Building a Fractional Marketing Empire with Ben Hoehn

Hey, Stephen, thanks for having me. I’m Ben Hoehn. I’m a fractional marketing lead at mojomogul. So I do three main things, GTM, demand gen, optimization for different marketing programs, and then generative AI readiness for different companies.

Really it was, it was this nagging suspicion that one day I’d eventually work for myself or start something up. I’d been hiring, building and networking with a lot of different teams. And one thing was consistent. I’d always have, you know, a handful of people on these teams that I’ve built. It said, when are you going to start your own thing? When are you going to start your own thing? I’m ready to come join you. So this is step one, starting my own thing.

Generally, it’s been a few different audiences here. Wait, hit that mute. I work with, kind of, three different groups. One is mainly early stage startups, people that either just got funding or they’re about to get funding. They need me to come in and actually build a marketing team, build scalable process and build everything out for them. So that comes with me, you know, either going in as NIC in some cases, or laying out the strategy, making recommendations and hire tech stack, all that stuff, right? Kind of a one person marketing army. The second audience are mid -market and enterprise companies that have established teams, established processes and products and everything like that. But what they usually do is they need help, either re-optimising or launching something new. A lot of times it’s ABM or it’s, our digital program is not working, we need an overhaul or you know, this dimension strategy with, you know, content marketing, customer marketing, or something along the way just needs help. And then the third is something new that I’ve been starting to do. And I’m getting a lot more traction here are companies of all sizes that want to leverage generative AI to either improve a process, displace legacy tech, or just get started and say, Hey, what do we do? Give us an assessment. How ready are we and where can we improve?

My differentiation is what someone called strategecution, which is as opposed to a lot of different fractional CMOs. I actually come in and can do the work and not just lay out the strategy. Most of the time, if you hire someone fractional or even bring in a consultant, the age old thing is, Hey, this consultant flew in, told us 20 things to do and flew out and ran away. They just threw an action grenade at us and it took off. I don’t do that. I will actually stay and begin to execute the strategy. And as I said, I can train resources that you have on how to do the job that I’m kind of doing in terms of best practices or help you hire, recommend and replace me with that team. So I’m not having to stick around, but I don’t like to leave any of my clients with just use the laundry list of stuff to do. Good luck.

Yeah, I would say the growing is this AI readiness concept. So I’m starting to put together a more robust offering in which I’m evaluating different tools. People started calling me Ben GPT a little while ago because I have this secret list of tools, AI tools that I evaluate and I kind of categorise them. And so now I just get slacks and messages from a lot of different CMOs and other marketing leaders who are like, Hey, do you have a tool that does, you know, market sizing or one that will do TAM or one that does, you know, this or that or the other thing. I’m like, yeah, I’ve tested these three. Here’s my top recommendation. Here’s kind of what they cost. I keep getting those requests and I keep doing this for free. So that tells me I ought to formalise it a little bit more. So that’s one of the newer things out there.

I’d love to scale this into more of an agency approach. My background comes from demand agencies and branding and marketing agencies. Those were how I got into the marketing industry and how I always pictured myself getting in. And then I got the startup bug kind of after working on a couple of agencies and that’s been great. But, I really do kind of like that model model and I like networking, evaluating talent, recommending talent, as you can tell. And as everyone has kind of asked me to.

They keep saying, when are you going to do your own thing? And to me, the model is some form of an agency. I would say it’s more, more evolved than that. I think agencies almost become a four letter word, but if you have people that really know what they’re doing, that can kind of come in and do that strategecution portion. I think that model is super effective.

Doing stuff like this, just having conversations with other marketing leaders networking there. I’m also living in the Bay Area. So I attend at least one or two networking events a week I still know a ton of you know people and vendors that just about every conference so I can kind of always get a ticket and walk around and meet with people that I know either previous clients or vendors that I’ve worked with And then finally just getting referrals from my existing clients putting the work that I do out there and then you know just continuing to have discussions like this.

