Digital Authority Partners is an award-winning San Diego-based fractional CMO agency with a top-notch record of helping businesses grow fast. We offer organizations the missing piece of so many marketing puzzles— marketing leadership. Our San Diego fractional CMO service puts an experienced C-level executive in the driver’s seat of your marketing team for a fraction of the cost.
140
%
increase in sales for Fortune
1,000 company within one
year of working with DAP
92
%
Of companies wish they hired a Fractional CMO sooner
40
%
Lower cost per year to hire
a Fractional CMO versus a
full-time CMO
180
Days average time needed for
a Fractional CMO to help a business
4.5
X
More leads for companies who hire a Fractional CMO
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Schedule a consultation with a DAP expert today and find out what we can do for your business.
Our Clients Love Us, and They Tell the World About it
Clutch
Leading Marketing Strategy Firm
Clutch
Top Digital Marketing Company in San Diego
CES
Award-Winning Innovators in Interconnected Digital Strategy at CES
Time Magazine
Trailblazers in the Top 100 Digital Innovators by Time Magazine
UpCity
Top Digital Agency on Upcity
Clutch
Distinguished as One of the Top 1000 Global Companies
What Our Clients Say About Us
“We highly recommend … Digital Authority Partners for your Fractional CMO and marketing needs. The professionalism and experience exhibited by Christal and the Digital Authority Partners team was excellent. Christal hit the ground running and kept running with all the marketing tasks. She acted as a great CMO – advised us and then executed when decisions were made, took the initiative to get the marketing projects completed, and laid out the entire marketing strategy for the company with minimal oversight. She really felt like part of the team, and she was. The DAP members also felt like part of the team as they contributed to the company through not just marketing services, but also introduced us to professional connections, contacts, and experience that benefited the company. … We further like that DAP’s CMOs were agnostic to service providers. She could and would recommend other service providers that she felt would provide the best solution to the company (vs pushing the company back to only use DAP). This gave us the warm and fuzzy feeling that she had the best interest in the company.”
Tyson Schroeder
Vhanti
“Digital Authority has helped my company in a number of ways that will result in record profits. Being more "old school" in my thoughts, I did not understand the value of a digital partner until I met with Michael of Digital Authority. He explained the value, process, and expectations in a way that I could understand. Now I value the relationship and cannot imagine making marketing decisions without consulting with them. We lead with our digital footprint and outreach with all other mediums coming in a distant second. I give them the highest marks and hope they can help you as much as they have helped me.”
Mark Meyer
CEO & Founder of E&M Strategic Real Estate
“Digital Authority Partners provided us with fractional CMO and analytics services. Great team and great work that added value to our marketing and analytics capabilities.”
Bijan Vafaei
Head of Marketing at Wage
“What was most impressive about the team was their hands-on approach and accessibility — their president was always involved and ready to help throughout.”
Sivan Galinsky
Chief Marketing Officer at Brinks, Gilson, and Lione
“Their knowledge in the space was very helpful in developing our marketing plan. Digital Authority Partners was very helpful in developing the our marketing plan. They were responsive, available, and seamless with both their communication and workflow. In the end, the team delivered their project on time with high-quality results.”
Zak Higson
Executive Vice President of Signature Analytics
“We hired DAP to help us simplify our go-to-market messaging, launch a new website and provide a marketing operations framework we desperately needed. DAP was holistic in their treatment of our marketing operations, from the technology that supported our marketing engine to the messaging that was displayed on the website, to the ads we were serving, to SEO and our positioning in the market, DAP brought a wealth of expertise to the team that allowed us to put our best foot forward to our prospects and customers.”
Lizzie O'Rourke
Vice President of Marketing at DecisionLink
Work with San Diego’s Top Fractional CMO Agency
Digital Authority Partners (DAP) is an award-winning fractional CMO agency that puts the talents of an enterprise-level Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) within reach, even for organizations that don’t have the budget to attract such an executive full-time.
Access the talent you need without hiring a full-time marketing executive. A fractional CMO is essentially an on-demand resource for companies that want to grow fast. Organizations can leverage our expertise for a fraction of the cost.
