What a Fractional CMO Does: Marketing Without the Full-Time Cost

In this episode of Ahead of the Game, Peter Murphy Lewis, founder of Strategic Pete and a seasoned fractional CMO, dives into the evolving world of marketing leadership. He shares his journey from academia to international business, revealing how he helps companies make sense of overwhelming marketing data to drive real growth. Peter discusses the rise of fractional CMOs, the importance of strategy over execution, and how AI is reshaping the digital marketing landscape.

Key Takeaways:

(01:03) The rise of the fractional CMO: Why companies need strategic leadership before execution.

(04:43) Does every business need a CMO? No—small, agile teams can often operate without one.

(08:52) Performance-based compensation in marketing: Pros, cons, and negotiation strategies.

(12:50) Learning from early mistakes: SEO missteps, poor hiring decisions, and business pivots.

(18:26) The power of remote teams: How global talent can accelerate marketing success.

(23:46) Intern-to-MVP system: Training marketing generalists from the ground up.

(34:08) The most in-demand digital marketing skills in 2025.

(36:09) How AI is reshaping marketing—leveraging automation without losing strategy.

(42:50) LinkedIn organic growth, newsletters, and automation: The biggest B2B trends for 2025.

(46:46) Advice for younger entrepreneurs: Pick the right industry and always keep learning.

RAPID-FIRE Q&A

What is a fractional CMO, and why is it trending?

A fractional CMO provides high-level marketing strategy without the full-time salary. The rise in remote work and the demand for strategic leadership has made this role more popular.

What’s the biggest mistake marketers make?

Jumping straight into execution without defining strategy. Most marketing tactics are commodities—the differentiator is knowing what to do before doing it.

How do you build and train high-performing teams?

Hire for soft skills first—curiosity, resilience, and adaptability. Technical marketing skills can be taught, but a growth mindset is key.

What are the most overlooked marketing opportunities right now?

LinkedIn automation, AI-powered content personalization, and strategic webinars are proving to be major revenue drivers for B2B companies.

What’s next for you?

Peter is launching a book on how to scale businesses using international talent and continues to develop content-driven marketing strategies for companies worldwide.

Transcript

Will Francis (00:06)
Welcome to Ahead of the Game, a podcast brought to you by the Digital Marketing Institute. I’m your host, Will Francis, and today I’m talking to Peter Murphy Lewis, all about being a fractional CMO and his journey in the world of marketing and more. He’s the founder of strategicpete.com, and he’s a sought after fractional chief marketing officer renowned for transforming overwhelming marketing data into actionable strategies that drive revenue and growth.

Software, travel, media, even zoos and banks. He works in all kinds of industries and he loves and thrives at that intersection of creativity and data-driven results. And I want to talk to him all about that. Peter, welcome to the podcast. It’s great to have you.

Peter Murphy Lewis (00:49)
Thanks Will, pleasure to be here. Excited to market chatter with you.

Will Francis (00:54)
What is a fractional CMO and why has it been talked about as a role so much?

Peter Murphy Lewis (01:03)
I’ll start with, I think the trending side first, because in my opinion, the definition is while it’s not fluid, it’s not conclusive. It’s not completely defined because I speak to so many CEOs, so many prospects, so many clients who don’t really know what it is 100 % that they’re asking. So from a trending point of view, I think that fractional CMO has, is on the rise one because of remote work, right? Like if you,

If you, I’m in the middle of the United States, CMO in the state of Kansas in the middle is gonna make half of what a CMO is gonna cost in New York or California. Well, remote work makes that possible nowadays, right? With the amount of tools that we have, the people who weren’t open to remote work five years ago, CEOs today now know how to use everything on remote and are used to top talent globally. Secondly, I think that, you know, there is,

an interest in leadership, boards, venture-backed private equity who say, we need strategy before we need execution. We don’t have the revenue. We might be at a one million or we might be at two million or we might be at five million and we don’t have the revenue for a chief marketing officer. In South America, that might be $80 to $100,000 a year. In the US,

That’s $200 to $500,000 a year, depending on what size of company you’re on. So if you’re a smart, you know, investor, you’re like, why don’t I hire a strategist for five hours a week, you know, at a lot less than a full salary. And I think that there’s some added benefit. Like if you’re, if you are a person who’s, you know, run a lot of businesses, you get that having a fractional CMO,

who works across different industries or works across three or four or five or six different teams also bring something to the table because they’re not in the trenches. So that’s why I think it’s trendy. the, so it’s a cost reason, there’s a remote reason, there’s an efficiency reason. Now, what is it? I’ll give you what, how I approach it. I approach it is that a fractional CMO is a person who is going to plug into your company.

Will Francis (03:07)
Yeah.

Peter Murphy Lewis (03:29)
as if it were a teammate. The person is going to think like a strategist. The person is able to oversee your team or team of contractors or their own team, and is also going to be willing to negotiate something based around performance if they’re not just a consultant. So it’s not a consultant. It’s not a freelancer. It’s not a mid-level marketer who might know how to do, but doesn’t know how to think up the strategy.

And so I see it trending partially because I see a lot of freelancers saying I’m fractional. know, like you have to, in my opinion, you have to be able to sit down and do an audit and think what you should do before you do it. The people who come to me are often CEOs who don’t live in marketing, don’t oversee marketing, don’t operate marketing. They have a good product and they have struggled hiring one or two or three marketing agencies.

