A Marketing Coach is Your Bridge to Marketing Success
Strategic marketing consulting services delivered by Virtual CMO are unlike traditional forms of consulting. VCMO engagements are structured as a program focused on maximizing the return on your marketing ROI. Digital marketing has become too complex, specialized, and driven by tactical objectives. When business leaders decide to seriously invest in marketing as a vehicle for growth, they need a marketing coach that will simplify marketing and at the same time, ensure it’s strategically purposed for achieving business goals.
Virtual CMO is a marketing consulting service delivered by Dave Zwicker, a seasoned marketing coach with over 25 years experience, mostly at the VP or CMO level. Dave operates as your Chief Marketing Officer on a virtual basis (not really an employee) and a fractional basis (any time slice required). This engagement model is efficient and effective for clients in all areas of business and stages of growth. Whether your business is B2B or B2C, high-tech or low-tech, start-up or steady-state. At the end of the day, marketing is marketing.
The fundamentals of marketing are constant and enduring. Messaging is the foundation for marketing success. Websites are the cornerstone of every campaign. Content must facilitate the customer’s journey. Demand generation must produce a return on investment. And properly applied, analytics create accountability and drive continuous improvement. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
Marketing can be Simple and Strategic
Why do so many businesses struggle with producing a consistent marketing ROI? Most of the time it’s because eager entrepreneurs jump to tactical execution. They lean on intuition to place their bets on one marketing strategy over another. That’s not a recipe for success. Perhaps market conditions have changed, competition has become more intense or your organization has slipped out of alignment. This can happen when a product strategy is no longer aligned with a value proposition that is no longer aligned with sales execution.
There is good news. Regardless of your starting point, a strategic marketing process can guide you toward your vision of the future. That vision might be measured in terms of revenue targets, market share, customer value or operating efficiency. With the right coaching, you can follow a roadmap that will take your marketing from its current state to that desired future state.
All You Need is the Right Marketing Coach and a Roadmap to Success
Remember this proverb: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime. A strategic marketing coach teaches you to fish by combining years of expertise with a proven process for marketing success. Every VCMO engagement covers the fundamentals: Messaging, Website, Content, Demand-generation and a thoughtful use of Analytics. The fundamentals are so important to success, they have become 5 stages of an Executive Marketing Roadmap. This roadmap guides business leaders through a strategic marketing process to maximize the return on your marketing investment.
Using this roadmap as the structure for every engagement ensures each critical success factor is addressed, aligned and fully optimized. This process can be used to create a fiscal year marketing plan or a 30-day sprint for developing a focused sales and marketing initiative. With an Executive Marketing Roadmap, marketing can be simplified and at the same time become highly strategic.
To learn more about the concept of Simply Strategic Marketing, visit this page. To learn more about VCMO client engagement models for creating and following an Executive Marketing Roadmap, visit this page.
If you would like to discuss any of these concepts in more detail, please fill out the contact form and we can schedule some time together. You can read Dave Zwicker’s bio on LinkedIn. You can also read these testimonials from a small sample of many successful client engagements.