We work with San Diego’s top life science, healthcare, and manufacturing companies. The DAP roster of experienced marketing executives has the resumes to prove it with stellar results in increasing brand awareness and revenue for top San Diego companies. Our experts have become a crucial and affordable resource for small and mid-sized organizations to scale, profit, and dominate their industry.
We are honored to be a critical part of the San Diego technology scene for the last 6 years. We have established ourselves as one of the best CMO service agencies in San Diego helping the 83,000+ local entrepreneur community grow multi-million dollar businesses. From the vibrant La Jolla community and Coronado beaches to the coastal areas of Del Mar and Encinitas, our clients come from all areas of San Diego.
Our San Diego CMO experts create a sustainable marketing strategy to get you more leads, incremental sales, and higher customer retention.
Conduct a Marketing Audit
Define the Marketing Direction
Manage Your Marketing Team
Set Up Marketing KPIs
Scale Lead Generation
A marketing audit is a thorough examination of where your marketing stands, where you want to go, and how our San Diego fractional CMO services can help you get there. The audit covers:
Understand Your Customer
Your fractional CMO will help your team identify your ideal customer—not just any interested party, but the customers that drive the most profit for your business at the optimal cost of acquisition. The CMO-for-hire will help you create detailed “customer personas”—your perfect customer identified by demographics, industry, job title … everything you need to target your message to them with surgical precision.
Every sale is the endpoint of a journey and the start of a new cycle that could result in another sale. Every journey needs a map. Under the leadership of your San Diego fractional CMO, you will map out your current customer journey, identify strengths and areas for improvement, and brainstorm ways to optimize, automate, and remove friction from the customer journey.
A brand isn’t just about the company—it’s about the customer’s experience with the company. Many organizations miss the mark with this experience, one which is entirely under their control. Your San Diego fractional CMO will help you redefine the customer experience so that you can get more conversions, upsells, cross-sells, and repeat business.
The best way to get customers to respond to brand messaging is to craft a message that is tailored specifically to them. When mass-messaging, this can be difficult to achieve. Our experienced San Diego fractional CMOs can show you how to personalize your message to targeted audiences within your customer personas, so they feel like you are speaking specifically to them.
Once we understand your competitive landscape and business objectives, the next step in our is to define the marketing strategy to get you there. This includes:
Brand Strategy
The word “brand” is a buzzword, used as if everyone knows what it means, but most people don’t. A brand is how people feel when they think of your organization. It’s your first impression and every successive impression. A San Diego fractional CMO can help you define your brand goals, values, and mission, then craft a messaging strategy to communicate that branding to your ideal customers.
A digital strategy is a powerful tool for building brand awareness. The digital world can be quantified, optimized, and tested. Your San Diego fractional CMO can help you build a digital strategy, offering advice about digital tools and techniques like web development, custom software development, mobile app development, eCommerce, and digital analytics.
The most effective way to engage with your target audience is through marketing content—written, audio, and video. In addition to forming a crucial component of SEO strategy, content is how you communicate that brand message you worked so hard to create for your ideal customers. Your San Diego fractional CMO will help your team take inventory of the content you already have, as well as create a to-do list for the content you need to build your dream customer experience.
Successful marketing roadmaps ensure that your brand is “top of mind” for your ideal customers when they enter the market looking for products and services like yours. Marketing is what your San Diego fractional CMO does best. This CMO-for-hire will help craft marketing plans that your in-house marketing team can continue to execute and optimize long after the fractional CMO’s contract is up.
DAP’s San Diego fractional CMO service provides you the leadership your company needs and deserves. Your CMO has the experience and the insight to set manageable goals for your team and provide them with structure, accountability, and support.
Marketing Objectives
C-level executives are leaders. In the same way, leadership makes all the difference between successful and unsuccessful marketing campaigns. A big part of leadership is knowing where you are trying to go. A San Diego fractional CMO will help your marketing team define its objectives. What does success look like? What steps need to be taken to get there?
