How does a fractional CMO work? A mini case study.

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to hire a fractional CMO or fractional marketing director? Well, you’re in luck, because I’m going to tell you—using a client of ours as an example.

This client, an established e-commerce company, came to us a few years back because they wanted help with their marketing. They had a staff full of talented and creative people, but nobody had the time or the experience to build and execute an effective marketing strategy.

Getting started with a CMO engagement

Enter the fractional CMO firm (us!). I set up an appointment with the owner and key staff members, and together we built a marketing plan that reflected their marketing goals, brand, target audience, and budget. We customized it to leverage in-house talent as much as possible to keep costs down; in the end, they were in charge of creating content such as videos and photos and acting as the subject matter experts for written content such as blogs. On our end, our job was to oversee the strategy, monitor results, and execute the rest of the plan, including social media (organic and paid), search marketing, email marketing, website conversion, SEO, and more.

Step two: executing the marketing strategy

Once the plan was in place and had buy-in from the team, we got to work. To execute the strategy, we:

Built automatic email flows to, among other things, capture browse and cart abandonment traffic and improve site conversion
Created an email campaign calendar, and started to send monthly sales campaigns
Created a social media posting plan and began to execute it, relying heavily on user-generated content for social proof. We also created a YouTube channel.
Integrated a review-generation platform (in this case Trustpilot) to grow social proof around both the brand and the products themselves
Started building their SEO (Search Engine Optimization) with informational blogs and other website updates
Took over the existing search marketing and paid social media advertising, made updates, and continued to optimize them for better performance
Provided direction and feedback to in-house talent to help them produce content that performed well as ads, website content, social posts, and YouTube videos
Created a print catalog and other printed promotional materials
Reported back results to the owner and key team members so that we could improve the marketing plan over time

In short, we acted exactly as a new CMO or marketing director would if they joined your company: we set the path and got to work. Of course, being fractional, we only focused a portion of our time on this client and therefore kept costs to a minimum.

Does a fractional CMO get results?

So what did all this do for the bottom line? Here are some key results that show that good marketing does work to grow your business… even if your CMO or marketing director is only part-time. Pro tip; the more you treat your FCMO or FMD (Fractional CMO or Fractional Marketing Director) like they’re a part of the team, the better the results will be. This client rolls with us exactly like we’re their head of marketing, and it shows.

Email marketing: we’ve grown annual email revenue by 47%.
Social media: our Instagram following has increased by 172%
SEO: just last year, one of our blogs built around a long-tail keyphrase received 26,144 views (admittedly the best performing of the blogs, but we love that stat!)
Revenue (the most important metric!): in the first year, we grew overall revenue by 30%, and our second holiday season (November and December) netted 177% more revenue than the first.

In conclusion

So, there you have it, folks. If you’re thinking of hiring a fractional CMO or fractional marketing director (pssst… we’d be happy to help!), you should expect to have someone in your marketing corner acting just like your new team member… but for a fraction of the cost.

Happy marketing!

Katie & Theron

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer fractional marketing director services, which include marketing advisory, strategic planning, program and staff management, and marketing implementation for small to medium businesses and startups. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing adviser, and phone-a-friend marketing lifeline. We specialize in building efficient marketing programs to grow your business without blowing the bank.

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The top five marketing best practices that don’t make sense for small businesses

Good news! I’m going to take a break from telling you all the marketing best practices you should be doing… and, instead, tell you which marketing best practices are simply not worth it for small businesses. Yes, you read that right. I’m going to tell you what not to bother with. Consider it like a wee holiday.

Before I get started on this, let me remind you that these are all marketing best practices. This means, that—if you have the staffing, time resources, and budget to do them, they will make your marketing program stronger. Key phrase, here: “If you have the staffing, time resources, and budget”. Most small to medium businesses, however, simply do not. And none of these “best practices” make a lick of sense if you don’t have the resources to do them well.

