Fractional Leaders feat. Kevin Mason

In this  ‘Fractional Leaders’ blog, we chat with Kevin Mason, an experienced fractional CMO specializing in B2B marketing, particularly in Manufacturing and Engineering.

Read on to learn about Kevin’s journey, client successes, and insights for scaling businesses.

Can you please introduce yourself and your journey to becoming a Fractional Leader?

I’m a straight-talking fractional CMO, offering strategic marketing expertise to a B2B client base. Manufacturing and Engineering are particular specialism. With over 20 years of board level experience as a strategic marketing consultant, and more recently as a fractional CMO, I’ve got a fair idea of what works and what doesn’t – I’ve got the scars to prove it!

The companies I work with share a problem.

They’ve grown to a certain size. The board’s set a strategy and they’ve got growth objectives. Everyone has an opinion about marketing, but no-one really knows anything about it.

With no direction, the small marketing team does their best, but the board doesn’t know if it’s working.

The result? Very little.

At some point, the board asks itself “is our marketing fit for purpose?” The fact they have to ask the question signals they have a problem.

They know they need someone experienced to help, but the job isn’t big enough for a full-time marketing director. So they hire me on a part-time basis, at a fraction of the cost.

My job is first to work with the board, setting the marketing strategy, budget, plan and KPIs. Then I direct the team, making any hires if needed, and report to the board on progress. I work with the company until it’s clear the marketing engine is consistently delivering profitable growth.

Let’s talk impact, what achievements are you proud of the most?

I’m very proud of my work with a farming insurance client in the South West.

Five years ago we repositioned the company to double-down on their niche, and developed a proposition which went further than insurance, offering both risk management and risk reduction services to build resilience into member’s businesses.

We then set a marketing strategy, plan and budget, and hired a very talented marketing manager to roll the whole thing out. I continued working with them for two years, at which point we could see measurable impact from the marketing activity.

I caught up with the team recently at their board’s strategy awayday, and it was great to see that year-on-year they’ve consistently achieved their growth objectives, gaining market share against a very large national competitor with deep pockets.

Based on your work with start-ups and scale-ups, do you have any pieces of wisdom you could share with businesses in scale-up mode?

 1. Understand what you’re getting in to. You need marketing to punch you into new territories and markets and you’ll be up against tough competitors with established brands and deep pockets. It’s not something you can dabble in. It takes serious strategic thinking and some seriously hard work.

2. Understand the time-frames. You’re probably already getting tactical short-term wins by fishing for leads in the 5% of the audience who are in-market at that time. But for marketing which can prime the remaining 95% for significant lasting growth, you’ll need to put in the strategic ground work. Typically, it takes 6 months to develop a coherent strategy, and a further 6 months to start to see a measurable impact.

3. Hire the right Fractional CMO. The service is very young, and I’ve seen lots of consultants and freelancers jumping on the bandwagon. To judge whether the person you’re hiring is going to do the job for you, ask yourself this: is the person I’m talking to someone we’d invite onto the board? Because that’s the role. Your marketing director, contracted on a part-time basis. Not someone who can do facebook ads, SEO and website management. Those are people your Fractional CMO might hire.

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If you are a fractional leader and would like to be featured as part of the “Fractional Leaders” series please get in touch.