My husband thinks love means making sure my car never drops below a quarter tank of gas. I think love means not leaving my shoes in the middle of the hallway where he’s guaranteed to trip over them at 6am. We’re both right, we’re just speaking different languages.

It wasn’t until I read Gary Chapman’s The 5 Love Languages years ago that I understood why we kept missing each other. He was showing up with a full tank and I was showing up with clear walkways. Both gestures mattered, we just weren’t registering what the other person was offering.

The same thing happens with marketing agencies.

A lot of founders hire a marketing team or bring in a fractional CMO expecting one thing and getting something completely different. The agency shows up with beautiful dashboards. The founder was hoping someone would just fix the tech mess and tell them what to do next.

At Plum Good Marketing, we believe strategy is about showing up in ways that make our clients feel supported, confident, and clear.

Turns out, it looks a lot like the five love languages. And once we understood that, everything clicked.

Words of Affirmation: How Fractional CMO Strategy Communicates

There’s something about getting a text that says “I’m proud of you” on a day when everything feels like a dumpster fire. It’s the kind of message that shows someone genuinely sees what you’re dealing with and acknowledges it matters.

With our clients, we do the same thing. We walk through what’s working and why, not just drop a dashboard in their inbox and move on. A lot of marketing reports look impressive but explain nothing because the data looks busy and the picture stays blurry. We believe marketing KPIs should operate like headlights, illuminating the road ahead instead of decorating the dashboard.

When we work with EOS companies, we make sure the marketing Scorecard is simple enough that leadership can see what’s on or off track at a glance during their weekly L10 (their leadership meeting). If something goes red, we use IDS (Identify, Discuss, Solve) to get to the root cause and figure out what to do next instead of offering vague promises to “monitor it”.

We also help clients tighten “we do everything” into a clear, compelling story. Everything needed for a strong marketing strategy is usually already in the V/TO (the two-page EOS plan). Our job is to make sure marketing reflects that everywhere, or close the gaps where it doesn’t. One client told us we “delivered a brand messaging architecture that resonates deeply across all channels” after just a few months of working together.

We also coach internal marketing teams and make sure leadership sees their wins. And when your gut says something’s off, we give that feeling real words and a real plan. That uneven momentum usually comes from an overloaded Scorecard, which we simplify to what leadership can actually act on weekly.

Quality Time: Building Marketing Team Alignment That Works

You can tell when someone’s really listening. When your friend puts their phone face-down at coffee and waits for the real answer instead of the polite one, not mentally drafting their to-do list while you’re mid-sentence.

That kind of presence matters in relationships. It also matters in fractional CMO partnerships.

A lot of outsourced marketing teams operate at arm’s length. They send you reports, hop on occasional calls, and stay in their lane. But if you’re looking for marketing team alignment and real strategic partnership, you need someone who’s in the room when decisions happen.

We join your Level 10s so marketing isn’t discussed in a vacuum. We collaborate directly with your Integrator, own marketing Rocks (your quarterly priorities), and spend full days in your quarterly and annual planning sessions. We’re in the conversation when someone flags a red number on the Scorecard, when sales mentions a pattern they’re seeing, when ops identifies a bottleneck that marketing could help solve.

One client told us we created “alignment across stakeholders in different departments” and helped them “focus on ROI and growth levers” because we weren’t just the marketing people who showed up once a month. We were at the table when cross-functional problems surfaced, which meant we could IDS them in real time instead of playing telephone through email threads.

We also prioritize working sessions over status updates. Anyone can build you a slideshow and talk through what happened last month, but we’d rather spend that hour mapping out your Q1 campaign calendar or workshopping your messaging for a new service line. The kind of work that really drives things forward.

And when we do look at numbers with you, we translate instead of overwhelming. We simplify your marketing KPIs down to the handful that tell you if you’re on track weekly, explain what’s changed and why it matters, and help you figure out what to do next.

Physical Touch: How a Detroit Marketing Agency Shows Up

Physical touch in relationships is about presence and tangible connection. It’s the unprompted back scratch from your husband that lasts longer than two minutes, without the negotiation of “okay, now you do mine” or the complaints about how tired his arm is. It’s just there… no strings attached.

