“Logo guidelines and messaging documents take priority over commercial outcomes for the first stages of any CMO’s contract.”

Yeah! That was a trainer who is there helping CMOs grow their business. And what she told me on a webinar this week… well, she didn’t actually just direct it to me, but to the whole webinar audience. She went on to say that “marketing exists to look good and to be attractive to the audience. Sales generate the money, and the success for marketing should be talked about in terms of sentiment and perception.”

Wow. What planet is she operating from? I thought every piece of marketing has a commercial purpose. The brand still matters, but it works for the business rather than existing as a separate project. If an activity doesn’t connect to growth, it should be questioned.

Every piece of marketing content should connect directly to a commercial outcome.

* Your content on social media should get people to raise their hand in interest.

* Your emails should start the conversations.

* And your website should convert visitors ready to buy into buyers.

If you add in a human contact or connection wherever possible, that’s when your marketing wins. All of your marketing should be working together for purpose, in my opinion.

When this shift happens, you stop measuring how many people saw your content, how many people liked it, how many subscribers you’ve got, and you start measuring it on how many people acted on it. Your brand will become the reason prospects chose you over competitors, not because of the clever tagline, but because every touchpoint demonstrated real expertise and value.

The businesses I work with that make this shift typically see their cost per lead drop significantly within the first 90 days, not because they spend less on marketing, but because every dollar starts with a proper job. That’s the job of the CMO, in my opinion: to keep all of this in check.

As a fractional CMO, I’m working with business owners who have probably reached the million revenue threshold and are looking to scale to their next 5 or 10 million in their business. We focus on the work that connects marketing activity to revenue. We put away the crayons until we need to. We assess the brand, make sure there’s full alignment across values, across the value proposition, and the transformation message that needs to get out there.

But fundamentally, taking a contract with a client, my first job is not “let’s redesign the website, let’s have a new logo, let’s get all pink and fluffy, let’s look at value lists.” All of that matters. But when somebody approaches me to help them from a fractional CMO perspective, 9 times out of 10, the first job is to connect the marketing activity to revenue and ultimately to profit.

I want to get the CFO onside as an ally in that business, because I will want more money plowed into the marketing budget. If I can demonstrate that marketing is actually generating the revenue it needs to, and that it’s producing a positive ROI, then I’m going to get more money to put into marketing and grow that business.

It’s not just about making things look good and sound good. That’s the job of the brand, and it should be part of the mix. But it’s not, like this trainer said, the thing to focus on in the first stages of any CMO’s contract.

If you want to talk to me, if you want to get in touch about how I can help you as a fractional CMO or interim marketing director, then head over to www.anthodges.com or email me directly at cmo@anthodges.com.

Subscribe to the podcast wherever you’re listening to it, and please share this with your marketing department or anybody else asking these key questions. Let’s get revenue connecting to our marketing activity more than the pink and fluffy stuff.

Most founders, CEOs and business owners that I speak to aren’t short of marketing information. In fact, they’re drowning in it. And everyone seems to be an AI expert, because they live on their ChatGPT or Claude tab on their browser, and whatever they need access to, they simply tap a few questions and get the answers they were looking for. Whether the answers they get back are right or wrong for their business, they feel that because they got a detailed response... you know, a silicon chip gave you an answer that feels good because you’ve got a 12 page report on it all, it doesn’t mean that it’s right.

And for those not dabbling in AI, it’s no different. You’ll subscribe to dozens of newsletters, sat through seminars and webinars, bought the courses, stacked up the books. You’ve even jumped into some lifetime or annual high ticket program that gives you access to a mentor at an unprecedented level.

Information on marketing is not something you need more of. What you’re short of is implementation that actually fits your business.

What worked for that bro marketer, or that course creator, or the guru that you followed for the last decade, it won’t drop into your business and work out of the box. Their audience is different. Their offer is different to yours, and their context is different to yours.

So how do you take what you’ve learned and actually use it?

Because I’m a trainer, I’m a coach. I do a lot of this, and I want people who listen to me to actually implement some things and get things working. So what I tell them to do is three simple things.

1. Test whether it’s even relevant for their business or not, because actually, most strategies aren’t, and you only need one or two strategies for your business to actually make things work well.

