive new car? Be sure to leave your comments in the comments section or share a link and a comment on this post wherever you please, but please do give credit back to this original post via a link — and if you have a rebel streak in you, make it a do-follow link to show irresponsible corporations what ordinary consumers like you can really do. 😉
How many have ever wondered who writes the copy on a web page? Or were curious who wrote the windingly short, terse sentences in a certification course they had to take to get that certification and keep their job? Few, I imagine.
I started out writing mainly for myself in my 20s while finding my muse in college. I wrote poetry and short stories mainly. I even edited an eccentric little literary arts magazine called Royal Vagrant. It was at once traditional and forward-looking, striving for a kind of belated avant-garde ethic combined with a more adventurous genre-breaking obscurantism. It also published work that many already ubiquitously-published were not getting published elsewhere.
I edited poetry books for many of the poets who frequented these circles, having been turned off on the kind of poetry writing they offered at my university with their over-dramatic stories written in vacuously self-important sentences that glossed all that was wrong with the world or with people. Many of these poets gave me a great deal of pleasure. I loved giving my input on what was powerful or lacking. I had already read more powerful and well-crafted poetry than most of the literature majors I brushed shoulders with every day on campus. Writing, I discovered, put life experiences into a proper perspective in a way that nothing else ever could.
In my later 20’s and 30s, now out of college with a highly sought-after Bachelor’s Degree in the Humanities (I declined to write the thesis for the accompanying Philosophy major due to a developed distaste for philosophy academics), I was writing for all kinds of companies, colleges, universities, and even foundations. As it turned out, being a bookworm and a budding literary writer makes for a pretty good commercial writer, with just a few minor accommodations and a sense of humor. I looked to Andy Warhol and other artists for justification that while every artist needs to make art, they also need to make a living. I created my own agency, 123interface.com. It didn’t hit at first, but began to make a decent income within just a few years. Still, I was paranoid about running out of clients and projects.
With age, I realized that lack of confidence was the worst mistake to make as a copywriter. More and more, I wrote copy with abandon, with gusto, with bravado. I became one, to some extent, with Don Draper from Mad Men. I was Don, both as a writer of great commercial lines, but also as a marketing strategist of some technical finesse.
I now had many marketing and business certifications, from Google Analytics to HubSpot email marketing to inbound marketing to a Certified Associate of Project Management (CAPAM) credential. I was now over-qualified for most jobs and frightening to most marketing directors. I began to understand that I had, as an overcompensation for a non-technical degree, qualified myself out of any chance for working for most paranoid bosses with minimal technical or creative expertise in the process.
Over time, my technical writing took on IT and cybersecurity topics, in addition to the marketing expertise I already had. Financial got added to the list, and furniture, property taxes, roofing, you name it, I was writing on topics once boring to me with a new penetrating interest, accuracy, and discrimination. I had begun to struggle with some of the minor pragmatics of English grammar, like how the Oxford comma had eliminated a lot of the conundrums that the Americanized comma introduced, and how ridiculous many of those dilemmas could become.
The English are annoying and full of hot air. I don't deny it. Yes, almost all of them. That's right. Yet they really had done a lot of work on the language before passing it off to us colonists. I began to appreciate, if not the English themselves, at least the love they put into that one seemingly ultimate side project. How they worked so hard to perfect what is in effect the merchant language, the language of Empire as best they could. And all this while writing up all of those pesky little Dutch East India Trading Company contracts, dotting the i's and crossing every t. Well...but back to me...
I wasn’t always making as much as I knew I wanted to be, for the simple reason that I was traveling a bit too much, often traveling or relocating to another state or another country for personal reasons. I began to tell my wife that she could go on vacations without me. That I didn’t need to see China or San Francisco or New York again. What was I going to do? This was the recurring thought every Monday as I looked ahead at where I was and where I needed to be to expand my income.
And then one fine day in my 40s, it began to dawn on me:
I was already living my dream, at least part of the time. I was traveling and seeing places most people I grew up with had not and would never see. I always had money. I always had a roof over my head and a car to drive, clothes on my back. Even though owning a business was isolating, oh how I loved the seclusion.
And I still managed to have friends. I was able to drink nice wines and do whatever I wanted. I was able to read whatever and whenever I wanted, learn new languages. I maintained my creativity, my secret interests in the guitar, philosophy, art history, political history, Kung fu and film. There was usually an engrossing love interest in my life — throughout virtually all of my life. What had I been so tense about every Monday all those years?
Nowadays, a second wife and a full beard later, I realize that every copywriter is a secret reader of Proust in search of lost time, of Bukowski looking for that lost beer bottle in the back of the fridge, of the Buddha looking for inner peace, and in the most whimsical moments, of rare hidden away gems.. like Huysmans, looking for that elusive form of aesthetic or religious decadence that wasn’t in itself an underappreciated art form, only to be gratefully disappointed to find there were none that could not be deeply rewarding and contribute to a fully lived life, full of my favorite things — Chinese martial arts, authentic Asian food, culture, books, music, romance and yes sweet solitude whenever I wanted it.
Now and then, I realize that my storehouse is pretty full. In fact, in terms of a dizzying array of cultural interests and my own personally-developed sense of aesthetics, as well as in terms of my more solid second marriage, my storehouse is ample and filled to overflowing. And I realize that this is exactly what makes me a better writer, and yes, a more daring and emboldened copyeditor .
So I need to make a living being an expert at something commercial, technical, and practical in the bargain. So what? This is precisely what made me a digital marketing strategy expert along the way, and got me so certified that I don’t have a choice but to work for myself. I always dove in deep and long and hard and never stopped until I understood the thing by probing the hell out of it, whatever it was.
These days, I have clients coming at me every which way. Ironically, I usually say no, because most clients aren’t very good. That’s the…um…polite version. It’s part of what they do as business owners or middle management types. I get it. But I shield myself, all the same.
For instance, I don’t take on a client unless I think there is room for my creativity, my exacting technical research and marketing standards, and my imperative on quality above cost and time constraints. People who want crappy marketing or writing probably shouldn’t contact me.
Are you a prospective client?
Be warned; I won’t take on under-funded projects that don’t allow something interesting to be produced in the span of the parameters assigned. If, however, you want blog post or article copywriting, technical copy, or learning materials that go beyond what you can fully imagine yet, and you have a decent-sized budget (say over $500), feel free to book some of my consulting time. My rate is $50 per hour for all first projects, and $75 per hour thereafter. Flat rates of $55 per 500 words can be obtained for most simple nontechnical, purely creative and branding-oriented copywriting.
Are you an agency?
Or if you’re an agency owner who would like to develop your business, I’ve not only made a profit on my own agency, but I’ve helped numerous others to do the same. Book some time if you’d like to do the same. But be warned: agency biz dev is not all that simple when major decisions have as yet to be decided. My rate for agency consulting is $75 per hour.
Are you a copywriter?
If you just want to find out what a more experienced fellow writer thinks about the copywriting game, wants interview with my agency team, or learn how to write copy for the unwashed masses, we could talk about that, too. Chances are, I’ve made most of the mistakes you would like to avoid.
Book my time as a writing or web content coach. My rate is high, but the time is short enough and compact enough to make it worth your while. A written sample of what you consider your best work is required to be considered. I may say no, I can’t say yes to everything and everyone.
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Down the Digital Marketing Rabbit Hole 