Dr. Jeremy Roberts works as a Fractional CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) with Robot Creative. His journey into entrepreneurship started at the age of nineteen, and has provided him with unique opportunities to develop specializations in several areas. Read more about Jeremy’s journey to becoming a fractional CMO in his Q&A interview below.
Get to Know Jeremy
Q: What was your path to becoming a fractional CMO? Tell us a bit about your prior experience.
A: I started my first business when I was 19 years old. I was in music and entertainment, and eventually moved into concert promotions. Eventually, I became intrigued by digital sales and created a website to sell items. I was a consultant for years for the majority of my 20s, and I consulted for small mom-and-pop shops in San Antonio, as well as clients in Mexico and Saudi Arabia. My first corporate job was at Rackspace. I started in demand gen, and we were doing about 2,500 leads a month, growing 27% year over year, which made us extremely successful. From there, I joined Harland Clarke as a digital consultant, became a public speaker at IBM and became a sales consultant at Adobe. What I have learned is that fractional CMOs are not your typical CMO. A fractional CMO has a very short time to learn things and develop a quick, actionable plan with short-term, mid-term and long-term goals. We can’t afford to spend two years to see a ROI. We have to be good at making an impact quickly, learning everything fast, fostering transparency and more.
Q: How have your non-marketing roles impacted your perspective as a CMO?
A: In marketing, the money given to you by the company is supposed to drive impact, growth and have a certain return. You are spending critical money and relying on the marketing to be successful. Stepping outside of the marketing world has helped me understand the full impact of that money being spent. The second thing is that marketing activities affect other departments. They affect products, sales, finance, you name it. When you have more of a 360 degree point of view, you have a stronger understanding of what you’re doing, how you’re doing it and how it will affect others. That broader perspective is what makes a better CMO, because you’re aware of those blind spots.
Q: What industries/types of businesses are you most passionate about?
A: I’m passionate about businesses that impact the community. Earlier in my career, it was more about transactional industries, but now, I get excited about working on a project that can have a strong impact in the community and help people.
Q: Do you have a favorite project you worked on that significantly helped the community?
A: There’s one I’m working on right now. It’s an independent project. It’s bringing healthcare access to Latin America. It’s a feel-good project. Another one that I worked on was with one of the largest blood bank donation centers in Florida. I worked on a personalization model and digital transformation strategy for them to target the community better and identify how to generate more donations.
Your Role as a Fractional CMO
Q: If you could only use one tool to evaluate a client’s marketing program, what would it be and why?
A: Generalized marketing is always predicated on a website, so I would say a tool that displays an analytics dashboard. Everything revolves around a website. Finding a tool to analyze what works, what we could be doing better, what’s not working and using that information to decipher between primary data and secondary data will help the client understand what efforts are working. It’s important for fractional CMOs to look at that data, the inflow and outflow of the traffic to the site, where people landed on the site, what actions they take and where they dropped off on the site, because everything tells a story. You can do a great job bringing people to the site, but unless you can convert them, you have done nothing.
Q: When working with internal teams, how do you foster transparency and collaboration across the team?
A: I do this with consistent communication, building trust and being helpful. On a team, it’s crucial to communicate weekly to build a cadence of trust. Once we trust each other’s skill sets, we can help each other achieve a common goal.
Q: When building teams, what core value(s) do you look for and why?
A: Culture. The team I’m building right now has highly skilled people, but none of that matters if the culture and dynamic don’t work. Culture drives mission, vision, collaboration and respect. If you can build something with a strong culture, that’s crucial. In the book “Start with Why,” Simon Sinek talks about how leaders inspire others to follow them by inspiring them to also believe in their mission. If you create a culture that believes in the success of a business, you will always win.
The Future of Marketing
Q: What’s a current marketing trend you’re following right now, or keeping an eye on?
A: AI and automation. If you’re not using AI and automation, you’re missing out. Automation creates something that I call an “efficiency center.” We will use AI automation to take mundane tasks that can be automated and create efficiencies that save time. Saving time allows people to focus on the more important tasks, which then allows them to reallocate resources to things that are more needed.
Q: In the next 10 years, how do you think AI is going to impact the different facets of marketing?
A: I’ll take a different angle on this question. The thing I worry about the most when thinking about how AI will impact the different facets of marketing is authenticity. AI will allow the average Joe company to create narratives and content that are not authentic to the true nature of the company, its brand and its product. AI is easily masking the reality behind what companies truly are, and it’s putting a false mask over authenticity.
Looking for Help?
Learn more about Robot Creative’s Fractional CMO Services, and let us know if we can help provide you with marketing leadership or strategy for your business.
