Author: Jena Mertz

How Adding a Fractional CMO or Marketing Leader Can Transform Your Business

Posted on March 7, 2023 by - Business Tips, Strategic Marketing

What if you could bring on an expert to help fill in critical leadership and skills gaps but at a fraction of the cost of hiring FTEs? This is exactly what a fractional CMO or marketing leader does, and here’s how adding one to your team can transform your business. 

Marketing has always been a fast-paced industry, and the momentum continues to build faster than marketing teams can hire the support they need.

It takes time to interview, hire and train new FTEs who may or may not have the skills required to develop and execute effective marketing strategies. It may take several FTEs to fill the necessary gaps, and that overhead adds up quickly.

Yes, you can fine-tune your recruitment strategies to attract qualified candidates, and it’s essential to focus on retaining the talent you already have on board, but neither of these will guarantee your marketing team has the full breadth of expertise needed to deliver qualified leads to your sales team. 

Staying at the forefront of changes in the marketing field is often more than one marketing professional or small internal marketing team can handle—nobody should be doing this alone. 

Just because marketing takes a specialized team, however, doesn’t mean all of those experts need to be on your payroll.

Hiring a fractional CMO, fractional marketing director or fractional marketing sales and alignment expert can provide your business with the power of a full-service marketing department—for a fraction of the cost.

Giant Fractional Marketing Services

Giant Voices offers fractional marketing support to augment your existing internal marketing person or team. This type of investment gives your company the power to leverage the expertise of a full-service marketing agency for a fraction of the cost of hiring FTEs, and it amplifies your existing teams’ capabilities.

Instead of hiring for specific skills, you’ll gain access to an entire strategic marketing team with experts in marketing strategy, digital marketing, web development, SEO, content creation, social media, graphic design, and more. 

We become an integrated part of your organization, delivering what is specifically needed in terms of strategy or tactical assistance. If your team has gaps in certain areas, fractional marketing support could be the key that unlocks unlimited potential.

If you could use help in any of the areas listed below, a fractional service agreement may be worth exploring:

What level of fractional marketing support is right for you?

Marketing support services can augment your team at any level—from C-suite to (virtual) front desk. Check out the following options and consider your needs. 

Fractional Chief Marketing Officer

A fractional CMO sets the strategy for marketing and sales teams, manages your organization’s brand identity, and builds strong relationships with internal and external partners. It’s executive-level strategy and oversight, backed by a skilled team of marketing professionals. 

Fractional Marketing Director

From internal and external communications to marketing and advertising strategy development, a fractional marketing director will help move your business forward powerfully, ensuring all marketing projects are completed and optimized.

Marketing/Sales Administrative Support

Fractional marketing sales and administrative support adds capable hands to your team. They’ll keep you in touch with customers through list management, mailings, email sends, customer inquiries, event management and more.

Case study: Giant fractional CMO services fill critical leadership and skills gaps

Involta is an award-winning hybrid IT and cloud-forward consulting firm orchestrating digital transformation for the nation’s leading enterprises. Involta’s ongoing mission has been rooted in partnership for nearly 20 years.

The Giant Voices team has been Involta’s strategic marketing partner for over a decade, helping grow the company’s footprint from one market to six and providing marketing insight every step of the way.

As Involta grew, the company needed a higher level of strategic marketing insight and leadership. Giant Voices fills the role of Chief Marketing Officer to help Involta fill a critical leadership gap. 

The Giants backup Involta’s internal marketing team, provide support to build Involta’s brand, strengthen lead generation and digital advertising efforts, oversee the company’s website and manage public relations.

This tremendous amount of work wouldn’t be possible without combining the Involta and Giant Voices teams. It’s a collaborative effort every step of the way, and the results have been mutually beneficial. Deep integration leads to deep knowledge and a high level of trust. We’re one team. 

“With Lisa Bodine leading Involta’s marketing efforts, we’ve expanded our data center footprint, honed our IT security offering, elevated the Involta brand and positioned the company for acquisition by Carlyle. She and her team have been invaluable.”

—Jim Buie, Involta CEO

Ready to engage a Giant fractional marketing expert?

Reach out to our team at any time to discuss how we can augment your team.

Little-Known Recruiting Strategies for a Tight Labor Market

Posted on August 16, 2022 by - Business Tips

Welcome to part two of our series on navigating the great resignation for business owners.

For employers, the high job turnover rate seen across industries in the last few years is a double-edged sword. There’s a lot of competition for top talent—and some employers may be rightly concerned about their key people being lured away by competitors (check out our blog on improving your retention strategy for tips).

This also means there is great talent out there that might be a good fit for your team. Whether you’re looking to add to your team, or are planning for the future, it’s a great time to evaluate your recruitment strategy. 