A marketing communication strategy aligns your value proposition with your brand message in a way that will resonate with customers. A San Diego fractional CMO will help you design a communication strategy. This ensures you will not only reach customers, but also connect with them on a level that leads to conversions, sales, and repeat business.
Content is not a one-and-done task. It makes a bigger impact when it gets deployed over time, consistently. Part of building a content strategy includes making a content calendar—a schedule of content creation. Your San Diego fractional CMO will put together a content calendar that builds on previous content and bolsters your SEO strategy. The calendar will provide a roadmap for future content deployment.
Established marketing tools and processes can make the burden of marketing a million times lighter, but picking the wrong tools and processes can make the job harder. Your San Diego fractional CMO has the experience to cut through the noise and equip you with the processes that work, supplying only the tools you need.
You can only improve what you can measure. Digital marketing changed everything by moving the CMO’s job away from hunches and gut feelings towards data-driven decision-making. KPIs tell you whether your marketing efforts are succeeding or need improvement. We track these important marketing KPIs:
Cost of acquisition
Companies that depend on a steady stream of leads for their sales team need to know how much they cost. Otherwise, they have no way of knowing if their marketing efforts are profitable. A San Diego fractional CMO can help you determine the cost per lead acquisition from both traditional and digital marketing efforts, as well as strategies to reduce that cost.
With good branding and marketing, a customer’s first purchase from a company will not be their last. Customer lifetime value identifies how much the average customer spends across multiple purchases over the entire relationship with the brand. A San Diego fractional CMO will help you determine your average customer lifetime value so you can determine whether or not the cost to acquire a lead or a customer is justified.
Even if it takes time, every marketing investment should produce a return. A San Diego fractional CMO can set a target return-on-investment for every marketing campaign you execute. Marketing ROI exists at the intersection of cost per lead, conversion rate, and customer lifetime value. A CMO-for-hire can put all the pieces together and help establish markers so you never feel like you’re spending money with nothing to show.
Generating leads is not good enough—they have to be sales-qualified leads. They have to not only be good prospects for your product or service but also ready to buy. A San Diego fractional CMO can help you determine how many of your leads are sales qualified and provide leadership to put more qualifiers in place to increase the proportion.
It’s time to scale up lead generation. DAP’s San Diego fractional CMO services help you scale lead generation through:
Marketing Collateral for Sales Teams
With any job, it helps to have the right tools. When it comes to sales, marketing collateral is one of the most powerful tools. Our CMO-for-hire will guide your team in assembling the right sales collaterals to help your team be effective. Beneficial marketing collateral includes white papers, blogs, brochures, one-pagers, business cards, case studies, and testimonials.
“Pricing” is one of the classic “Four P’s” of marketing—Product, Place, Price, and Promotion. Many companies wing it when it comes to pricing. They try to undercut competitors, attempt premium positioning, or simply charge the price they think they need. Any of these strategies could fail if poorly executed. A San Diego fractional CMO can take the guesswork out of pricing and give your product or service the best chance to succeed.
Search engines rule lead generation efforts. Few brand awareness tactics yield higher dividends than putting your message directly in front of people who are searching for solutions like yours. A San Diego fractional CMO can help create your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy—so that your website ranks highly in organic searches. The fractional CMO can also create a Search Engine Marketing (SEM) strategy with paid ads on search engine platforms.
You need to convert the traffic you are getting to your website into leads. A San Diego fractional CMO will conduct conversion rate optimization experiments to get the most leads from your website traffic. When your conversion rate is as high as it can be, it makes a lot more sense to scale up your lead generation and outspend your competitors.
Helping San Diego Businesses With Their Fractional CMO Needs
Healthcare
The goal of healthcare marketing is to be at the top when a customer thinks of your services. In the case of healthcare, this service is keeping people healthy while offering the ability to answer questions quickly.
That’s a big ask. How do you become the first brand that people think of when they go about the business of their wellbeing or improving their quality of life?