Or marketers, middle level marketers who just can’t figure out the strategy first. And that’s a sweet spot.

Will Francis (04:38)
Well that’s interesting, I mean does everyone need a CMO?

Peter Murphy Lewis (04:43)
No, no, no. Like if you’re, if you, if you are a small team and you’re a smart founder, CEO, whatever name you want to put it, you’re, you know, you’re general manager of your two man team or 10 man team, you don’t need a chief marketing officer. You’re so much closer to your client and to your product and to your service that you don’t, you don’t need a fractional CMO. You don’t need a full-time CMO. You can probably run,

with an entry-level marketer who is good at writing emails if you know if you’re close to your customer. I think that there’s a lot of inflated egos in the marketing space saying that everyone needs it. I don’t think so. I’ve said no to many, many a prospect saying, hey man, book a call with me once a month for free on Growth Mentor through one of my communities. You do not need to hire me nor any of my peers.

Will Francis (05:36)
Interesting. What’s, I mean, not a red flag because that’s a negative thing, but what’s like a key sign that someone doesn’t need you that would make you turn them down and say, you don’t need me?

Peter Murphy Lewis (05:50)
Well, for starters, I think when, you know, they just are worried about execution, right? If you’re just worried about execution, I really think you should go find a marketing agency or find a good marketer who’s a generalist who can execute upon those items, right? Like execution and marketing, nine out of 10 things that we do in marketing are now commodities, right? Like SEO has been a commodity for 10 years.

PPC is now a commodity with AI copy and is a commodity. There’s so many things. What is still left out there is strategy before you do any of the execution problem solving.

Will Francis (06:32)
Yeah, true, yeah. That’s so interesting. So I would love to hear more about your career, your background, like how you arrived at doing this, because our listeners will be curious. They may aspire to be where you’re at. And I’d love to know how you got there. What is your path to today?

Peter Murphy Lewis (06:49)
The abbreviated version is in 2007, I started my own company in South America. I was an academic prior to that and I couldn’t get a job with anybody else, no one would hire me. And so I started my own company, created a bicycle traveling company that really took off quickly, had well-known customers like Paul McCartney and Aerosmith and…

Beyonce and got in The New York Times. And then we built three or four more brands out of that. We did golf tours. We did high end excursions to Atacama and Easter Island and Antarctica, you $5,000 to $15,000 per person. And so we kind of grew from like a grassroots bicycle company to a high end luxury package. And that company I just sold this year, 2024, and that using my own money,

to grow my travel companies and brands and HR and scaling to four cities and hitting seven figures and 50 employees, that’s where I learned my marketing chops. Now, the transition into what a fractional CMO is, I started helping other people solve the same problems that I solved in my travel company. Like, how do you digitalize…

a brick and mortar company. I started working with banks, right? I helped banks become newly chartered and I’m on the board of a bank that is pretty big, $750 million  in assets. So that kind of experience that I first got my chops with then translated into helping other people. And then I started to realize, you know, like I don’t have to run my other company, I can sell it. And now I can just help other people make money. I mean, I always I say when I’m not on camera, and I won’t swear to your audience, but I say I’d love to help people make a lot of effing money.

And that’s kind of my passion. And when you have skin in the game, because I usually negotiate contracts, I usually negotiate contracts around my performance. And that allows people to trust me and pay a higher price as a bonus, but engage more quickly.

Will Francis (08:52)
That’s interesting. I was always really wary about that. used to run an agency and I was always wary about performance related payment, but in hindsight, I probably should have been more open to it, I think. Do people ask you about that? Do you have any sort of general advice about that for sort of freelance marketers out there being asked for performance related fees?

Peter Murphy Lewis (09:18)
Yeah, I would be very careful and I would be wary as you were, especially at the beginning. And when I say performance, I usually won’t negotiate anything around KPIs and metrics until I’ve worked inside of their CRM or their PPC or their SEO for at least a month, right? Because the first time you meet with a prospect, they don’t tell you that their company’s in trouble, that their revenue’s headed down. Yyou know, that they have, their domain has problems, their email’s been blacklisted, they don’t tell you all their problems. Right, so if you sign up for metrics it’s unfair because they haven’t shared all of their cards. Just like you don’t say like, hey, you know, on Fridays, I like to close my computer at 2 p.m., right, you wait until you’re overperforming, they’re not gonna tell you, hey, our pipeline is reduced every quarter for 15 % over the last four quarters. So.

I wouldn’t negotiate anything around KPIs. What I do negotiate upfront is I will negotiate, hey, here’s what I’ll charge you. So I’m gonna charge you $20,000 a month. That’s what my fee is for all of these items. I’m willing to work for $10,000 a month with all of my team doing the engagement. Any time that you decide to move it up to the retainer, what was done in the past is two times that difference. So like the first three months you pay me $10,000,

Soon as you move the retainer up to 20%, you’re paying me a 2X bonus on the $10,000 that I took as a risk for the first three months. So you’re gonna pay me a $30,000 bonus times two, you’re gonna pay me a $60,000 bonus. And so I do it around retainer, and then I will negotiate my KPIs as soon as I understand them. It’s in my best interest to negotiate KPIs, because then the person can look at something like, is Peter delivering or not, right? Like, I don’t wanna have to convince him every single month.

if they should continue with my retainer at $10,000. And ideally, I wanna move them to something that they feel comfortable right away. So I’ll let them move to the $10,000, the $20,000, $30,000. So I’ll negotiate around my renewal of my contract until I figure out the KPIs.

