6 Traits of a Fractional CMO for SaaS Success

Companies hire chief marketing officers to help steer their marketing campaigns — but when you’re a SaaS company, you need to increase revenue and generate growth at a faster pace. A fractional CMO for SaaS is a part-time executive-level marketer who offers you the expertise of a chief executive at a fraction of the cost. 

For these professionals to pull the proverbial rabbit (ROI) out of the (marketing) hat, they need to have a few traits that will differentiate them from mid-level marketing professionals.

Here are six traits to look out for when hiring a fractional CMO (and a few complimentary SaaS marketing tips). 

What Is a Fractional CMO?

A fractional chief marketing officer (FCMO) provides an executive marketing service at a C-suite level on a part-time basis. The FCMO oversees the marketing function, manages the in-house marketing team, and monitors ad campaigns to ensure they’re delivering the desired results. That’s not all, of course. Essentially, anything you’d expect a full-time CMO to know how to do, an FCMO does just as well.

What Does a Fractional CMO for SaaS Groups Do?

A fractional CMO for SaaS optimizes the marketing strategy to help the company keep pace with the rapid growth and demands inherent in the industry. While they’re only meant to be on board for a short time, they strategize for the long game by placing the building blocks for trust, reputation, and brand visibility. Whether you need SaaS marketing tips or help hiring a new Dev team, your FCMO is there to help.

Recurring business is vital to a SaaS company’s success, which means that customer relationship management forms the foundation of a solid SaaS marketing plan.

Here’s a peek at what an FCMO might have on their to-do list: 

Help Companies Scale

An experienced FCMO understands the finesse that SaaS marketing takes, particularly when scaling. One approach is to utilize an industry-recommended four-step formula that encompasses awareness, consideration, decision, and retention. 

• Awareness: Use various channels and targeted marketing to reach your ideal customer.
• Consideration: Nurture your leads by sharing insightful content and creating valuable touchpoints for prospects and converted customers.
• Decision: Be transparent and offer decision-making information upfront, such as pricing and product or service specifications.
• Retention: Complete the sales cycle with after-sales service, regular updates, and continuous communication.

Work With Short-Term Projects

Companies require a healthy balance of short-term and long-term marketing strategies to achieve their overall objectives. 

Short-term goals are the smaller pieces that build up the larger picture. These are the quick wins and activities that boost immediate results, such as: 

• Driving website traffic: Sales on a website start with leads, and leads start with traffic. Ways to boost traffic to a site include creating strong content, optimizing for proper indexing, and effective advertising. Digital Authority Partners worked with Decision Link to increase their website traffic with the help of a fractional CMO. This led to a 200% increase in qualified sales leads YoY. 
• Lead generation, qualification, and conversion: Website traffic is one thing, but without qualified leads, it’s hard to land sales. Lead generation might involve drip email campaigns, networking, and freebies with signups. 

One path to increasing leads is through highly targeted content. For example, when we worked with TXI, we refreshed their existing content and added new blogs and service pages to help them rank for local terms. 

We also created case studies for TXI to show their potential clients what they can do. After working with our team at Digital Authority Partners for six months, TXI saw a 75% increase in Fortune 1000 companies requesting consultations and 50+ qualified leads monthly.

Work With Long-Term Projects

Long-term goals form part of an FCMO's SaaS marketing tips for creating content marketing strategies that adapt to market changes and buyer behavior. These goals are: 

• Increased ROI: A cumulative effect of your marketing efforts as your business increases market share and unlocks better profits. You can check your ROI with this formula here: (ROI) is: ROI = (Net Profit / Total Cost) x 100
• Brand Awareness: Forms the basis for other marketing goals and takes time to develop. It results in better relationships with customers, increased loyalty, and a competitive advantage. 
• Social media presence: Social media increases brand visibility and is a great platform for direct audience engagement. It also offers analytics and insights tools to better understand the target market, which can help achieve other long-term marketing goals, such as brand awareness. 
• Organic search engine growth: Paying attention to good content results in better organic searches. These include SEO best practices (search engine optimization), high-quality images, keyword research, and the use of backlinks. 

