Marketing is powerful but requires investment. And along the startup journey, marketing objectives and goals differ.
Startups are usually reluctant to invest in marketing senior expertise from the beginning. But this results in lost growth opportunities and precious time.
What if you could embrace a fresh approach to accessing marketing expertise? An approach that’s agile, scalable, and allows you to pay per consumption, granting you early access to senior marketing expertise without the typical risks and costs involved. Enter the realm of consumption-based Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).
Consumption-based CMO is an approach that resolves many marketing startups' problems.
You probably heard about consumption-based or usage-based software. This exciting approach to pricing models allows users to pay per their usage. It provides greater flexibility and transparency for the user as the spend is directly tight to the service provided.
It is like purchasing four burger buns at the supermarket when you only need two (Am I the only one who wishes the package existed in France?). Instead of compelling users to purchase an extensive package they don’t need, you charge for the service consumed. It increases the value and competitiveness perception of the product, adding credibility and trust on the way (if your product is bad, it will likely not be used, therefore not billed).
Now, think about marketing. What if you could buy senior expertise as needed when you’re reevaluating your positioning or brand messaging, work on project-based marketing such as building your lead scoring system, support your internal marketing team, or just have a question? Why should you hire a senior marketer when you have punctual needs, a tight budget, or need to understand your business more before committing?
This is where consumption-based marketing expertise comes into play.
What is consumption based CMO?
What I call consumption-based CMO refers to a model in which founders are charged based on their actual usage or consumption of the senior marketing expertise. Instead of a full commitment, founders pay per hour, day, or specific project. This model allows them to pay only for what they need and use, making it a more flexible and cost-effective option. This flexible model allows you to get access to short expertise – such as punctual advice, fresh perspectives, board slides review – mid-term expertise – such as audit, positioning reassessment, marketing strategy – and longer-term commitment – like team recruitment & management, implementation of a scalable marketing machine or international expansion. You can scale up and down per your requirements and the level of happiness of the service.
It is especially valuable when your internal team comprises junior marketers that lack the strategic insights you need to pass the startup stages successfully.
Let’s find out why.
Marketing is costly but crucial, consumption-based CMO allows early strategic thinking.
Marketing is one of the largest areas of spend in startups. As a result, it is even more important to spend it wisely.
Most startups hire junior marketers who lack experience and knowledge to think strategically. They waste precious time and money on marketing activities that are not thought of for the future and lack the data to analyze the ROI of their actions.
If you throw money into Adwords, you might achieve certain growth, but will it be sustainable? Will it pass economic downturns as it addresses the customer that needs your product, or will it attract curiosity along the way that will churn in a few months or when budget restrictions strike? Will you validate your target audience and main use cases needed to scale in Series A? Early strategic thinking is usually overlooked because of the lack of senior expertise available, but this can be risky.
In fact, almost 20% of startups fail because of poor marketing. If you add no business model, lost focus, being outcompeted, lack of market need, pricing issues, failure to pivot, ignoring customers, and failed geographical expansion, you end up with the majority of failures tied directly or indirectly to the absence of strategic marketing insights.
It is an excellent reason to pay attention to senior expertise in this area. You cannot ask a junior marketer who just started to be hands-on and strategic at the same time. Pardon me, you can ask, but you’ll not get it.
But again, hiring a senior marketing leader is expensive, and you might not be ready to invest that much money when you’re not even convinced of the value it can bring. This is fine. And this is when consumption-based marketing expertise comes into play.
Why is usage-based marketing expertise a good idea for startups?
Marketing needs are different per startup stage.
Consumption-based CMO for Seed Startups
In the Seed stage, startups must usually validate their GTM and acquire their first customers. They need to understand their target market, how to position, which brand messaging resonates, and validate many assumptions without data to support them.
Moreover, they need hands-on marketers to execute and test the different hypotheses. They usually wait to hire senior leadership as there is no team to manage, and the focus is mostly on execution.
As a result, they typically lack strategic thinking and insights to optimize their efforts and grow faster. This results in decreased growth, lack of positioning validation, and wasting effort and money.
At this time, remaining agile and able to pivot is needed. By bringing strategic market insights, marketing expertise allows startups to understand and adapt quickly to their market.
With usage-based marketing expertise, you can ask a senior marketer to support you in analyzing your efforts, understanding your market to build the right positioning, and giving you guidelines on brand messaging and tactics to validate strategic assumptions. It can also give you the necessary guidance and training to junior marketers to effectively and efficiently deliver to get you to the next phase.
Consumption-based CMO for Series A Scale-ups
When you get to Series A, you usually require more marketing efforts.
You now need to scale your marketing to achieve predictability. It requires structuration, organization, and processes.
Your early-stage marketing team is usually not the best to handle these new challenges. Your team can grow with you, but the shift in mindset is usually so significant that it is typically the time to hire a Head of Marketing to build the right foundations, hire the team and build a scalable marketing machine.
But hiring can be difficult and risky. During economic downturns, uncertainties in funding add to the risk of hiring a senior marketer.
Adopting consumption-based marketing expertise can help you start quickly, building the right foundations for scaling your marketing efforts and recruiting the team with more extensive flexibility.
Depending on your requirements, you can hire the Head of for 1, 2, or 3 days per week and scale it up and down as needed. It allows you to maximize your investment without the associated risks.
And suppose you’re afraid about durability and consistency. In that case, you can use on-demand senior marketing to support a junior talent in becoming a leader or hiring the right Head of to give you more time and insights to choose wisely.
Consumption-based CMO for Series B Startups and beyond
In Series B and beyond, you focus on growth and maturity. Adding on-demand senior marketing expertise allows you to scale your efforts quickly on project-based marketing such as international expansion, replacing vacancies without impacting your growth, or giving a fresh perspective on your work.
The best advantage of usage-based marketing expertise is flexibility. You get access to senior marketing expertise as needed, remaining agile and strategic enough to take on new opportunities at all startup stages.
Accessing strategic growth through a consumption-based CMO during economic downturns.
This is even more true during economic downturns. At this particular time, you need to:
- Adopt sustainable growth strategies: this is when you need to reconsider your go-to-market strategy, add new tactics such as ABM or SLG elements to your PLG machine, and more.
- Increase retention and upsell/cross-sell.
- Prioritize actions to optimize efforts.
- Be able to respond strategically to changing market trends and customer behaviors.
All of the above requires senior marketing expertise to help you navigate the journey. But this doesn’t necessarily require a full-time commitment.
You can benefit from on-demand senior marketing expertise ensuring efficient kick-starting, scaling, and expansive growth without a full-time commitment. If you’re happy, you keep investing; if not, you stop. Easy.
As a result, you:
- save money
- save time
- reduce risks
- scale at your pace
Adopt consumption-based marketing expertise now; contact me.
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