Will Francis (11:33)
Very good, that’s very interesting, yeah. does that, On your side, does that motivate the team, knowing that there’s skin in the game and there’s something at stake, do you think?

Peter Murphy Lewis (11:46)
Yeah, I share, you know, for my management team, I’m sharing revenue, I’m sharing contract numbers with them. And, you know, then I say, you know, we have bonuses around when our contract is renewed. We have bonuses around when the person moves from the risk, you know, the risk first three months up to the full retainer. And then I tell all of my clients that there’s a bonus at the end of the year. And I tell them that’s how I motivate my team.

Will Francis (12:12)
Okay, that is…

Peter Murphy Lewis (12:13)
Now the majority, now to be specific, well, the majority of the financial risk, I’m taking it. So my team is being paid.

Will Francis (12:20)
of course, yeah. Yeah, yeah, but I just, but still when you work for someone, you want them to be winning, you want them to, you want it to all go well because that provides long-term stability for them work-wise. Like when you work for an agency or anything like that. Yeah, that’s really interesting. Okay, so you learn all about marketing by running your own company, right? Tell me, do you remember any of those early mistakes? Like what were the kind of biggest mistakes, big learnings, let’s call them, in those early days?

Peter Murphy Lewis (12:50)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

How much time do we have, Will?

I’ll start off with the embarrassing ones. My new kind of catch phrase in the last week or two that I’ve learned about myself is my only real currency in life Will is vulnerability. I don’t have a lot more to add to the team or the plate and other than vulnerability. So let’s start off. I can remember at about month six, firing our first secretary/executive assistant.

by sending an email to my boss, or to my boss, to my business partner named Joel (Joel). And I said, Joel I’m coming into the office today at two o’clock. We have to let Maria Jose go. You know, she hasn’t done this, this, and this. She hasn’t answered these emails. Well, I put her in CC. And when I show up to the office, she says, Peter, I got the email you sent to Joel I’m aware it’s my last day.

Will Francis (13:53)
No

Peter Murphy Lewis (14:04)
It still hurts today. That was in 2007. It still hurts today. I can, I can tell you the amount of times that I’ve negotiated poor contracts with marketing agencies. I’ve got a good one. I screwed our traffic so poorly one time Will, I don’t know what I did till this day. I did something with telling Google Analytics and telling search, Google Search Console that most of my traffic should be focused in South America. And so then it started to lower my rank

and focus on people who are searching for me in South America. All of my clients were from North America and Western Europe, all of them. So it took me about six months to see my traffic go from 5,000 unique visitors per month and it tanked to 1,500 and I lost, I don’t know, maybe $200,000 of revenue just because of an SEO traffic mistake. But I have another, I have 15 more lists if you guys wanna feel better about all your mistakes that will make you be like, man, Peter’s stupid, I won’t hire him.

Will Francis (15:00)
No, but it’s good, it’s good because I think I talk a lot about imposter syndrome on the podcast. I talk a lot about this, just the insecurities of being a marketer because there’s no rule book. There’s no perfect way to do everything. it’s rough and dirty and grubby out there and you’re just scrabbling around, aren’t you? And yeah, your hands get dirty and you mess up and you break things and that’s okay. And so it’s nice to get people like yourself who are clearly very successful

talking about that to make people feel… because there’s a lot of cliches in that, know, fail fast, break things, but no one really talks about the gory details so much. So it’s nice to hear that.

Peter Murphy Lewis (15:43)
Yeah, I was fellin’ fast and fellin’ forward before Silicon Valley was tellin’ us that that was cool, and I wasn’t doin’ it on purpose Will.

Will Francis (15:54)
What do you think’s different? How do you think the digital landscape’s changed? What’s different now versus sort of 15 years ago?

Peter Murphy Lewis (16:05)
Well, I feel like things are much harder and easier in the same breath. much harder, right? Like everything is digitalized. Before COVID, there were so many companies that didn’t have to send out an email newsletter. There were, I think, I think the majority of companies didn’t have to do anything outbound.

Some of them didn’t have to do ads, some of them didn’t have to do any cold email, some of them didn’t have to do anything on LinkedIn. Some people only had to worry about one handle on one social, only Facebook. Didn’t have to think about YouTube or TikTok or podcasts. Now, and that’s different, right? Like a bank that I work with now has to do all of that. And how do you make a bank sexy, right? Like that’s hard. How do you make a bank compete against…

crypto and PayPal and Payoneer and Venmo and all of those things that are just so much more difficult. From an easy point of the word, right? Like, I think you and I are gonna talk about this is our world is so interconnected remotely now. I have an amazing person on my team who is from Palestine, who lived in Saudi Arabia when I met her. Now she lives in Toronto.

and she manages all of my branding for all my clients and I’ve never met her. She’s been with me for five years. I have a spectacular project manager who can execute on anything and she’s from Mexico and she started off as an intern with me and now she can oversee my biggest clients, private equity clients and I have an SDR kick ass guy from Bangladesh and out of 16 people on my team, Will, 15 of them started as an intern with me, right?

