Communications goes way beyond marketing and advertising and, therefore, differs from the special talents of a great Fractional Chief Marketing Officer. We will discuss their talents and value to you in a later article.
A Chief Communications Officer’s (CCO) value is communicating the value of your brand, mission, vision, values, culture, purpose, and vision internally and externally.
They help you build brand awareness, drive initiatives, and advance change inside and outside the organization.
A Fractional Chief Communications Officer (CCO) enables your marketing team to focus where their talents lie, turning prospects into customers and differentiating the organization from the competition.
Conversely, the Fractional CCO’s job is to strategize and communicate about goals, vision, and objectives, align all stakeholders, and drive initiatives forward.
A Fractional CCO can be crucial in helping an organization achieve its goals by providing strategic communications leadership tailored to the company’s specific needs. Here’s how:
Aligning Communications with Business Objectives: A Fractional CCO ensures that all communications efforts are strategically aligned with the organization’s overall goals. Whether the objective is to enhance brand reputation, enter new markets, or manage a crisis, the Fractional CCO develops and executes communication strategies that directly support these goals. Given that they work with various organizations, they have garnered best practices from across industries that can benefit you.
Driving Brand Awareness and Reputation: If your goal is to build or enhance your brand’s presence, a Fractional CCO can craft and implement a brand strategy that elevates your organization’s profile. This can include refining your messaging, improving media relations, and leveraging traditional and digital channels to reach target audiences. They will also have a strong pulse on the brand, understand how it evolves and be able to communicate those changes to all stakeholders. Hence, the brand remains relevant and valuable.
Managing Change and Transformation: For organizations undergoing significant change, such as mergers, acquisitions, or rebranding, a Fractional CCO can manage the communications strategy to ensure a smooth transition. They can guide internal and external communications to maintain stakeholder trust and minimize disruption. It takes a lot of strategy, active listening skills, and an understanding of change psychology to develop communication around change that is listened to, understood, valued, and engaged with. Without effective communication, change is often deemed unnecessary and ignored.
Enhancing Stakeholder Engagement: A Fractional CCO can develop and execute strategies to improve engagement with key stakeholders, including customers, employees, investors, and the media. By fostering strong relationships and clear communication, the organization can build trust and loyalty, which are essential for achieving long-term goals. A Fractional COO’s role is to listen, understand, and communicate in relevant and meaningful ways. Their job is not to be a bullhorn, but rather to be a conduit of understanding.
Improving Crisis Management: If an organization faces a crisis, a Fractional CCO can provide expert guidance on managing communications effectively to mitigate damage and protect the organization’s reputation. Their experience ensures that the right messages are delivered quickly and accurately, helping the organization navigate the situation with minimal impact. What is vital to understand is that excellent crisis management happens long before a crisis occurs. It is about having systems, policies, procedures, people and plans ready to be actualized at a moment’s notice. This includes making sure these plans are practiced, evaluated, and augmented, and changes in the plan are communicated so everyone is clear on their roles and responsibilities should the need occur. You can find a great playbook on communicating through a crisis here.
Optimizing Resource Allocation: A Fractional CCO helps the organization allocate resources more efficiently by focusing on the most critical communication needs. This targeted approach ensures that efforts are concentrated where they will have the most significant impact, helping the organization achieve its goals more effectively. A great Fractional CCO prioritizes things based on budget, wants, needs, goals, fears and aspirations. They understand business objectives and continually meet with various C-Suite partners to ensure up-to-date priority lists and plans and communication are augmented accordingly.
Providing Leadership Without Overhead: A Fractional CCO offers executive-level leadership without the long-term commitment and overhead costs of a full-time executive. This allows organizations to benefit from high-level expertise while maintaining flexibility in resource allocation. It will enable organizations to bring in senior talent who may not want to work full-time but have decades of experience across industries and can more quickly assess situations, develop strategies and tactics and implement them more effectively.
Accelerating Time-to-Market: If your goal is to launch a new product, service, or initiative, a Fractional CCO can expedite the process by creating and executing a communications plan that quickly generates awareness and drives adoption. Having affected teams understand where you’ve been, where you are, what you are currently doing and why and what the next steps are is vital to bringing projects to market faster, more cost-effectively and more profitably. For example, traditionally, salespeople are not told about new programs until late in the cycle. At that point, they are expected to quickly read up on nuances and sell it to the market. The problem is that these salespeople are currently working with customers on other projects and with limited budgets. Therefore, unless sales and clients are brought in early, opportunities for quick wins are limited, and launches will fall flat.
By leveraging the expertise and strategic insight of a Fractional CCO, organizations can achieve their goals more effectively, whether it’s growing the brand, navigating complex challenges, or improving stakeholder relationships. This role provides the necessary leadership to ensure that communication efforts are impactful and aligned with the organization’s long-term vision.
About Ben Baker
Ben Baker has been a Fractional Chief Communications Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Podcast Officer for his clients for over a decade.
"The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place.”
- George Bernard Shaw
We help you fix that problem and make sure you are listened to, understood, valued, and engaged with by internal and external clients, prospects and stakeholders in meaningful and profitable ways.
Nick Lamparelli is a 20+ year veteran of the insurance wars. He has a unique vantage point on the insurance industry. From selling home & auto insurance, helping companies with commercial insurance, to being an underwriter with an excess & surplus lines wholesaler to catastrophe modeling Nick has wide experience in the industry. Over past 10 years, Nick has been focused on the insurance analytics of natural catastrophes and big data. Nick serves as our Chief Evangelist.