Little-Known Recruiting Strategies for a Tight Labor Market | Giant Voices

Optimize Your Job Postings

The objective of a job posting is to make the right candidates for a position excited about the potential of joining your company.

To do this, your job postings should showcase your brand and accurately represent the work to be performed. Here are a few tips.

  • Use SEO-friendly language. Internally, you might call your accountants “Dollar Detectives” and your lead generation specialists “Click Captains,” but your candidates won’t be searching for those titles. Stick with industry-standard and searchable descriptions in postings. 
  • Describe the position accurately. Resist the temptation to massage job descriptions around what you think a candidate might want. Instead, describe the position accurately, and emphasize possibilities for advancement or position growth as applicable. 
  • Emphasize culture. What makes your company a great place to work? Flexible hours, competitive pay, access to learning and development? Include a separate section on your job posting that describes the benefits of joining your organization. Check out our blog on building a great company culture for more insight.

Encourage Referrals

Your current employees should be your biggest brand advocates and are powerful recruiting tools. Some companies offer referral bonuses, where if a referred candidate is hired, the referring party receives a monetary award.

For many employees, however, the promise of being able to work with a trusted party (and the ability to help a friend or colleague find a new position) is plenty of incentive to make a referral. 

To encourage referrals, make sure to let employees know when you are hiring, and ask them to refer qualified candidates. It also makes sense to treat these referrals with particular care.

Although you have no obligation to hire a referred candidate, you should provide a level of personal attention to referred applicants so both the applicant and the referring employee know the referral was appreciated. An employee who feels their referral had a bad interview experience is unlikely to refer again.

Treat Interviews as Marketing Opportunities

Imagine this—you fill out a lengthy online application for a job and receive no response, or you speak with a recruiter who seems dismissive of your skillset and disinterested in the task of interviewing you. 

Now imagine that instead, you apply for a job and make it to the final round of interviews. The hiring managers are engaging and personable. They seem to like their work, and they seem to like you.

Although you don’t get the job, you receive a personal thank-you note for your application and are warmly encouraged to stay in touch with the organization. 

Which of these companies will you be monitoring for future openings? Where will you tell your similarly-skilled friends to apply?

Although it is rarely framed as such, recruiting and interviewing is a marketing initiative. Making sure that even unqualified candidates receive, at the bare minimum, a formal rejection, demonstrates respect for the job-seeker’s experience. If your resources allow for it, providing a personal note and some individualized feedback can further build goodwill.

For qualified candidates who are not hired, be transparent and timely in communicating your decision, provide relevant information about your timeline for additional hires, and request that the candidates keep you informed on their searches.

You may also want to maintain a list of qualified non-hires and reach out personally when you have another position to fill. Not only will you generate positive buzz about the way your company treats candidates, you might also be able to fast-track the hiring process the next time you have an open position.

Seek Help From a Trusted Partner

From designing and disseminating job posts to processing applications and interviewing candidates, recruiting and hiring is a time-intensive process.

At Giant Voices, we can help fine-tune your recruitment strategy and offer staff support during the hiring process, so that you can bring in the right candidates for your open positions—and build your brand along the way. Reach out if you need help building a strong, dependable team.

Key Retention Strategies for Navigating the Great Resignation

Posted on August 10, 2022 by - Business Tips

It goes by many names. The great resignation. The big quit. Catalyzed by pandemic-related changes in both job structures and employee priorities, workplace turnover has been at an all-time high, and some businesses are more impacted than others.

In fact, a recent study from SHRM Hill found that about 4 million workers left their jobs every month in 2021.

This trend has prompted an increased focus on both recruiting and retention for many companies.

At Giant Voices, helping companies improve their recruiting and retention strategies is one of our core business consulting services. This month, we’re delivering a few key retention tips to help ensure you meet your business goals.

Key Retention Strategies for Navigating the Great Resignation | Giant Voices

Understanding Workplace Turnover

Some level of turnover is natural in a company. Especially for small business owners, it’s important to remember that an employee leaving doesn’t necessarily mean that you are doing something wrong.

Moving, changing priorities or interest in a new line of work are reasons employees leave happy, healthy workplaces.

Instead of focusing on individual transitions, keep an eye on your employee turnover rate to assess your retention strategy. In general, a 10% annual turnover rate (or a 90% retention rate) is considered strong.

Problems tend to arise when turnover rates are significantly higher than this baseline. High rates of turnover require you to devote time and money to replacing talent, and they can mean that your training and development dollars are benefiting your competitors (instead of your company).

A particularly high turnover rate can also suggest there is dissatisfaction within your workforce or, the incentives you offer are not competitive in the market. In this case, a trusted business consulting partner can help you identify issues and make a strategic plan to improve your retention rates.

Connect Work to Purpose

Burnout can be (and often is) caused by overwork. Recent research, however, suggests burnout is less correlated with the amount of work than it is with connection to a sense of purpose.