If you’re a bank that struggles with being sexy in your marketing and growing your base, and you can tap in to somebody in Bangladesh and Palestine and Mexico and Germany and Kenya, you have an advantage over your competitors. So you can scale faster. If you’re smarter and efficient and you know how to use some of these younger tools that all of your audience knows how to do.

then you have an advantage over your Luddite dinosaur competitors.

Will Francis (18:26)
Just detail what that advantage is, because I think the perception is there is only one single advantage with global talent, as people politely call it, and that’s just cheaper rates, cheaper talent. But I think there’s a bit more to it than that. And what is that?

Peter Murphy Lewis (18:37)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, so, you know, for my, my leadership team, you know, they’re making competitive salaries in the United States, but living abroad where cost of living is a lot less. So that’s not the case for my team. And what I would say to that is beyond that from an advantage is I surround myself with people who have different life experiences and think differently than, than myself. I think.

Well, I’ve never taken a marketing class in my life. I’ve never taken a business class in my life. I studied sociology, Spanish, and political science for my masters. So I learned everything kind of on the go, and I try to surround myself with people who are similar. I think that if I met somebody just like myself from Kansas in the middle of the United States, they’re going to be able to offer only 10 % more

to my approach to helping my clients than what I already do. But if I find a version of myself in Kenya or Cyprus or Germany or Pakistan, they approach things so much differently, not just because we have different, you know, psychographic approaches or, but mentally, like I went to, I think one of the most fundamental kind of steps in my life or how I connect the dots to who I am.

is I went to a boarding high school three hours, two hours away from my parents with 160 students in high school in Missouri, poor city, 2000 people, right? Like we’re not talking about a prep school. Nobody wore a tie. The teachers were making a little bit above minimum wage. But out of those 160 boarding high schools, 60 of them were international students.

And those kids were all smarter than me because they were living in their second country at the age of 14. And I was just leaving the state at the age of 14. They already spoke three languages. They already knew how to talk to a dumb American, me, and I didn’t know how to talk to them. So I don’t think that this is about money. I think this is about a framework. It’s like speaking in second language.

Will Francis (20:55)
Interesting. Where do you find these interns and tell us a bit more about these kind of internship or apprenticeships really that you run with them?

Peter Murphy Lewis (21:06)
Yeah, I, this is my favorite kind of hidden gem. It might not be a hidden gem to your audience. I bet there’s a good percentage of them who’ve heard of this, but I hire only on Dynamite Jobs, dynamitejobs.com. It is a job board from an online community called Dynamite Circle.

I’ve been inside of Diamond Circle for I think 10 years. It’s a paid community. I don’t know what it costs, $500 to $1,000 a year. And the only thing that keeps, you know, we have in common is that we’re all digital nomads, which means that we all run our companies locationally independent. And we’re in there and we’re helping each other all day and all night long. But I specifically hire for people who’ve discovered it because if they’ve already worked with a digital nomad, somebody like myself or you, right?

They’ve already been trained, they don’t need to be motivated, they don’t need to be slapped around or told to fill out their paperwork or to update their Asana or their Monday or their Trello or hey, say happy birthday to somebody or if somebody’s a little bit, you haven’t seen them on Slack today, pick up your WhatsApp and call the person. There’s some uniqueness to remote culture that I find from almost everybody who applies for a job on Dynamite Circle that I don’t see myself replacing it.

Every single person on my team has come from Dynamite Circle and when I work with new clients and they ask me to hire a marketing manager for them or sales manager for them, I immediately go to Dynamite Circle.

Will Francis (22:36)
And are you, just to be clear, are these interns coming and working for you or your clients?

Peter Murphy Lewis (22:42)
Most of them start with me. I have a unique system for how I train non-marketers to become generalist marketers in six months. I say that you’re getting the MBA in marketing in six months. And you come work under my name, Strategic Pete, and you work across different clients that I am engaged with. So even if your focus might be my venture-backed AI client,

You’re gonna spend 10 % of your time on PPC with my zoo client. You’re gonna spend 10 % of your time on LinkedIn with my bank client. And that’s gonna make you so well-rounded that if I can’t retain you at the end or I can’t source you at the end with one of my clients as a full-time person, you’re gonna get an MBA in marketing.

Will Francis (23:32)
Wow, interesting. So do you then believe that marketing, the sort of marketing channels, the marketing skills are all quite easily teachable? And I think what I’m hearing is that the soft skills or the motivation, the personality type, you look for a certain kind of person, because that’s maybe less teachable, particularly in six months.

Peter Murphy Lewis (23:46)
Yes.

Will Francis (24:01)
And then you just give them this kind of opportunity to soak up information about marketing. Because yeah, I think I agree with you. A lot of marketing is very quickly learnable, isn’t it?

Peter Murphy Lewis (24:11)
Yeah, yeah. So I think you got your spot on. So I do my hardest to filter out the people who don’t have the soft skills for remote A players, ambitious, people have a chip on the shoulder. Ideally, they failed once or twice. They’re vulnerable. They can learn publicly. They’re aware that what they don’t know, what they don’t know, they ask questions that I try to figure out before

they ever get accepted to work with me and be an intern or apprentice. I don’t care if they have ever written a blog, if they even know what paid performance campaign is. I don’t care if they don’t use social media. I don’t care if they only watch YouTube. I can teach them about LinkedIn, how to write a blog, how to write a newsletter, how to analyze HubSpot pipeline, how to determine what’s broken by becoming an SDR and listen to a sales call.