The top five marketing best practices that don’t make sense for small businesses

A presence on every social media platform. Yeah, the big brands have pages and communities on every platform. But you’ll see, if you pay attention, that they have curated content for each of those platforms, designed for the main demographic of the platform. And, I can guarantee you, they have a full-time social media manager, if not a whole troupe of them. If you don’t have this luxury, it’s much better to focus on just one or two that you know you can do really well. Pick the one or two that best reaches your customer base and knock it out of the park. Yes, less is actually more.
A detailed marketing strategy that uses all marketing channels to meet all customer segments. Again, we’re 100% behind putting together a marketing plan! It’s an absolute necessity. But it doesn’t have to be extremely detailed, and it actually shouldn’t include strategies for all channels. Why? Because I guarantee you that there is no way you have the time resources, staffing, and budget to effectively nail every channel. Instead, think strategically and pick the few channels that you know will work best for you. If you’re not sure which will, talk to a marketing expert (like us!) to get a better idea of what will give you the best bang for your buck.
An in-depth content and social media calendar for the whole year. Again, this is a great idea… if you have the time and resources. On the pro side, it forces you to plan, and makes sure you hit the important events, like Black Friday. But it’s also hard to find the time to do this. You can get the same benefit from quickly jotting out the most important points of the year and adding them to your calendar, then putting the actual details together on a weekly basis. I find that for many business owners, this actually leads to fresher, more interesting content – and better use of UGC (User Generated Content) – than trying to figure out what to say far ahead of time
In-depth audience segmentation. OK, you know the drill: yes, this is a good idea… if you have the time. But remember, a segment is only as good as what you do with it. Do you have time to write five times the marketing emails? No? Then having five customer segments may not be worth it for you (though we do recommend building segments as you grow so that, down the road when you do have the resources, you have the segments in place to use). Instead, focus on segments that are no-brainers. For instance, if you have a clothing boutique that sells men’s and women’s clothes, you do want to segment between men and women so you can send appropriate emails. But try and balance how granular your segments are with how much time you have to address them.
Daily (or even weekly) marketing emails. I suspect a lot of small business owners are put off the idea of email marketing because 1) they hate getting spam emails all the time, and 2) they simply don’t have the time (or interest, since people universally hate putting emails together). But the reality is that marketing emails are one of the most cost-effective ways to generate sales and keep existing customers coming back. You absolutely should do it… but you don’t need to do it all the time. We have clients that do fine with emails just once a month, others do well with just two a month. In fact, many businesses find that sending too many emails results in poorer results and more unsubscribes.

Phew! Feel better? It’s far too easy to read the thousands of articles about marketing best practices and get stressed out because there’s no way you can do them all. But we’re here to tell you that some of them really just don’t make sense.

Of course, if you’re wondering how to decide what you actually should do, you can read our article on the top marketing strategies for small businesses or another of our articles on great steps to grow your business. And, of course, we’d love to help as well. We even offer free mini consultations, so you can pick our brains for free.

Happy small business marketing,

Katie & Theron

At Urban Sherpa Marketing Co. we offer marketing advisory, strategic planning, and services for small businesses and startups. Our goal is to make high-quality marketing possible for every business, no matter the size. Think of us as your outsourced marketing department, strategic marketing adviser, or even your phone-a-friend marketing lifeline. We specialize in building efficient marketing programs to grow your business without blowing the bank.

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Can You Trust Google’s AI to Optimize Your Search Ads?

Google has rolled out new AI-powered suggestions to help advertisers optimize their Google Ads search campaigns. Using machine learning, Google now analyzes your account data and makes recommendations on things like new keyword ideas, bid strategies, ad creative, and more.

The promise is enticing: let Google’s advanced AI do the heavy lifting of campaign optimizations so you can spend less time tinkering and testing. After all, Google has access to a wealth of data that the average advertiser couldn’t possibly process, so their AI should be able to find optimization opportunities that humans would miss, right?

Not so fast. While Google’s AI suggestions may seem impressive on the surface, there are some important caveats to consider before blindly implementing them.

Why Google’s AI might not work for your SEM campaigns

Google’s motivations. At the end of the day, Google is a for-profit company whose main goal is to make money from ads. This means that their AI suggestions may be optimized more for Google’s interests than your own. For example, it may recommend higher bids or broader targeting to increase your spend, without necessarily improving your results. We’ve seen Google’s recommendations dramatically reduce click-through rates and drive up overall campaign spend while lowering conversion rates and overall conversion count.
AI lacks holistic business context. Google’s AI can only base its suggestions on the data. It doesn’t understand the nuances of your specific business, profit margins, sales cycles, or strategic priorities. Recommendations that look good from a pure data perspective may be misaligned with your goals. For example, we once saw Google AI recommend “flyer distribution services” for a company whose core business is online press release distribution (to be clear, the company didn’t offer flyer distribution services). Blindly following this suggestion would have led to highly unqualified leads that would waste both the marketing budget and the sales team’s time.
Automation bias. There can be a tendency to over-rely on automated suggestions, without applying critical thinking. Just because the AI says to do something doesn’t mean it’s the right move. You still need to audit the suggestions through your own strategic lens. All you need to do is take one look at some of the weird and wacky AI images floating through the internet to realize you need to take their suggestions with a vast truckload of salt.

