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Gaëtan Chardon, marketing strategist

My mission fits in one sentence: turn attention into customers, and customers into growth.

I am a marketing strategist and entrepreneur based in Montreal, Quebec. I was CMO on the Yomi Denzel launches, where I ran the generation of 240,000 leads. I host the Marketing & Chill podcast and I founded WhatPayment.

My work comes down to one question, asked the same way every time: where is the bottleneck, and what is the single decision that clears it. Not a fifty-page audit. One decision, and the order to execute it in.

What I actually work on

Six areas, always the same ones, because these are the ones that move revenue.

• Opening new markets. Analyse what a segment actually needs before building the offer, so you enter with the right promise rather than the product you happened to have on hand.
• Paid acquisition, mainly on Meta. Account structure, creative, angles, budget pacing, and reading the numbers that matter rather than the ones that reassure.
• Sales funnels and their copy. Opt-in page, VSL, sales page, email sequence, booking. Every step prepares the next one or it serves no purpose.
• Product launches. Calendar, offer, scarcity mechanism, orchestrating the live and the replay, and sizing the sales team behind it.
• Audience monetisation. Turning a community that watches into a base that buys, without burning it.
• Building and managing marketing teams. Define the roles in the right order, write the briefs, hire, then hold the line day to day. A badly sequenced team costs more than an incomplete one.

What an outsourced marketing director is

It means holding the CMO function inside a company without being a full-time employee. I own the strategy calls, pick the channels, lead the teams and the vendors, and answer for revenue.

It is the option for companies that need a marketing lead but cannot, or do not yet want to, hire a full-time CMO. And it is very different from a consultant who hands over a document and leaves.

The detail of what the function covers, including the cases where it makes no sense and I say so.

My background

Trained as an engineer, went through consulting before moving fully into marketing. That double origin explains how I work: I look at a sales funnel as a system with measurable points of loss, not as a matter of inspiration.

I then worked on high-volume launches in French-language info products and training, on both the acquisition and the conversion side. That is where the numeric reference points came from, the ones I use today to say quickly whether a funnel has a traffic problem, a promise problem, an offer problem or a closing problem.

A few numbers

Who I work with

Companies selling online that already have volume: info products, training, coaching, high-ticket services, monetised communities. The common thread is not the industry, it is that something already exists to scale.

I work in French and English, with clients in Quebec, France and elsewhere in Europe.

The podcast

Marketing & Chill is how I keep learning in public. I sit down with people who actually post the numbers they claim: media buyers with 20 M$ of ad spend, the copywriters behind the biggest French-language launches, closers, founders. All 18 episodes are fully transcribed on this site. The podcast is in French.

Where to follow me

On YouTube for the podcast, on Instagram and X for short breakdowns, and on LinkedIn.