All of those things can be taught to anyone who has the soft skills. I always say the best generalist marketer is someone who should have been a psychologist, but they realized that they didn’t wanna sit in a couch all day and they wanted to make money for themselves, make money for someone else and solve problems. But that’s kind of what a psychologist is.

Will Francis (25:31)
I mean, do you spend a lot of time on Zoom calls screening and coaching people then? How do you manage that?

Peter Murphy Lewis (25:39)
Yeah, so we have set up a system that starts from the moment they apply until about 30 days in to them having worked with us that is group learning and tools to document what they’re learning and what they’re struggling with. So it’s as little one-on-one to maximize our energy as managers. So I’ll give you a couple of examples and then you can, you know, ask me what you want to dive into or pause on.

Will Francis (26:01)
Yeah.

Peter Murphy Lewis (26:09)
So let’s start off with day one after you’ve onboarded. For the first 30 days that you’ll be onboarded and working with this, you will be asked to fill out a survey, a daily survey when you close your computer. And in that survey, I’m trying to determine what you did that you understood, what you can do tomorrow without me overseeing,

what you’re proud of, of something that you’ve done. So I’m trying to figure out your love language. The book Five Languages of Love is one of the most important books. So if I can figure out how you wanna be appreciated, then I can appreciate you, which will then motivate you more. And then I would think the most critical question that I ask in that survey is, what is one thing that I’ve done in this onboarding today that I could have done better to set you up for success? And if you don’t fill that out and critically,

tell me what I did, what, what, cause I’m trying to teach you culture. I’m trying to teach you to question everything that I do so that you can be a good marketer. If you don’t do that, I’ll take a screenshot and we’ll put it into a group Slack and I’ll say, Will great first day, but you’re not going to make it far if you don’t feel comfortable criticizing me in private. So now’s your time to tell me what I could have done better in public. Right? So we, we are trained, we are reformatting your mind to say everything that’s broken about our system.

Will Francis (27:09)
Yeah.

Peter Murphy Lewis (27:32)
because if you’re good at that, if you can say it to me, then we’re gonna be able to help clients and we’re gonna figure out what’s broken in their system. So that’s just a start. And that tool, all of the managers see at about five o’clock Eastern time and are like, Will really understood the SOPs, he’s really organized. Emma, she was fantastic. She said that she liked the meeting, she understood the KPI scorecard and she liked the cascading goals. She liked our entrepreneurship operating system. she likes data.

let’s train her on Google Analytics. Will likes organize. You know what we need to do? We need to pass him all of our AI tools and have him organize those into context libraries so we can be more efficient with all of our clients. So that’s just kind of like we start to figure out your skill set. But I can give you five other examples of how we make sure we’re not doing one-on-one 30 days a week with five interns. Because five interns usually start in every new generation.

Will Francis (28:25)
Wow. That’s very interesting. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone say that before, just in general about, know, this idea you’ve got about you spot the things that people seem to get the most, that find the most rewarding, and then you kind of send them down that path. Because what happens obviously a lot of the time, isn’t it, that people hire a marketing role, they’ve got this predefined idea of what that role is, and they just force everything about that role on the person, no matter how much they learn about the person in those first days and weeks of the role. It’s like, doesn’t matter who you are, you just need to fit the role. That’s it.

Peter Murphy Lewis (29:04)
Well, I think

that, you know, like, I didn’t invent this, like, empowering people or coaching people to their strengths has been around for a long time. Why it’s particularly critical for me as a fractional CMO, and is, I think, I think it’s twofold. One is, people who come to an internship with me are working for less than $500 a month for six months.

They’re working their butt off. I don’t care if you’re from the United States, if you’re from China, if you’re from South Africa, right? You’re putting in basically free time to contribute and make my clients more money. In exchange I need to teach you something that’s gonna be beneficial to you. In my opinion, it should be your strength. The second most important thing, and from my role as a fractional CMO, right, like.

I don’t compete against marketing agencies that sell products and services as a commodity. Like if your only problem is SEO, I’m not doing SEO. If your only problem is you need Facebook and social media, I don’t do any of that. I’m trying to solve problems that a marketing agency, a product-type service can’t solve right now. So I would, I’m much more likely to send Will to go focus on three things that I don’t have the answer to

based around your skill set. So if you’re good at research, I’m gonna tell you how to figure out how to replace lost traffic from the Google update with Reddit. If you are good at YouTube videos, well then I’m gonna have you go research how we can grow clientele for our B2B client through LinkedIn newsletters. Well, there’s no product out there that you can go buy right now. There’s no.

there’s no written truth around Reddit traffic yet, nor LinkedIn newsletters. It’s to be discovered and we’re figuring out right now. So I’m gonna serve you much more as an intern to take your skillset that I learned from one and apply it to something that’s gonna help a client. Because my client should go hire a marketing agency. If the solution exists, they should go hire an agency, not me.

like when I interview interns, I ask them on day one, if you contribute over the next six months, you’ve proven that you’re a hard worker, that you fit in culturally, that you’re able to help somebody make money, what is your expected salary at the end of six months where you’re going to be able to save, have a good living, that I would be able to retain you at? And for me, I can’t always…

choose an intern based around that, but I try to choose interns that they tell me a price that if they are actually helping me make money for a client, I’m gonna retain that person. And so that is kind of like where I’m trying to figure out how when, I have six months to ethically stick to my word where I said, I’m gonna try to retain you if you contribute.