Also joining communities is a great way. I highly recommend for anyone listening to this to join the, either RevGenius community that’s been a very effective community for me. I’ve met a lot of smart people on there that I’ve worked with before or that I’ve just met. Most of the people, especially people that are super experienced have been very receptive to say, hey, let’s get on a quick 10 minute call. Tell me about you, you tell me about me, let’s find a way to work together or something, you know, and it’s just been very, very fruitful. Like there’s good vibes in that community, as opposed to some of the others that just become like a slack pitch that you have to just turn off after a while.

I think for people that do this, you, if you’re not into networking and self marketing in some way, it’s probably not for you, especially in this day and age when everyone has the ability to do so, everyone has the ability to, you know, churn out a ton of different blog posts and videos and all this content on LinkedIn or, or any platform. So they’re going to get more traction if you’re not into that. And that is just the nature of the beast, no matter how effective you are, it’s just not going to work unless you have like a really deep in road and, you know, a network of capital that is going to keep you fed. You’re going to have to do kind of that biz dev style self marketing. I am one that’s into it. I am in marketing, so I don’t mind doing it all the time. It also helps me network and meet new people. And I like to try and meet a new person a day and I like pushing, pushing out content and things like that. So that is now part of the game.

The second piece is always having a little bit of biz dev. It’s one of the things that I did have to learn as well. I like having, you know, just enough to keep me busy in terms of clients. And so I tried to tell people, Hey, I’m at capacity. I can’t take on any more work. But even in this space, when you’re fractional, you kind of always have to be receptive to maybe taking on one more client or, or, you know, just saying, Hey, yeah, I could take something on because you never know things do change.

You’ll need to, you know, add something else or you’ll need to kind of refer someone to someone else as well. So kind of those two things always be marketing yourself and then always be receptive to one more project. If you can’t do it, pass it on to someone else in your network. I work with a series of different agencies that are happy to kind of take on work and all feed them and then they’ll feed me as well.

Now’s a great time. what I’m hearing universally, and one of the big reasons I went fractional is because everyone is tasked with doing more with less. What that means is people have likely lost either tech, budget for spend or resources, you know, budget for actual hires. But what’s interesting is some of those budgets have just shifted to, you know, organising organisations saying, Hey, we’re not going to pay for like, a W2 employee and their insurance and all that, you know, the oversight that comes with that. but what we might do is pay for, you know, a fractional, which is why there are so many of us now. So now’s a great time to kind of join that crew. I went through several different branding exercises before I started this. So I highly recommend going through a series of those. There are a ton online. I’m not going to just recommend one because I did a few different ones. I also am a member of the NASDAQ entrepreneur group out here in the Bay area. So I’ve seen a ton of those talks and I’ve spoken with a lot of those speakers that have given me just a lot of different insight, but it boils down to establishing your personal brand. What are your strengths? What are you good at converting that into an offering? Like I just laid out kind of the three things that I do. If you do not have that kind of elevator pitch yet, build that. That’s the first thing that you really need to build. And then you can deploy that into, you know, an actual website and actual formalised offering. And then you can kind of climb through the ranks of building your client base and kind of going from there. So my advice is go through that exercise, get something out there, and then just start doing it. And then obviously always be marketing yourself as well.

My main channel is LinkedIn. So if you just follow me, it’s linkedin at mojomogul, M-O -J -O-M -O -G -U -L or mojomogul.com. That’s where I’m the most vocal. The other channels are more my personal channel. Feel free to connect with me on Instagram, but you’re to see a bunch of kid photos.

Well, this is, this has been, yeah. Sorry. This has been good stuff. I, if you do follow me, just stay tuned. I do a lot of different webinars and case studies. And if you do connect with me, feel free to ask questions, or if you’re on RevGenius, feel free to ask questions in the marketing channel. I usually offer free advice there. So one thing that I do just for anyone out of that community, if someone asks a general question, like it usually would to me is a marketing one -on -one question. Hey, have you tried to deploy ABM or what’s the best event way, I will happily answer that and give you kind of a free playbook that you can run with on your own. Because I just believe in that kind of, you know, helping out the next generation philosophy as the best way to build community.

Same, thanks Stephen, thanks for having me.