2. You run a simplified version of it to see if your market responds, and you can do that through your email list or your already existing audience.

3. And then you measure success based on the sales that you make, not on the metrics that make the strategy look good on paper, like likes or comments or clicks or something like that. You actually need to count the money.

I see this all the time. When running strategy sessions with business owners to create a simplified strategy for growth, they’ve followed the mentor’s playbook for the last 90 days and seen nothing move, and then blame the marketing, not the strategy.

Their ego is so great they can’t admit that what they’ve bought into is the wrong person, who operates a business that is totally different from theirs. But they still keep plowing on because they think they’re going to get a result eventually.

Let me tell you, if over 90 days of maintained visibility you keep the calls to action sharp, you’ve communicated your message consistently and shown up, the marketing didn’t let you down. The strategy was wrong for your business.

The strategy should always be the thing that gets tested first, not the execution.

That’s why I do the work inside of a strategy session with clients. Before we even get into implementation, we map out four 90-day sprints across 12 months, built around what will work for you in your business. And as your fractional CMO, I can work with you over the next period of time to help you implement, or you can keep them and work on them yourself with your team.

If you want to understand strategies that will work for your business right now, then simply book a call with me over at www.anthodges.com and let’s see what we can do to actually make a plan that will work for your marketing efforts in your business, not just on paper or from the horse’s mouth of that mentor or coach that you’re listening to thinking, “Will this work?”

Let’s find a strategy that will work for your business. Book that call over at www.anthodges.com.

My focus is on one thing, one thing only, simplification, and when we simplify, we streamline things. Part of the first job that I do is I look at how we connect the marketing activity to revenue, because it has to be linked.

When marketing is seen as a cost center, it’s because marketing has not been linked to revenue.

I was on a call a few months back with a founder who said something that stuck with me all weekend. He said, “I need to cut my marketing budget by 30% because revenue is down.” I asked him, obviously the right kind of questions, “what’s the return on your current marketing spend?” and things like that - I was trying to dig into the challenges. But his response was, “I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it just feels like it’s too much at the moment”,” and that’s the moment I knew we had a bigger problem than just marketing budgets.

In businesses where marketing is treated as a cost center, the first thing that gets cut when revenue dips is marketing. The logic goes, revenue’s down, costs need to come down, marketing is a cost, so let’s cut marketing, let’s even chuck AI into the mix and reduce headcount.

There’s all kinds of different things that happen, and what happens then is when revenue drops further because the one engine that was bringing in new customers got throttled. Then there’s a bigger challenge!

In businesses where marketing is treated as an investment, the conversation is completely different. When revenue dips, the question becomes, which marketing activity is producing the best return, and how can we double down on it - together with and how can we simplify and strip back the activity that isn’t producing revenue?

The difference between those two conversations is not the size of business, it’s not the industry, it’s not the budget, it’s whether the CMO has done the work to prove that marketing is an engine, not an expense. That is on us as CMOs.

If the CEO and CFO see marketing as a cost, it’s because marketing has presented itself as a cost, campaigns, creative agency fees, video studio time, platform subscriptions, headcount, all of it shown as money going out, but there’s no clear picture of money coming back in.

The modern CMO has to flip that switch. Every dollar of marketing spend needs to be tied to revenue, outcome, a pipeline, contribution, a customer lifetime, value, not as a post event report, but as a live view that the finance team can see at the same time we see it.

When marketing is an investment the CFO becomes your ally, not your enemy. This is because the CFOs job is to align capital to the highest returning activities, and if marketing is one of those, the CFO will fight for your budget harder than you will.

So if you’re a founder and you’re about to think about cutting marketing because revenue’s down, just pause for one moment ask the question…

“What’s working? What’s not? And what could happen if we doubled down on the things that were working and stripped back the things that weren’t?”

That’s a very different conversation to let’s cut 30% of the marketing budget.

If this resonates with you and you want your marketing to turn from just a cost center to an investment with measurable returns, email me cmo@anthodges.com or find me on LinkedIn.

We need to make sure that we’re stepping into the right situation, the right conversations, with the right numbers to show a return on investment, not just showing our pretty graphs and campaigns, which all just really talk about the costs that are going out.

Please share this with colleagues who also need to hear this message.