The way that I’m gonna retain you is helping you be the best marketer on my team and for my clients. And I better do that through something that I’m gonna be able to prove something measurable. So the example of the SEO person, the intern works on my team right now, he’s gonna laugh when he sees this. He’s not a native English speaker. We taught him to write an SEO optimized blog in English and his first one,

he did it on time and did it well and wrote 2,500 words and it was, we published it with minimal editing, probably an hour of editing from my senior content writer. And he’s like, I love writing blogs. I’m like, buddy, man, it’s November 2024.

I don’t know what’s gonna happen to blogs. I’m glad you learned it. I taught you this because you need to be able to write this in case this matters a year from now and you need, you had to follow a diligent way to follow a process. But I just wanted to make you go through the grind so you were empathetic with how hard these other people are working. How about this? Do you know anything about videos? No, I edited a video one time in college on Instagram for one of my classes. I said,

Can I see the video? He showed it to me live in my interview. And this was before he became an intern. And he showed it to me. So once he finished the SEO blog, my team’s like, what should we do with this guy? And I said, you know what? He showed me the edited video and he was empathetic. He was funny. He was psychological. Like he made me laugh. I don’t think he has any experience with editing video, but why don’t we train him? Right now

He spends 10 hours a week only editing videos and it’s gonna make him so much more valuable because he understands pain points, he identifies emotional, he’s figuring out how to optimize it on YouTube with thumbnails and when is the break and a 60 second reel which is discoverable to pull him down to more middle of the funnel. He’s gonna be smarter at YouTube than I am in two months and he was an intern a month ago.

Will Francis (33:42)

What skills do you see being most in demand in digital marketing?

Peter Murphy Lewis (34:08)
Let’s start with, I’ll say quickly the foundational project management. Like every single marketer I work with, they’re struggling with project management tools, updating, doing Gantt charts, fulfilling things on time. So start with that. If you, if you don’t have that, like you can’t apply with me. But more evolved, like where you’re, what’s going to translate into money and to outcome, right? Like PPC is something that I will overpay for. If somebody

is better at PPC strategically speaking, not technically speaking, strategically speaking, like I’ll overpay for that. Video right now, right? Like everything that I am doing for my clients involves some type of visual asset, some type of video asset, YouTube or LinkedIn videos or LinkedIn webinars or those types of tools I still hire for. And same with graphics, right? So like I have,

My most recent hire was a graphic designer and I just went straight to Colombia. I find Colombians inexpensive, really creative, smart, organized, easy to get along with. And I just reached out to 10 people on LinkedIn and I said, I’ll pay you for this test. Will you do it? And I said, I’ll prepay you. And I prepaid the person and the person did it and she’s still with me for over a year. Now she’s helping me design my book that I’m about to publish. Same thing with YouTube. So I found a YouTube

editor, I went straight to LinkedIn, I found people and I just went straight for that. So for me, beyond generalist right now, it’s PPC strategy, graphic, right? And a time when everything’s doing everything in AI, if you can stand out and not look like AI, and then video, those are the three things that stand out for me. Everything else, I feel like I can teach.

Will Francis (35:47)
Yeah.

And I suppose I have to ask you, what are you seeing as the impact for good or bad of AI in marketing right now? Like what are you worried about and what are you optimistic about?

Peter Murphy Lewis (36:09)
I don’t think I’m worried about anything. My team uses AI all the time. We have a paid team account and we’re all looking at each other’s templates. We’re all sharing prompts. We’re making context libraries for each one of our clients to what their ICP is and demographics and sales pipeline and messaging. So we’re using AI at least an hour out of the day. Every single person on my team is using AI.

We are now embracing AI video. We’re playing around with AI video aggressively. I’m creating avatars. I’m filming videos of me talking in 4K video with different gestures. And then I’m planning to scale that with scripts. Right now I’m personally recording one to two videos per day for either a client or for myself, for Strategic Pete.

And if I can scale this, once I figure out the algorithm, the thumbnails and the optimization and the messaging and the tone, if I can scale this with an AI tool, then it’s gonna be a game changer. Because I still feel like, you know, I see smart marketers around me and I see smart clients around me that are making a lot of money and they’re not using 5 % of AI that I am or that my team is or other smart marketing peers are. So right now I don’t have any fears.

in terms of embracing, we embrace everything, right?

I just for starters, after every sales call, I take the video and I put it into an AI tool and I say, I want you to critique what I could have done better. And then I share that with my team, right? Going back to my currency’s vulnerability, AI, if the intern doesn’t feel comfortable criticizing me on onboarding, I can tell you who does. ChatGPT, Gemini.
tell me how bad I was and man, I had one roast me the other day and like it was terrifying. But it’s good for your soul.

Will Francis (38:19)
It is, it’s good to stay humble and all that. It is, but I love how you also share that with the team because I think that helps them in their confidence realize that, yeah, we’re all sort of working this stuff out as we go, you included. We’re all just, every day’s a school day and we’re all in it together. And I think there’s a camaraderie and a kind of, it takes away that kind of hierarchical, we must do what Pete says, kind of, know.

Pete knows everything kind of thing. Hopefully people feel comfortable, you know, learning on the job openly.