It’s a hard place to reach. There is also the fact that a local doctor or a regional health center is no longer the only healthcare options in a given region. Retail clinics, private clinics, and telemedicine have upped the ante considerably in terms of competition. Every healthcare organization needs to step it up—not just in terms of the quality of services they offer, but the marketing message they communicate.
A San Diego fractional CMO can put you in a position to establish yourself in this competitive landscape. A DAP CMO can provide the enterprise-level leadership you need to establish the kind of trust consumers expect for their healthcare providers.
Fintech
Financial technology is one of the most exciting industries trending right now and is seeing a rise in the number of companies entering the market.
But these companies not only have to prove that they have the idea that will disrupt the financial industry; they have to attract a user base willing to trust them with their money and personal information. That’s a high barrier of trust to clear.
But even new companies on the scene can clear the bar with the right messaging and content. The job of your San Diego fractional CMO is to match the message with the target market. This means identifying the target market with the creation of user personas, crafting the message, and amplifying that message through correct channels.
Many fintech companies have the technical skill—not only for the software and hardware, but for marketing as well. What they lack is leadership. That’s where we come in. Our fractional CMO services provide the missing piece to get your messaging on track, and to give your team the tools to keep it up after the CMO is long gone.
Education
In many ways, it is a golden age for education. The advent of the internet has been the biggest boom to education as a concept while being a significant challenge to education for traditional institutions. Anyone who wants to learn something can go out and find it. Anyone who wants to teach something can create an online school with a few mouse clicks. What is an educational institution to do?
Prestigious colleges and universities have the world to offer students, but they also have an unprecedented branding and marketing challenge in front of them to share this knowledge.
Many schools are asking the right questions. Who are our customers? What value do we offer them? How can we mold that value into a message? How do we reach as many prospective students with our value as possible?
A San Diego fractional CMO can bring a healthy dose of clarity and practicality to these questions. School and education will never go out of style. Proper marketing leadership can help both elite and upcoming institutions of higher education adapt to the evolving needs of their student base.
Law Offices
Attorneys are often competitive by nature. That’s one thing you and your San Diego fractional CMO have in common. Lawyers and their teams like to win. Sometimes their revenue depends on it. Chief marketing officers like to win too. They like to beat the competition—in this case, other law offices vying for your client’s business through marketing.
Law offices have their work cut out for them. Potential clients have a plethora of choices when they are on the market for legal counsel. Many of them have the marketing budget to communicate their message effectively.
Your fractional CMO can help you stand out by crafting a message your client wants to hear. No legal jargon, just solutions to their problems.
What clients want most from their attorneys is someone who will get the job done the right way. This is why marketing content matters so much to law offices. You cannot just be loud—your message has to carry authority. A fractional CMO can help a law office publish the content customers want to see—often in their time of great need—in the places they are looking for it. In doing so, they start to build trust in the marketplace and a position of authority.
Real Estate
To call San Diego real estate “competitive” is an understatement. From brokerage to leasing, investing to property technology. The best of the best stand out in this prestigious market. It’s not for the faint of heart or those who take marketing lightly.
DAP staffs its roster with San Diego fractional CMO professionals who know how to win the real estate game. Yes, it is a game that can be won, and our San Diego fractional CMOs have won it before. Most importantly, they have the insight and leadership skills to repeat that success for San Diego real estate organizations of all stripes.
A fractional CMO can build a marketing approach that includes lead generation and client outreach while building a professional network. Then they can lead the implementation of processes that offer repeatable, sustainable success.
Building a San Diego real estate empire requires patience, persistence, calculated risks, and above all, the right strategy. There’s no room for error. But the rewards are worth it. A San Diego fractional CMO puts those rewards within your reach—not just in the near term, but the long-term growth.
Professional Services
If there is one category of business that tends to tell us “Marketing solutions don’t work for my business,” it’s professional services. Many of them have been let down by marketing “pros” and are reluctant to try again. They’re often stuck in old-school marketing tactics that are not scalable for today.
Marketing solutions for professional service companies can be a little generic. One-size-fits-all solutions do not work for professional service companies, because no two professional service providers are the same.