Set Up a Go-to-Market Strategy

One of the best SaaS marketing tips an FCMO has in their back pocket is a go-to-market strategy. A detailed go-to-market strategy enables companies to introduce an existing product or service to a new market or a new product or service to an existing market. 

No strategy will be identical, but here are three classic growth models you might hear come up when you interview an FCMO for your SaaS company:

• Product-Led Growth: The product is the primary driver of customer acquisition, expansion, and retention. PLG focuses on delivering value through the product itself (often via free trials, freemium models, or self-service onboarding) to drive growth organically. 
• Sales-Driven Growth: The sales strategy catalyzes this growth method, requiring market research, identifying target audiences, and understanding consumer pain points. This approach relies heavily on a direct sales team and is effective for high-touch, high-ticket products where buyers require education, demos, or negotiation before purchase.
• Channel-Partner-Driven Growth: Break into new markets by collaborating with third parties (resellers, system integrators, affiliate networks, or strategic partners) who already have trusted relationships with target customers.

6 Key Traits of a Fractional CMO for SaaS Businesses

SaaS marketing is a fast-paced and demanding field that requires a specific set of skills and even more specific SaaS marketing tips. Before onboarding an FCMO, they must display these traits: 

1. They Are Adaptable and Agile

The marketing landscape is constantly evolving, and what works today may not work tomorrow. Whether it’s attributed to technological advancements, media coverage, trends, or economic changes, consumer spending and behavior can be unpredictable. 

2. They Work Quickly

Time management in the SaaS environment is critical, as SaaS businesses often scale rapidly. It’s also essential that fractional marketers understand digital marketing trends and — to a certain extent — can predict them. 

3. They Have Industry-Specific Experience 

While marketing practices are generally the same across industries, SaaS companies need quick-moving, fast-thinking specialists on board who can pivot when conditions change. Industry experience sets the specialists apart from the generalists. Industry-specific experience also turns simple SaaS marketing tips from an FCMO into actionable advice. 

4. They Understand Consumers

To sell to consumers, you need to gain their trust — and to gain their trust, you must understand them. A marketing strategy should include profound knowledge of:

• The psychology behind consumer choices, for instance, how they decide on products or services based on needs and wants 
• How consumers feel about a brand and its products or services, and how they decide which one to go with when faced with options from competitors

5. They Are Data Driven

What sets a marketing campaign on the fast track is experience, but what gets the competitive edge is insight. Data-driven marketing is essential for SaaS businesses as the insights and reports ensure that campaigns run on research, not assumptions. This improves targeting and personalization — reaching the right customers and reaching them quickly. 

6. They Understand All Aspects of Digital Marketing

A CMO needs to be more than a one-trick pony and can’t rely on a single marketing method to run successful campaigns. Some of the digital marketing tools include: 

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO): The strategic use of keywords to rank high on search engines such as Google or Bing.
• Generative Engine Optimization (GEO): Well-structured content that enhances AI responses
• Content, Email, and Social Media Marketing: Creating content that adds value, generates traffic, and builds trust across platforms that include web, email, and social media sites
• Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC): Pay-per-click (PPC) is a digital advertising model where businesses pay each time a user clicks their ad. It can be a great tool to quickly drive targeted traffic, generate leads, and accelerate customer acquisition, but it can fall flat when the cost-per-click is too high.
  • A PPC agency and an FCMO well-versed in PPC for SaaS will know how to do this, and you can always check their math with this formula: Cost-Per-Click (CPC) is: CPC = Total Advertising Cost / Number of Clicks

Consult With a Fractional CMO for SaaS Companies

SaaS companies employ rigorous marketing strategies to scale rapidly, but they require a strong, versatile professional to develop a comprehensive plan. A fractional CMO brings executive-level experience to the game. 

However, for these campaigns to achieve the traction they need in the rapidly evolving SaaS landscape, they require a marketer who offers fractional executive services with a vested interest in the SaaS industry. 

When you’re ready to pivot your SaaS marketing strategy into actionable campaigns that drive numbers, our team at Digital Authority Partners can connect you with an experienced fractional CMO in your specific field. We can drive your SaaS campaigns home, and you won’t have to worry about hiring a full-time executive. 

Contact us to discover just how we can help your marketing efforts today and get a free audit (with more of our SaaS marketing tips included!).