An employee working 45 hours a week is not a high burnout risk if she feels that her work is moving her towards her personal goals, whether those are related to finances, skill development, career advancement, or helping her company grow.

This same employee, however, might burn out working 20 hours a week if she feels that her efforts aren’t serving a purpose.

To help your employees connect their efforts to outcomes, make sure to recognize and reward strong performance and to provide clear pathways for skill development and advancement within your organization.

Foster a Culture of Feedback

Feedback is key for any healthy community. It can also be difficult to give and receive. To combat this, establish a structure (such as quarterly or annual reviews) to provide employees with consistent feedback, both reinforcing (or positive) and change-oriented (or constructive).

It’s also important to empower your employees to give feedback. Although employees can be reticent to provide feedback up the chain of command, feedback is a key source of information for leadership.

An environment in which an employee feels comfortable telling her boss if she is dissatisfied with an element of her job is one in which her boss can decide whether or not to make a change.

It’s also an inherently healthier environment than one in which the employee kept silent. In giving feedback, she is demonstrating both trust that her supervisors will accept the feedback in good faith and a continued investment in her workplace community.

To encourage a two-way flow of communication, make it a habit to ask your employees for feedback and demonstrate your appreciation of their input.

Although you might not be able to grant all requests, you can build goodwill by thanking an employee for giving feedback, giving true internal consideration to their comments, and following up accordingly.

This demonstrates professional respect and encourages open communication in the future, even if the ultimate answer is that you are not currently in the position to make a requested change.

Learn From Exit Interviews

Conducting exit interviews is one way employers gather feedback from their departing employees. Your exit interview should aim to find out why an employee is leaving, what aspects of their experience were optimal, and what could have been improved upon.

As with internal feedback, the objective of these interviews is not necessarily to learn what you should have done differently—it’s more so taking advantage of a moment in an employee’s tenure when they may be feeling both particularly reflective and comfortable speaking about their experience working at your company.

Keeping exit interview data on hand and watching for common themes can help you determine whether or not changes in your workplace policies or compensation structure are necessary to improve your retention rate.

Final Thoughts

Business owners and entrepreneurs are responsible to many parties. You need to keep your customers happy, forge strong relationships with partners, maintain workplace satisfaction, and monitor your bottom line, which is much to consider! There’s a reason that C-suite superheroes learn to prioritize self-care early on.

If you’re struggling with high turnover or retention and recruitment, a third-party consulting firm like Giant Voices can help. We will identify the root causes, and develop and implement—in tandem with your team—strategies that align with your business goals. To get started, just reach out.

Don’t Boil Your Frog: Three Ways to Evaluate Company Culture

Posted on December 22, 2021 by - Business Tips, Company Culture

Over the course of my career, I’ve had many conversations with peers in jobs that just didn’t feel right.

In most cases, my friends reported that although they loved their work (and their coworkers), things seemed off. Why didn’t folks chat in the break room? Why did every meeting seem tense? Why did people keep leaving.

As hindsight makes obvious, these workplaces had significant culture problems.

There’s a lot to learn from experiences like these. What strikes me most, however, is that my friends’ coworkers didn’t seem to notice their organization’s day-to-day problems, even as they witnessed their negative effects.

At Giant Voices, we believe one of a company’s most important target audiences is internal. If your employees aren’t your biggest fans (and strongest advocates), there’s likely something amiss.

Still not sold? Allow us to offer up why we deem it a critical and profitable strategy for your organization.

Taking Your Cultural Temperature

We all develop cultural blindspots. It’s normal—and can even be healthy: accepting the status quo allows us to focus on the tasks at hand instead of being endlessly overwhelmed by the bigger picture.

The problem occurs when this baseline requires a change. Practices that struck me as odd or problematic were, for my friends’ colleagues, “just the way things are.” It’s the boiled frog effect in real life.

So what is a leadership team to do? How do you evaluate culture when you’re inside of it every day?

It’s a sticky wicket, but we’re here to help.

How to Evaluate Company Culture

1. Ask your newest employees.

To assess your company culture, we recommended interviewing employees who have been with your organization for three or fewer years.

Consider questions like…

  • How does the climate and workplace culture here differ from that at your previous companies?
  • What do you like about our culture?
  • What feels odd or surprising?
  • What might help you do your job better?

To empower your interviewees, go ahead and lay your cards on the table: “I am asking you these questions because you are newer to our company. This gives you the ability to notice things that others might take for granted.”

You might be surprised at just how helpful (and observant) your new hires can be.

A bonus? By soliciting their input, you’re making them part of your positive culture task force. They’ll be on the lookout for ways to help your company become stronger.

