Who needs one
Companies with marketing activity but no marketing leadership. The symptoms are consistent: a team of two or three juniors with nobody senior to answer their questions, three agencies each reporting a different success, a founder approving every decision at 11pm, and a budget that grows without anyone able to say what it returned.
A full-time marketing director is the right answer once the spend and the team justify one. Below that point, a business gets better decisions from a few senior days a month than from a full-time hire it cannot really afford, or from nobody at all.
What the role covers
- Strategy and priorities. Which markets, which segments, which channels, in what order, and what the business is not doing this year.
- Budget ownership. How the money splits, what each line is accountable for, and what gets cut when it does not deliver.
- Vendor management. Briefing agencies and freelancers, reviewing their work against the brief, and having the conversation when performance drops. Most owners find this the most valuable part, because it is the conversation they least want to have.
- Team development. Weekly time with your marketing staff: reviewing work, teaching, setting standards, and hiring when a role is genuinely needed.
- Measurement discipline. One definition of a lead, one report, one number the leadership team looks at. The build behind that sits in analytics and tracking and dashboards and reporting.
- Board and owner reporting. A monthly written view of what happened, what it cost, what it returned and what changes, in the language of the business rather than of marketing.
How the engagement works
- Diagnostic month. A full review of channels, tracking, team, vendors and spend, plus interviews with sales. This is effectively the digital marketing audit run from the inside.
- Plan and budget. A twelve-month direction and a 90-day plan with owners, deadlines and the numbers each channel is accountable for, agreed with you.
- A fixed rhythm. A weekly working session with the team, a fortnightly vendor review, and a monthly leadership report. Predictable time beats being on call.
- Hiring and vendor decisions as they arise: job specs, interviews, briefs, contract terms and, when necessary, ending an arrangement that is not working.
- Quarterly reset. What worked, what did not, and what the next quarter funds.
- Exit path. The point of the role is to build something that runs without me: documented plans, a team that has grown, and a successor brief when you hire a full-time lead.
What you receive
- A written marketing plan and budget, updated quarterly.
- A 90-day roadmap with named owners and deadlines.
- Vendor briefs and a scorecard for each one.
- A monthly leadership report on results, spend and decisions.
- Job specifications and hiring support when a role is justified.
- Documentation your next marketing lead can pick up without an introduction.
What a fractional CMO is not
It is not an execution retainer. I do not run your ad accounts, write your posts or build your site inside this engagement; those are separate services, and if I do both there is an obvious conflict in judging my own work. Where execution is needed, I brief and review the vendor, whether that is my own service or somebody else’s, and you see the same standard applied either way.
It is also not a full-time role at a discount. Two to four days a month buys direction, decisions and accountability. It does not buy someone in every meeting, and a company that needs that should hire.
Where the execution goes
Once priorities are set, the work happens somewhere. Paid channels usually run under performance marketing, and one-off direction without the ongoing role is consulting and strategy. If what you actually want is a diagnosis rather than a leader, the audit is cheaper and faster, and I will say so on the first call.
Pricing pointer
Quoted monthly by the number of days and the size of the team and budget being managed, with a minimum term of three months so the diagnostic has time to turn into results. After that it is month to month. Prices are on request.
Next step
Tell me the size of your marketing team, your annual marketing budget and who currently makes the decisions. I reply within 4 business hours with whether a fractional role fits or whether an audit and a strategy project would serve you better for less.