So, in the end, should you utilize Google’s AI recommendations? The suggestions can certainly surface new ideas and areas to explore. But they should be vetted thoroughly rather than implemented blindly. Think of the AI as more of a research assistant than an autonomous decision-maker.

Google suggestions and the broad match trap

One of the insidious things we’ve noticed is Google’s tendency to recommend the use of Broad Match Keywords that require you to rely on their AI to optimize your campaigns. This is usually the first thing Google reps will suggest once they get you on the phone, and to be fair, it has its uses. But, it also has its dangers!

The allure of broad match keywords is understandable. They can increase reach and uncover new search queries beyond your original keyword list. However, campaign transparency and control quickly dissolve. Broad match keywords have steadily expanded to trigger ads for increasingly tangential searches, including irrelevant queries and inappropriate contexts.

Unless vigilantly monitored, broad match can drain your budget across a wider and wider funnel of garbage traffic. We’ve seen cases where broad match keywords triggered ads for competitor’s branded terms, completely unrelated products, and even disturbing or offensive searches. And overbroad matches often have an atrociously low return on ad spend that goes undetected for too long.

Google automated auction pitfalls

Meanwhile, leaving the bid optimization to Google’s AI auction system is risky business. While their smart bidding algorithms consider a vast array of signals, advertisers have no insight into that black box process. What parameters is Google truly optimizing for? Are they favoring high-revenue advertisers or prioritizing auctions that make themselves more money through higher CPCs? We have no way of knowing.

Just as concerning, Google could be training their AI bidders to expand broad match even further and indiscriminately target any queries even remotely connected to your keywords. This leads to overspending and attribution nightmares in tracking true ROI.

Yes, we still need the human element in PPC advertising

In other words, the quest for PPC automation and efficiency has its limits. Automation should be an aid to make PPC marketers more efficient, not a crutch enabling blind reliance. AI and broad matches have their place but must be meticulously monitored and constrained. Relinquishing steering control to black box systems and indiscriminate keyword matching is a recipe for PPC disaster. The human element of strategy, insight, and measurement must remain paramount. Just as in all things, there is no magic PPC marketing card to take you to the finish with no effort.

Ultimately, the human in charge needs to apply strategic judgment, business context, and prioritization to your Google Ads optimizations. The AI can spark insights, but you need to remain firmly in the driver’s seat.

And of course, we’re always here to help. Whether you need a simple audit of your existing campaigns and some thoughts on things that could help optimize your performance or you’re looking for a partner to take on the full-time management of your Google Ads, well, we do that! (And speaking of audits, we’ll do an initial audit absolutely free as part of getting to know you. So you have literally nothing to lose and everything to gain by reaching out!)

And just to finish this off, we’d like to remind you that while AI is up and coming and can be a useful tool, SkyNet was also an AI.

Ask John Connor how that worked out.

Happy marketing!

Theron & Katie

Urban Sherpa Marketing Company is a boutique marketing advisory firm specializing in helping small to medium-sized companies jumpstart their growth. Offering everything from outsourced marketing director services to marketing training and hiring advisory, they love helping marketing teams grow and thrive.

Tips for improving your e-commerce conversion rate

This is a marketing truth: you can have the best advertising in the world, driving all sorts of traffic to your website… but if your website doesn’t convert that traffic into sales, you’re wasting your money.

Obvious, right?

It may be obvious, but I will say it again: it is absolutely imperative—especially if you’re an e-commerce company—that you focus on improving your website conversion rate.

First, let’s set the target. As a baseline, your e-commerce website is doing really well if it has a conversion rate of at least 3%*. This means that for every 100 people who visit your site, about three people will buy something (or, put another way, people make purchases about 3% of the time).

Is your conversion rate at or above 3%? Yes? Congratulations! The information below might still be helpful for you to increase your conversion rate even more. If you’re not at 3%, however, you definitely need to take some time and work on your online store. Here’s where you should focus:

Pricing: one of the most important decisions you can make as an e-commerce company.