Accountants, financial advisors, consultants … There are as many approaches as there are professionals. Inexperienced marketing pros don’t know what to do with them unless they are micro marketing professionals in their own right.
A San Diego fractional CMO takes a different approach. We begin with the end goal in mind. We identify the ideal customer, craft a customer journey, personalize the customer journey, and then leverage the most effective messaging channels to deliver an attractive message to that ideal customer en masse. In short, a fractional CMO can help you scale when all others fail.
Looking for your next Fractional CMO in San Diego? You’ll be in great company
Schedule your free consultation
Have questions about utilizing a fractional CMO for your project? Schedule a consultation with a DAP fractional CMO today and find out what we can do for your San Diego business.
Why San Diego companies choose us for their Fractional CMO needs
We’re Experienced.
Our San Diego-based executive-level marketing team has a phenomenal track record of success in marketing leadership for companies big and small across a variety of industries.
We’re On-Time and On-Budget.
We know time is money, and resources are limited. We set goals based on your desired time frame and budgetary needs, and we hit those goals.
We’re Award-Winning.
We don’t just talk the talk—we walk the walk, and we have the medal to prove it. Our marketing expertise has earned us numerous accolades from professional marketing associations. In fact, just this year we won a top B2B global marketing agency award from Clutch.
We’re Focused on the Future.
In an ever-changing business landscape, we strive to create future-proof solutions. Our marketing executives stay on the cutting edge and prepare your team not just for today but tomorrow.
Why You Should Choose Digital Authority Partners For Your San Diego Fractional CMO Needs
We Know Marketing In and Out
A funny thing happened when the internet became a tidal wave of DIY marketing tools and gurus selling marketing training—the impression was left that anyone could do it. You might have even tried some of those solutions and become discouraged.
Don’t feel bad. Marketing is not something you can buy pre-packaged, one-size-fits-all. Marketing is an art, and a science. No one is born knowing how to do it. People become legitimate experts at marketing—able to actually move the needle on brand awareness—through extensive training and experience.
That’s what we offer with our San Diego fractional CMO services—leadership seasoned with enterprise-level challenges, risen to and conquered.
We Live and Breathe Digital Marketing
It’s easy to exaggerate when you say that a market disruption “changed everything,” but digital marketing really did change everything. For everyone. The ability to track every marketing metric, micro-target an audience, and “buy” scale? It’s the granddaddy of all market disruptions.
In a way, it’s the one thing that made every other disruption possible. With digital marketing, even small companies can build a niche or even become players to be reckoned with on a world stage.
DAP fractional CMOs make it their business to stay on the cutting edge of digital marketing best practices. Digital marketing changes fast. What worked yesterday may not work tomorrow. Digital marketing leadership is built on staying current on these changes in digital marketing—so we make it our business to stay current.
We Know Marketing Processes
Desired outcomes result from choosing the right processes. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Wherever you want your marketing to go, someone has honed and refined a process to get it there.
When you hire a DAP fractional CMO, you hire a priceless shortening of the learning curve. Their experience has shown them the processes that produce the outcomes—how to implement them, how to train your team to implement them, how to train your team to maintain them after their contract is up.
At the end of the day, you hire a San Diego fractional CMO to make sure your marketing gets done right.
We know how to Manage And Scale Marketing Teams
A DAP fractional CMO is an enterprise-level marketing leader. If you have a marketing team, they can take the reins and lead them to greatness. If you don’t have a marketing team, they can help you build one from the ground up. We can also make sure that when the contract ends we leave your marketing team with a strategy that they can continue to execute.
We also know how to scale a marketing team—which means we know how to double the size of the team, but quadruple or 10x the results. To do more with less. This is one of the keys of successful marketing—scaling not only your campaigns, but your teams.
We Know How To Define and Track Marketing KPIs
Every marketing campaign needs KPIs—key performance indicators. These metrics tell you whether your marketing is working or not. With the right KPIs, you don’t have to guess whether you are getting a return on your marketing spend.
You can count anything and everything. But that doesn’t mean every performance indicator is key. We will help you identify the right KPIs to track and define benchmarks for success.
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