Marketing leadership one or two days a week
A full-time Marketing Director costs £70,000–£100,000 plus benefits before they've delivered anything. A Fractional CMO gives you the same seniority — strategy, budget ownership, team management and board reporting — for a fraction of that, on a retainer you can scale up or down.
Senior ownership, days not headcount
- Leadership01
- Delivery02
- Reporting03
You have marketing people. You don't have marketing leadership.
Most SMEs at £2m–£20m turnover reach the same point. There's a marketing executive or an agency doing the work, and a managing director trying to direct it between everything else. Activity happens. Nobody can say with confidence which of it is generating revenue.
The instinct is to hire a Marketing Director. But at this stage you rarely need someone five days a week — you need someone senior enough to make the calls, two days a week, who is accountable for the outcome.
That's the role I fill. I sit in your leadership meetings, own the marketing plan and its numbers, and manage whoever delivers it — your team, your existing agencies, or specialists from my network.
What changes for your business
- A written marketing strategy tied to your revenue target, reviewed quarterly.
- One clear owner for marketing performance, reporting into your leadership team.
- Budget allocated on evidence — and reallocated away from what isn't working.
- Your existing marketing team developed rather than replaced.
- Agencies held to account against defined commercial metrics.
What's included in a Fractional CMO retainer
Strategic ownership
The marketing strategy, positioning and channel plan sit with me. I bring recommendations to your leadership team with the reasoning and the numbers behind them.
Leadership presence
Attendance at your management or board meetings, translating marketing performance into commercial language and challenging assumptions in both directions.
Team management
Line management, coaching and structure for your internal marketers. Clear priorities, realistic deadlines and skills development they can carry forward.
Agency accountability
Briefing, managing and reviewing external suppliers against defined outcomes — with the technical knowledge to know whether the work is actually good.
Budget and forecasting
Annual and quarterly budget planning, forecast enquiry volumes by channel, and monthly reconciliation of spend against pipeline.
Reporting discipline. A single monthly report covering cost per qualified enquiry, conversion rates and pipeline contribution by channel. Consistent, honest and comparable month to month.
This is right for you if
- You turn over roughly £2m–£20m and marketing has become too important to leave unowned.
- You have at least one marketing resource, in-house or agency, that needs direction.
- You can commit to a six to twelve month engagement — strategy needs time to compound.
- You want honest challenge from someone independent of internal politics.
- You'd rather build internal capability than become permanently dependent on an agency.
How this works in practice
The detail behind the headline: how the work is structured, what it depends on and how progress is judged.
What a Fractional CMO actually does week to week
A Fractional CMO is not a consultant who visits, comments and leaves. The role is accountable leadership on a part-time basis: owning the marketing plan, chairing the marketing meeting, briefing and managing suppliers, setting the priorities for the quarter and reporting to the board on what marketing produced against target.
In practice a one-day-a-week retainer covers a weekly working session with your team or agency, ongoing review of performance data, sign-off on the next sprint of work, and direct involvement wherever marketing meets sales — lead handover, follow-up discipline, proposal messaging and win/loss review. Two days a week adds hands-on delivery of the highest-value work: proposition, key pages, campaign structure and CRM logic.
When fractional beats hiring, and when it does not
Fractional works best when you need seniority more than hours: the decisions are worth six figures but there is not yet enough day-to-day work to justify a £90,000 Marketing Director plus employment costs. It also works when you have junior marketers doing good tactical work with no one senior to direct them, or when the founder is still the de facto head of marketing and has run out of capacity.
It is the wrong answer if what you actually need is delivery volume — ten blog posts a month, daily social, constant design. That is an execution problem, solved with a specialist or an agency working to a plan. I will tell you if that is your situation, and the honest version of that conversation usually saves the client money.
Sales and marketing alignment
Most SME marketing underperforms at the handover, not the top of the funnel. Enquiries arrive and are followed up inconsistently; nobody agrees what counts as qualified; the CRM records outcomes late or not at all; and marketing is judged on volume while sales is judged on revenue.
Part of the leadership role is closing that gap: a shared definition of a qualified enquiry, an agreed response time, structured qualification questions, pipeline stages that mean the same thing to both sides, and a monthly review where marketing spend is discussed alongside closed revenue rather than in isolation.
Reporting your board will actually trust
Boards lose confidence in marketing when reporting is written in marketing language. Impressions, reach and engagement do not answer the only question that matters: did the money produce enquiries and revenue, and where should the next pound go?
You get a monthly pack built around qualified enquiries, cost per qualified enquiry by channel, pipeline created, conversion rate and — where the CRM allows — revenue influenced. It fits on a few pages, uses the same definitions every month, and includes an explicit recommendation to increase, hold or cut spend by channel.
Fractional CMO vs full-time — see the numbers
Drag the inputs to compare the annual cost of a full-time Marketing Director against a Fractional CMO retainer. The saving is what you could put into the channels and tools that actually grow the business.
Full-time Marketing Director
£116,000
Salary + 30% on-costs + recruitment, year one
Fractional CMO retainer
£28,800
1 day/week · no recruitment or employment costs
Estimated annual saving
£87,200
Enough to fund a focused paid-search budget and the AI tooling that returns hours to your team — while still keeping senior leadership accountable for the outcome.
Marketing thinking in short form
Strategy, SEO and paid search explained in a couple of minutes on Instagram and TikTok.
Where to go next
A few things worth reading — and the pages most people move to from here.
Related insights
- SME GrowthWhen an SME Should Hire a Fractional CMO Instead of a Marketing DirectorThe revenue, team and complexity signals that decide between part-time and full-time leadership.
- AnalyticsThe Five Marketing Numbers Your Board Actually WantsThe reporting set that turns marketing activity into a commercial conversation.
- AIThe AI Operating Model: What a Small Marketing Team Should Automate FirstWhich marketing tasks to hand to AI, which to keep human, and how to govern the difference.
Frequently asked questions
Ready for marketing leadership?
A 30-minute discovery call to understand your targets, your current marketing and whether I'm the right partner for the next stage.