Set your prices too high, and you’ll lose sales. Too low, and you’re leaving money on the table and reducing your margin. Test different pricing strategies, particularly on your top sellers. Do NOT arbitrarily set a price based on how much margin you want to make.

Shipping: high shipping costs cause sticker shock.

A sign that this is happening is if you see a large percentage of people abandon their cart after they have started checkout. If you can’t offer free shipping (and many e-commerce companies can’t), then offer free shipping on orders over a certain dollar amount.

Free returns: a generous return policy will go a long way if someone’s on the fence.

It’s a leap of faith to place an order for a product sight unseen. Customers are better able to make that leap of faith if they know they can return the item if it’s not what they expected.

Product selection: people won’t buy if they don’t like what you sell.

Obvious, right? But it pays to make sure you’re offering products that people want to buy (and make sure you’re advertising to the right audience). Remember, you may love your product, but other people won’t. Some market research is always a good idea so that you both test your concept and your audience. Want to read more on building your audience?

Product descriptions: provide all the information people need to buy.

Remember, people are buying your product without being able to touch and feel it. Make sure you answer any question they may have in the product description—and focus on the benefits to the customer (what do they get from it?) not what you see as your favorite features.

Photography: good product photography IS A MUST.

Don’t skimp. Show the product from multiple angles and (for clothing) on multiple models. Also, while the classic product-cut-out-against-a-white-background is a good idea, don’t forget to also show it styled; for instance, if you’re selling travel mugs, try a shot of the mug steaming against a vista in the wilderness. Aspiration is a good sales tool.

Site navigation: people won’t buy if they can’t find what they want.

Make sure your categories are clear and easy to navigate, and if you have a big catalog, add filters, search, and sort features. Not sure if your site is easy to navigate? Have a few people test it for you.

Social proof/UGC: people like to buy what other people buy.

Again (we’re a broken record, here), people can’t see your product in person—but knowing that other people have purchased (and loved it) will help them feel comfortable taking that leap of faith. Add product reviews from a third-party review generator like Trustpilot (don’t just add reviews yourself, if you can help it—those tend to look less real). Also, add user-generated content (UGC is photos and videos created by people who use your product) whenever you can. For our clients, we scan social media for photos of products “in the wild” and then add them to our product pages. Just remember to get permission. There are also platforms that do this automatically if you want to spend the bucks.

Offer coupon codes to new customers: a little incentive will change a browser to a customer.

The biggest hurdle is getting a site visitor to make their first purchase. Once they’ve ordered something (and, we’re assuming, liked the product and the service), they’ll likely be a customer for life. Consider first-time-customer discount codes to help them get over that hurdle.

Create a good conversion funnel: most people won’t buy the first time they visit.

Set up a system so you can keep reminding people about your product if they leave without buying. Get their email address by offering a coupon code (see above), then add them to your email list for weekly or monthly emails. Set up retargeting ads on social media and Google (retargeting ads are ads that are shown to people who have previously visited your website). Set up automatic email (and/or text, depending on your demographic) flows for cart and browse abandonment. If you don’t know how to do this, ask for help (we can help!), or read more on website conversion funnels.

Reduce form fields and make paying easy: don’t make people work hard to buy.

The last thing you want is someone deciding to buy that shirt on a whim, but then finding out they have to fill out a bunch of fields on their phone and have to get up off the couch for their credit card. Make buying easy! Integrate PayPal and other popular payment systems (platforms like Shopify make this easy), and keep your information fields to a minimum. And make it easy for people to save their information for fast checkout the next time. Similarly, avoid lots of disclaimers and warnings, since they tend to reduce trust.

Site speed: if it loads too slowly, you’ve already lost.

In a world of instant gratification, you’ll lose people if they have to wait too long for a page to load. Optimize your photographs and work with your web designer to improve your site speed (this is good for SEO, too).

Optimize for mobile: it’s 2024, people.

There’s an online plant nursery I buy from periodically that has a completely unresponsive website. Pull it up on your mobile, and it looks like the desktop site—just waaaay smaller. It’s a pain in the rear, and I hate them for it. Don’t do this to your customers, since only long-time, super-engaged customers (like me, in this case) will put up with it. Many of your customers will be browsing on mobile, so make sure the site isn’t just responsive, but actually functions and navigates well on mobile, including things like filters and payment fields. Test it thoroughly on multiple devices.

