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“Who do you think my number one customer is?” A luxury watch reseller’s CEO asked Angelo Ponzi that on his first day. Angelo guessed somebody with discretionary dollars. The CEO said Google. Angelo is a fractional chief marketing officer and the founder of Craft Marketing and Branding, and that job turned him into the CMO who goes around giving talks on why Google is your number one customer. On the Unscripted SEO Podcast he walked me through what eight months on that team taught him, and why most of the fires he gets hired to put out start with a company that doesn’t know its own market. Subscribe to Unscripted SEO so the next conversation lands in your feed.
A fractional CMO buys you a fraction of a strategist, not a project
Angelo’s definition is plain: “People are buying a fraction of my time.” It could be five hours a week or ten, worked out up front, and his typical engagement runs about eight months. That’s different from interim work, where you take the seat full time while the company hunts for a hire, and different from a project, where you show up, deliver and leave.
He spends that time on strategy, not execution. He sits in the C-suite, digs into the market and the finances, and builds what he calls the blueprint. He isn’t writing the blog. And the reason he likes the model over project work is that he stays engaged the whole time.
Where in the fractional world, I’m always engaged. I’m like a full-time employee just on a fractional basis. – Angelo Ponzi
Google is your number one customer
I asked Angelo where the C-suite and SEO disconnect. His first answer was a story about instant expectations: a client brought in an SEO expert, “and 30 days later, it was like, it’s not working.” They could tweet and see it immediately, and they couldn’t get past the idea that SEO doesn’t work that way.
The watch reseller was the opposite. Angelo was there three days a week, running a 15-person marketing department, and four of those people did nothing but SEO. Backlinks, blogs, competitor analysis and a 75% criteria every piece had to meet, every day. Eight months in, he says, “man, I drank the Kool-Aid.”
But it really showed the power of it if you nurture it and do it right. – Angelo Ponzi
He still uses the lesson on clients who don’t see the point. If someone searches your exact brand name, they find you. If they search the category, you’re on page 45, “but nobody’s ever gonna get there.” So he reads the data instead: which blog posts people land on, what that says about demand, and what to write next. One client in sustainable products had a post called Bioplastics 101 that was still their top page three years after it was written, because nobody understood the difference between industrial and home compostable. That’s an educational page doing the work of a sales team.
The dumpster fire: nobody was going to buy this business
I asked for his biggest dumpster fire. He had a few. One was a 15-person team that hated each other because the previous CMO made every decision behind closed doors with a handpicked few. Angelo spent six months giving all 15 of them a voice.
The better story was a 40-year-old med tech company. They asked him two things: how big is our market, and are our two marketers the right people? They also had a 37% growth target for the year. Angelo dug into the pipeline (leads sitting there for 150-plus days) and the history, and found they had grown about 6% a year for five years. The growth target existed because the owners wanted to sell and didn’t like their valuation.
So the dumpster fire came when I had to tell them at some one point in time that nobody was ever going to buy this business at the end of the year. – Angelo Ponzi
He didn’t get fired. He told a 75-year-old industrial client something similar, after finding that the engineers who bought from them were 60-plus and the 30-to-50-year-olds were sending projects to greener competitors: “You might not make it to 80 was the exact words I used.”
Ask the people who actually buy
This is where Angelo and I agreed hardest. In SEO we build keyword buckets and forecast traffic, but if the people searching don’t fit anywhere in the pipeline, you might as well write about cartoons. Angelo’s version of that is a line he uses on executives:
I have a saying I’ve used for years and sometimes it’s met with, you know, some resistance, but I don’t care what you say. – Angelo Ponzi
The reasoning: how many of your own products will you buy this year? None. So he goes to customers, lost customers and prospects. For an enterprise supply chain software company building a mid-market version, the feature list had 25 items. The buyers boiled it down to six, plus a seventh that was right on the cusp. Build seven, get to market in six months, and add the rest when somebody actually needs it.
A Christmas decor client had marketed weatherproof quality for 20 years. Angelo’s research flipped it to the memories families make at the mall or the sporting venue. “That’s a reason to believe, not a reason to buy.”
And when you lose a deal, don’t accept the first answer. “Price is the easy answer. I’ve heard it for 30 plus years.” If the prospect loved your proposal, why didn’t they come back to negotiate? That’s the real reason, and it’s worth chasing. I went deeper on that idea on my own site: what a lost deal is really telling you.
There are no silver bullets in marketing
I asked how he keeps clients from chasing every channel a competitor is on. An industrial manufacturer wanted to be on TikTok. Angelo looks at what competitors actually post and whether it gets traction, which usually shows they’re “just there to say they’re there.” On one software client’s accounts, LinkedIn was the top channel, Twitter second, and three other networks had literally no hits. “To me, it’s just ego at this point in time.”
He’s equally blunt about stale channels. “We blog.” The last post was two years ago. “That’s not blogging.” He wants clients to keep a running watch on what competitors publish and where, and he gives away an ebook on setting up that kind of competitive intelligence program. You don’t need a big research budget to start, either. You can check what a competitor’s site actually ranks for in a few minutes and decide whether their channel is worth copying.
Other than that, silver bullets have no place in marketing. My other favorite is hope is not a strategy. – Angelo Ponzi
His other stat: 92% of strategies fail because of poor implementation. Build the page, then tell people it’s there, then make sure the story holds when they arrive. A thousand visitors with 999 bouncing off the landing page is not an audience.
Your one takeaway: dig into your own house first
For anyone who has to be their own fractional marketer, Angelo starts inside. One client had won 30% of its proposals for 25 years. The question he put to them was whether they wanted 30% of thousand-dollar proposals or 30% of half-million-dollar ones. Another spread its budget evenly across five vertical markets, and two of them, 40% of the spend, had never produced business. His team spent 60 days on internal data before interviewing a single customer.
Then set the measurement up front. Not every program has a clean return on ad spend, but you can agree on what you’ll be measured on before you start. That’s what prevents the 30-day “hey, it’s not working” call he opened the conversation with.
Dig into your own house first. – Angelo Ponzi
Connect with Angelo Ponzi
- Website: Craft Marketing and Branding
- LinkedIn: Angelo Ponzi
- Podcast: Business Growth Cafe
- Free course: the Craft mini marketing course and more free resources
More episodes like this one live in Small Business Growth and Entrepreneurship. For the SEO side of Angelo’s argument, read how to stop a CEO from calling SEO a failure at day 30.
The Unscripted SEO Podcast is hosted by Jeremy Rivera. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and find every episode at unscriptedseo.com.
