Pros and Cons of Hiring an Outsourced Chief Marketing Officer for your business
A while back we wrote about the concept of an Outsourced CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) for financial advisors, wealth managers, lawyers and CPA’s.
The aim of the article was to introduce to them the idea that you don’t need one person, but can rather have an entire firm working on your behalf around all your marketing and branding needs.
Below we have explained the pros and cons to hiring an outsourced CMO for your firm.
Take a look and let us know if you have any questions.
+ Why do I even need marketing if my entire business grows through referrals?
You definitely can ignore marketing, but in an industry that is getting more and more competitive, you will notice your referrals continuously slow down as your competitors become more and more active in reaching out to the people you want to meet. These competitors no longer include just financial advisors, but banks, investment bankers, accounting firms, and roboadvisory firms, to name a few. Without the usage of marketing to Beautiful, Broadcast and bring Brand Awareness to your message, you will go into the category of the "Old Doctor": The doctor we all love but know will be dying soon.
+ What are the pros of hiring an in-house marketing employee?
There are many benefits to an in-house CMO namely:
- Ultra focus on only you and your marketing goals. With an in-house marketing professional, 100% of that person's focus will be spend on you and your goals.
- This person will come in, day in, day out, working on your behalf. They are heavily intertwined with you and your firm's marketing goals.
+ What are the cons of hiring an in-house marketing professional?
Although there are many pros to hiring someone in-house, there are many considerations to make:
⦿ Their initial cost: Depending on their experience, a person with high credentials around marketing, typically over 10 years, will cost you at least $200,000 per year.
⦿ Their ancillary costs: Beyond just their wage, an in-house marketing professional will have many many additional costs they will naturally incur, namely website coding, design, video production, advertising and more. So beyond the minimum $200K, you are looking at at least another $100-$150K in additional expenses to give to this person for a budget
⦿ You may be saying "Oh, my marketing person doesn't cost nearly that much; I got him/her straigh out of college." That's great, but then how much does this person know about law, the markets, investments? The real world? Probably not much, which means then you and your team are spending this time training him/her, without the forecast knowledge if this person will even stay with you in the long term. What is your personal hourly rate worth? $500/hour? $1000/hour? Are you willing to spend that training someone else?
+ How do I select an Outsourced Chief Marketing Officer?
There is really no secret formula to selecting an Outsourced CMO. We believe your main priority should be the level of trust and confidence you can have in this person and/or agency taking over many of the marketing and branding decision making as it pertains to portraying you and your firm to your target audience. Do you want to focus on the ultra high net worth market? If so, is Tik Tok the best platform for you? Are you seeking to focus on the retiree market? If so, should you be doing podcasts?
All of these are decisions that you can ask and discuss with your Outsourced CMO, rather than taking on the extra burden of making such big decisions.