Peter Murphy Lewis (38:58)
Yeah, that cut, know where my mind went when you said that is one of the challenges of running a fractional CMO business, because it’s not just me. Like people think fractional CMO is me, but I have this really smart team of people behind me, but people either want to see the 40 year old white guy with blue eyes and pink glasses. But the honest, the honest truth is, you know, there’s five people behind me that are smarter than me in 30 % of what I do.

So you can send the email to me, but if you don’t put my PPC person in CC, you’re wasting four hours because I just need to forward it on, right? Like if you’re not putting my LinkedIn person in CC and you just think that I’m the smartest person in room, you still haven’t understood me or my team. Strategic Pete feels like it’s, you know, five fractional CMOs with 10 marketers behind it who can execute upon the strategy in an efficient way. And we’re willing to, you know, better contract on it. It’s kind of who we are.

Will Francis (39:58)
interesting. That reminds me, there was something I was going to ask you. As a CMO or fractional CMO, how important is it that you stay on top of the very tactical at the coal face, how to do digital marketing, the ins and outs of the tools, the ins and outs of the TikTok algorithm and how LinkedIn works and stuff like that, or does it become a point where you don’t need to really worry about that?

Peter Murphy Lewis (40:27)
tried to be ahead of the times to know which way the trends might be going. If the trend is already scientific, if there’s already knowledge around it and you can hire the person, then I just hire the person. So I am a consultant or mentor on a platform or community called growthmentor.com. Growthmentor.com is one of my five, one of my three favorite communities by far.

Will Francis (40:57)
Yep.

Peter Murphy Lewis (40:57)
I’m a paying mentee and I’m a mentor on there, giving away hundreds of hours of free consultant calls on there. I, last week I said, hey guys, we’ve been doing a bunch of content for this URL and I don’t see the traffic growing up at the numbers that it should. And I don’t see the  keywords ranking in one through three like it should. And I said, here’s what happened. The three of us in this room are not smart enough to know what we’re doing wrong. Go book three calls right now.

with growth mentor experts in SEO, I don’t care if you have to pay $50, $100 or $150, go book it, record the call, I pay for my team to be on there, right? I have five teammates on there that have access to all these people, and then go talk to somebody smarter. Our goal is not to know everything in the room. I think our unique selling proposition right now is that we will understand trends that don’t have a law or science written around it. Right now they’re still art. If there’s science written around it, I’m going to hire the scientist and I will do the execution and package it into strategy that will make a difference on your bottom line.

Will Francis (42:06)
It’s true, isn’t it? The opportunities often are where the concrete hasn’t really set. It’s still fluid, it’s still moving. We don’t really know what kind of shape it’s taking, know, whether that’s, yeah, video, AI, Bluesky know, whatever it is. And that I always think they’re the interesting places to play because it creates a problem for brands, companies, they need someone to come and work it out for them.

Whereas you’re right, if there’s a playbook already, then just go get the playbook.

tell us what trends, micro or macro, you see coming through in 2025 in marketing.

Peter Murphy Lewis (42:50)
LinkedIn organic is just killing it for me. Every single one of my prospect calls said that they heard about me on LinkedIn. It might be ads. might be YouTube. It might be YouTube or it might be, or it might be a podcast, but they think it’s LinkedIn, right? Every single one of them say that they like my content on LinkedIn. So now I’m posting on LinkedIn every single day. And then I would say like, that’s pretty obvious. Like that, I wouldn’t say that’s trending. That might be like a year ago, but what is trending and is working is LinkedIn newsletters.

LinkedIn newsletters are working really well, taking care of the LinkedIn algorithm. Another trend that I see so many people not taking advantage of is the creator status on LinkedIn and YouTube to go live. So like podcasts, I run my own podcast a year ago like you do, and there is low-hanging fruit for people who are creating content do this on live stream. And then that takes advantage of YouTube and LinkedIn’s algorithm.

They will push out notifications and updates to all of your followers and on LinkedIn, that’s a big, big deal. Another idea, LinkedIn, man, I just met with a client yesterday, who all of their clients are on LinkedIn, and they’re not using any LinkedIn automation tools. Every single person that I start working with that has anything in B2B, I immediately test to see if their ICP is on LinkedIn. And then I

do a reverse engineer, I find every single contact, every single prospect that’s inside of their pipeline, inside of their HubSpot or Salesforce or PipeDrive or whatever, and then I go find who they are on LinkedIn, and then I extrapolate who is that person if I were to find

1,000 more of those people. What is their job? Where do they work? What size of company they do? I put that into a spreadsheet. I define why I think that that is one of their ICP. I show that to my client. They say, yes. I said, can you tell me with 75 % certainty, click through these, they look like people that you’d want to talk to that seem qualified. They say, yes. Then I say, let me log into your LinkedIn. I just set up automations to start connecting. And then you got to take advantage of the LinkedIn algorithm to post something so that you’re at the top of their RSS feed soon as you

as as you connect with them. So those are my starters. And then I think the last two items that I’ll throw in is webinars. I still can’t believe how well webinars are working from an ads point of view, from a top of funnel to bottom of funnel, getting someone to warm up. And it’s just more video, right? You’re just teaching someone your process

and moving them further down your funnel and getting them to trust you as the authority, that’s killing it for me right now. And like, I feel like webinars were 2010, it still works for me. And people are still telling me in their webinars, you know, like what their pain point is, why they’re talking to me, what they want to pay for it type of thing. And then the last one is communities. I mean, I find if you’re a marketer, there’s so much business inside of communities. Smart business people are creating communities.