2. Conduct an anonymous climate survey.

Climate surveys, often administered by third-party consultants, can assist in driving cultural change by identifying areas on which to focus attention. Gathering data also allows you to monitor progress over time and can be useful in your annual ESG reporting.

These surveys typically focus on work-life balance, leadership and management, employee experience, and inclusion. They can help increase employee satisfaction and engagement and, if needed, can form the basis of a cultural reset. We can help you get started.

3. Seek outside help.

Don’t underestimate the value of an outside eye. Much like your newer employees, independent consulting partners are in a better position to evaluate your company culture than your long-term employees are. They’re also well-versed in interpreting data and in developing workplace and industry-specific solutions.

At Giant Voices, we use data to locate organizational gaps (both operational and cultural), then make strategic recommendations that help our clients build stronger companies and reach their goals.

What’s Next?

At Giant Voices, we believe a strong organizational culture is one of the most important determiners of business success.

After all, the world’s most brilliant idea will fall apart if a team is disaffected and burned out—while an engaged, happy, thriving team can take a so-so business plan and burnish it into something powerful and lasting. 

And, like all things of value, culture doesn’t come cheap. There’s no one-size-fits-all culture-printing machine because culture can and should be specific to each organization.

We’ve been hearing more and more from our clients lately that culture is on their minds, too. We’ve got a lot more coming your way in the new year. 

And if you don’t want to wait—just give us a shout! We’ve been helping clients build strong company cultures since our founding, and we can help you preserve what’s unique and special about your team while identifying ways to make your company even stronger. 

Kick Up Your Marketing with a Fractional CMO, Marketing Director or Sales Administrative Support

Posted on May 7, 2020 by - Business Tips, Strategic Marketing

We don’t need to tell you that COVID-19 caused immediate and likely irreversible shifts in the business landscape. When we come through this—and we WILL come through this—business won’t look quite the same.

While we don’t know what the future holds, we do know that strategic marketing is more important now than it has ever been in the past.

We also know that many business leaders have had to make significant staffing changes in response to COVID-19’s ever-evolving impact on consumer behavior in different industries.

Now is not the time for radio silence. Your customers and prospects need to hear that your company has been able to pivot, that your work endures and that you and your team are here for the long haul.

Giant Voices offers many levels of support to help in all of your strategic communication efforts, and can act as a fractional CMO, marketing director or marketing admin.

Whether you’re looking for administrative assistance on a specific project or more robust oversight for your marketing strategy, the Giants are ready to dive in.

Fractional CMO

It is possible to add an executive to your team without conducting a prolonged search for the perfect candidate—who often comes with a high price tag.

As your Chief Marketing Officer, we’ll handle just about everything from setting sales goals, overseeing company branding, creating key messages, developing collateral, managing digital marketing assets, event coordination and more.

The best part? Our CMOs come backed by the entire Giant Voices team, so you’ll get 20+ strategic marketers to support your company’s growth.

A long-time Giant Client was faced with a sudden and unavoidable crisis, and they needed to formulate and deploy a strategic communications action plan quickly.

Leadership looked to Giant Voices’ public relations expertise for both immediate tactics and a forward-thinking strategy that helped the company build momentum to launch new offers. In the midst of this work, Giant Voices helped the client navigate the changing business landscape in response to COVID-19.

Fractional Marketing Director

From internal and external communications to marketing and advertising strategy, a Giant Voices account executive serving as your marketing director can help move your business forward powerfully. We can step in to fill a temporary vacancy, address a specific situation or crisis, or provide long-term marketing oversight and strategy for your team.

Overseeing the marketing of a parent organization of three independently operating programs is more than a full time job, especially when a CMO doesn’t have access to an in-house marketing team. Giant Voices dove in as a fractional marketing director to keep projects and initiatives running smoothly.

An expert Giant Voices account executive coordinates with contractors, works directly with each program team, engages the Giant creative teams for content creation and graphic design, and ensures each project meets both our and our client’s high standards.

Sales/Marketing Administrative Support

Successful marketing strategies require drilling into the details. Managing lists, coordinating mailings or email sends, staying on top of customer inquiries or managing social media accounts across several platforms is time consuming but incredibly important work.

When our clients need extra hands to get the work done, the Giants roll up our sleeves to keep you in touch with your customers.

When Giant Voices onboarded a new client with a large but unkept database of contacts, we tapped our account assistant’s expertise to validate and clean the large volume of data.

She embraced the high-touch project with a positive attitude and a strong drive for perfection, so our client could focus on strategic marketing initiatives. Today, this client enjoys a clean and accurate list of valuable, engaged contacts.

How Can We Help?

As our clients make strategic decisions to position their business for continued success during and after the global pandemic, Giant Voices is here to help.

Our job is to augment your team wherever you need support the most so we can strengthen your business now and into the future. Get in touch with us to discuss your strategic marketing needs and explore your options.