Provide good service: A friendly interaction goes a long way in building customer loyalty.

The last thing you want to do is lose a sale because the potential customer couldn’t get a question answered. Ideally, include help chat on your website; at the very least, have someone who answers the phone and emails promptly. And avoid harsh policies that make customers hate you. Sure, those harsh policies may save you money, but they’ll also likely lose you a lifetime customer… and maybe other potential customers if they complain about you in a review.

There you have it—website conversion 101 in a nutshell. Sure, it may look like a lot, but it’s mostly about one thing: giving people the confidence to buy a product they’ve never seen. Make it fast, make it easy, make it pleasant (and make sure your product and service are good) and the e-commerce world will be your oyster.

Happy marketing!

Katie & Theron

*For the purposes of this blog, we’re going to focus on e-commerce companies. B2B companies, SAAS companies, and D2C service companies will all have different conversion rate baselines.

7 Marketing Steps to Grow Your Business in 2024

This is the time of year when many small business owners take a moment to pause, reflect, and think about what they need to do to grow their business in the coming year.

And since marketing should be a pretty significant part of that, we thought we’d share some of the most important steps you can take to kick your business into growth mode in 2024.

First, and foremost, we’re strictly talking marketing, here. But that doesn’t mean that marketing can magically grow your business in a vacuum. We’re assuming that you’ve already put thought into making sure you have a product or service that people do want, AND that you’ve priced it correctly. ‘Cause the best marketing strategy in the world will only solve those problems temporarily, if at all.

The top ways to grow your business this year

1. Make sure you have an excellent, converting website. Do not put your website up and forget it. Look at it regularly with a critical eye. Is it doing what you need it to do (i.e. converting to sales)? Is it optimized for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)? What can you do to improve conversion rates? (A conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your site that buy your product or contact you)
2. Put in place well-run search marketing (SEM, aka Google Ads). 99.9% of businesses will benefit from good search marketing. SEM is one of the rare times when you’re serving someone an ad specifically when they are looking for your product or service, so it works really well. But notice we said, “well-run”; search marketing takes skill and experience to do well. Make sure you hire a good agency.
3. Leverage a great email marketing strategy. Email marketing is one of the least expensive and most effective ways to turn past customers into future customers. It also works well to keep potential customers warm while they think about whether to purchase. You’ll want to communicate regularly—say once or twice a month—and use a list you’ve built organically over time (although building a list organically can take a really long time, purchased lists are usually a total waste of money). Do not, however, send a newsletter that shares updates on your business because nobody cares. Instead, send information they can use, offers, and new product information—things your customers might want to know about.
4. Focus on social proof. People are more likely to buy if they know other people are doing so and are happy about it. And no, we’re not just talking reviews, here (though reviews are great, especially when collected by an unbiased platform like Trustpilot). Try other routes, too, such as pulling Instagram posts from people who have used your product onto your website, or collecting short video testimonials from customers in your store. And make darn sure you’re encouraging people to leave Google reviews!
5. Make sure you have a good marketing funnel in place. Make sure your website is a sticky as it can be. Put in a pop-up to collect email addresses, run retargeting campaigns, etc, etc. We talk about it more in this blog about building a great marketing funnel.
6. Put in place a strategy for getting NEW people in the funnel. If you keep marketing to the same group of people, you’ll eventually tap them dry. To grow, you have to keep attracting new people to the top of your sales funnel. How exactly to do that will look different depending on each business, but it could include the following channels (see The Top Marketing Strategies for Small Business for more details on these):
  - Social media platforms
  - Social media advertising (paid)
  - PR (media outreach)
  - Web display ads (including IP and Geo-Targeting)
  - Radio/TV/Other media
  - Direct mail/postcards

Test and adjust your strategy. We had a client once who was convinced that a particular value proposition was the only thing that could sell their product. I finally convinced them to let me A/B test it and we found that in both digital and email marketing, a different one worked much better. Bad marketing happens when you make assumptions and don’t test them. Test things. Look at the data. Adjust. Learn. It’s the only way you’ll continue to optimize your marketing. We talk more about that in this blog on testing your marketing.

There you have it. Due to space constraints—nobody wants to read a novel—we’re kept this really brief… but we’d love to hear from you if you have any questions!

Happy marketing,

Katie & Theron