Will Francis (45:30)
Yeah.

Peter Murphy Lewis (45:51)
They’re selling membership to these communities and there’s just such a wealth of knowledge inside of them. one of my favorite communities outside of Growth Mentor, their Slack is amazing. My other one is Dynamite Circle, which is I tell you that I’m inside Dynamite Jobs. And then the last one is Rhodium. Rhodium is kind of a high net worth where people are buying and selling businesses. just got, went to my first event, in-person event, and there I am the dumbest person in the room. There’s only about a hundred people who go to it and…

Being in the dumbest person in the room, man, going back to vulnerability, feels fantastic.

Will Francis (46:23)
You thrive on that, don’t you? I can tell, it’s great. That’s really interesting. Yeah, I agree. think you’re pretty spot on with those thoughts about what people should be jumping on. One closing question.

What advice would you give your younger self when getting into marketing or business?

Peter Murphy Lewis (46:46)
Well, I think I’ll try to answer it in two ways. So when getting into business, I started my first business in the travel industry and I would think twice about what industry you’re going to get into, what offer, what service you’re going to offer, what product you’re going to offer. Okay. I wouldn’t do travel industry again. It’s seven days a week. It’s being disruptive. in order to scale, you have to hire more people. so

you know, don’t make the mistake I did when I was 27 years old. I chose an industry where I had to make more money. I had to hire more people. I was highly dependent upon seasonality. I was dependent upon, you know, crime and reputation of the cities and countries that I was involved in. So the first thing is slow down and think about the industry before you invest money and create a team. Right. If you’re a freelancer, like that’s, that’s not the issue, right? You’re, you’re crafting  your, your art and your skill and your science.

Now to answer your question more directly around kind of as a marketer, you know, I think it would be the same thing. And I’m glad you asked me, right? Like what would I tell my younger self? Because I don’t really feel comfortable giving out advice around things that I’m not confident about. So I’ve probably come off because my voice and my excitement come off as very opinionated. I think you guys have heard all of my opinions. I don’t have a lot of other strong opinions.

But the one piece of advice that I would give my younger self as a marketer, and this is not because I want anyone to come apply with me or anything like this, and I told my wife about four or five years ago, I had something happen with my business that made me think that I was gonna lose everything. And I told her, said, if I lose everything, I want you to remind me of the following. I can work at Starbucks three days a week. I wanna find the smartest person

that is gonna open up their door to me and show me how to be a smarter businessman, a better leader, better at finance, a better industry, I’m gonna go do an apprenticeship. And she said, you have my full support. I started this internship program when I was 27. And when I almost lost everything when I was 30, my plan was to go back and be an apprentice again. So I would, if you feel like you’re struggling, you’re stuck either you’re stuck as a business person.

If you’re stuck as a freelancer, find 10 hours in your week and find somebody smarter who’s going to open up the door and just be vulnerable.

Will Francis (49:10)
Wow, yeah, great. That’s really nice advice, that. Thank you. Look, thanks so much. I really appreciate your time. I’ve learned loads and I’m sure our listeners have too. Just remind people where they can check you out and connect with you online.

Peter Murphy Lewis (49:25)
My favorite place is LinkedIn. As far as I know, I’m the only person on LinkedIn named Peter Murphy Lewis. I have a funny background. I accept all of my connections, even the spammy people who try to sell me stuff. Send me a direct message. Tell me that you love Will’s show. Tell me that you heard about it. Tell me what resonated with you. And if you want to join Growth Mentor, I’ll give you a free coupon for you to join there. You don’t have to join them to talk to me. I’ll jump on a 30 minute call and give you anything that I know and tell you all the things to avoid that I did wrong in the last 20 years of, of my business career. Thank you Will so much. I appreciate it.

Will Francis (49:58)
Lovely and the documentary you made is on YouTube

Peter Murphy Lewis (50:02)
Yeah, go check out the documentary

People Worth Caring About. That was just launched a couple months ago. I’m getting ready to film three more in 2025. And it’s a new important part of my pipeline that I never thought would have existed. It’s exciting.

Will Francis (50:16)
beautiful documentary, really worth checking out. And your book yet to be titled will also be out very soon after this podcast is published.

Peter Murphy Lewis (50:25)
Yeah, yeah, I was playing around with the title today and it’s gonna be, you know, from intern to MVP, a 30 day process to help CEO scale with international talent, something close to that. But it’s gonna be the framework that I’ve been sharing here. It’s written to a CEO. There’s gonna be a couple of annexes for more freelancers who wanna find a CEO, thinks like that, and create that culture. But I’m gonna try to pass off a playbook

for what has worked for me for almost 20 years of hiring smarter, younger people who don’t know anything about marketing so they can surpass you in six months.

Will Francis (50:59)
Nice, I like that. What a nice way to think about it. Lovely stuff. Pete, thank you again. Hope to chat to you again soon. I think we will talk again soon. That would be great. And we can talk more about your book when it’s published. yeah, thanks very much. See you soon.

Peter Murphy Lewis (51:11)
Love it. Thank you, man. Appreciate it.

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We appreciate you listening and would love to hear your thoughts! Visit StrategicPete.com to learn more and connect with Peter on LinkedIn.

Don’t forget to check out People Worth Caring About, Peter’s latest documentary, available on YouTube.