For a Detroit marketing agency working as your fractional CMO, physical touch means showing up in the real moments. We’re in the room for your product launches, quarterly planning sessions, and annual offsites, working through the details with you instead of sending a deck and calling it done.

We also get hands-on with the pages people actually use. Your homepage, your Google Business Profile, your checkout flow. These are the front desk of your business, and we treat them that way. We anticipate the next question a visitor might have, remove friction where people get stuck, and add trust cues where they’re hesitating.

We shape what, where, and how you show up so your brand feels consistent everywhere. Your Google Business Profile is your second website, especially with how AI search and Google Maps work now. We make sure the information is current, the photos reflect your actual business, and reviews get responses that sound like you.

We tune the full experience from first click to follow-up to welcome. When your EOS plan is aligned, your website reflects good service, and your email and SMS systems are set up right, customers feel taken care of instead of chased.

Gifts: Marketing Strategy Beyond the Template

The best gifts aren’t the expensive ones. They’re the “I saw this and thought of you” moments that show someone was truly paying attention. The book your friend picked up because they remembered an offhand comment you made. Or the coffee they grab you without asking.

In marketing, gifts are those little extras that make the work feel better and move faster. It’s when we notice a profit opportunity in your Black Friday data and build you a new customer segment you didn’t know you needed. Or when we connect you with the perfect vendor from our Rolodex because we know exactly who can solve your problem.

We don’t rely on templates or AI-generated strategies that make every business sound exactly the same. We use AI as a tool to make our work better and faster, but human brains stay front and center. One client described our approach as an “extraordinary blend of strategic clarity and executional excellence.”

The “by the way” insights come from genuinely caring about your business and paying attention to patterns others miss. During one Black Friday campaign, we helped a client build their list through low-cost Meta ads that fed into their email and SMS systems. The result was an engagement rate north of 40% for new subscribers, and 45% of their Black Friday revenue came from previously dormant subscribers and new customers.

We also share our Rolodex freely. As one client put it, we have an “I have a guy for that” attitude, and another appreciated that we “connected them with outstanding vendors and top-notch partners” because we know who’s good at what.

And yes, we bring snacks to meetings and remember your coffee order. The small hospitality details matter.

Acts of Service: What a Great Outsourced Marketing Team Handles

The best kind of help is the kind you don’t have to ask for. Like coming home to find that pile of laundry folded and put away, the one that’s been giving you the death stare from the corner of your bedroom for three days. It’s not Instagram-worthy, nobody’s celebrating it in the group chat, but it matters because now it’s one less thing weighing on you.

We bring the same quiet reliability to the unglamorous marketing work that keeps your business moving. We own the roadmap and priorities so nothing gets dropped. For our EOS clients, that means taking ownership of marketing Rocks across quarters and syncing KPIs with leadership planning.

We also untangle the tech mess that slows everything down. Tracking pixels that aren’t firing, forms that don’t talk to your CRM, marketing automation held together with duct tape and hope. We’ve moved brands from Mailchimp to Klaviyo and watched email-generated revenue triple.

We create things your team can reuse – frameworks, messaging architecture, systems that operationalize your marketing. We also wrangle vendors and protect your budget, vetting agencies, identifying performance gaps, and managing weekly calls with the expertise you’d expect from someone who speaks their language.

Ready for Fractional CMO Partnership?

Working with a fractional CMO shouldn’t feel like you hired someone to send you reports and check boxes. It should feel like you brought in a marketing leader who cares about your business, shows up when it matters, and makes things easier.

That’s what we mean when we say strategy is our love language. We show up through clear communication, time spent solving real problems together, hands-on presence in the moments that matter, thoughtful extras that make the work better, and quiet ownership of the unglamorous stuff that keeps everything running.

If you’re looking for a Detroit marketing consultant who provides marketing alignment that feels less like managing a vendor and more like working with someone who’s genuinely invested in your success, that’s exactly what we do. And if you run on EOS, even better. We speak that language too.

Want to talk about what fractional CMO strategy could look like for your business? Let’s chat.

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