Freelance marketing support for your small business
Need a marketing plan, help with a campaign, better content or an experienced pair of hands? Work directly with Samuel on a focused project or ongoing support. We agree the work and price first, with practical advice and delivery that fit your small business.
Diagnose → plan → hand over
- Diagnose
- Plan
- Hand over
What does a marketing consultancy actually do?
A marketing consultancy audits what a business already runs, diagnoses why it is underperforming and produces a prioritised plan the in-house team or agency can execute. MCG Growth Marketing delivers that as a fixed-scope review covering positioning, channel mix, CRM data quality and reporting, with clear recommendations ranked by commercial impact.
Everyone inside the business is too close to it
Marketing decisions in an SME accumulate. A website built three years ago, an agency inherited from a previous manager, a channel that once worked and is now running on habit. Each individual decision made sense. Together they've stopped adding up.
An internal review rarely fixes this, because the people conducting it made most of the decisions. What's needed is someone with no stake in defending the current setup, who understands the commercial context and can be direct about it.
Consultancy engagements are deliberately finite. You get a clear diagnosis and a plan, with defined recommendations you can act on immediately.
What changes for your business
- A written diagnosis of where your marketing is losing money and where it's under-invested.
- A prioritised roadmap: what to do in the next quarter, and what to stop.
- Clarity on your proposition and target segments, in language your sales team can use.
- A realistic budget allocation across channels, with expected enquiry volumes.
- A measurement framework your leadership team can interrogate monthly.
Typical consultancy engagements
Marketing audit
A structured review of positioning, channels, website, CRM, reporting and spend, benchmarked against your commercial targets and your competitors' visibility.
Growth plan
A prioritised twelve-month plan with named initiatives, sequencing, budget and expected outcomes — written so your team can execute without me in the room.
Channel diagnosis
Deep review of a single channel — paid search, SEO, email — where spend and results have stopped correlating, with specific remedial actions.
Measurement review
GA4, CRM and attribution reviewed end to end so the numbers your board sees actually reflect what marketing is contributing.
Agency review
An independent assessment of whether your current suppliers are delivering value, and what a better brief or a better provider would look like.
Leadership workshop. A facilitated session with your leadership and sales teams to align on target customers, proposition and what marketing is being asked to deliver.
How freelance marketing support works
For owners who need an experienced person to plan, advise or do the work, without hiring a team. Each piece of work has a brief and an agreed price.
Short conversation
A message or a 15-minute call to understand the business, what has been tried and what you need help with.
Written brief and price
A one-page scope: what will be done, what you will get, timings and the fee, agreed before work starts.
Plan or delivery
Either a prioritised plan your team can run, or hands-on help with the campaign, content or website.
Review
We check what changed against the measures agreed at the start, then decide whether to stop, continue or change focus.
Pricing
- Projects and audits
- Fixed fee quoted from the written brief
- Ongoing support
- Advisory retainers from £500/month, month to month
- Website rebuild
- £1,000 fixed for up to 40 pages, optional £100/month care
Related
- Cheshire Lettings — owner-led positioning and local search for a letting agency
- HausMart — a Crewe-first launch for a property marketplace
- Before hiring a freelance marketer — what Cheshire businesses should prepare
- Marketing strategy — when you need the bigger plan first
Choose the support you actually need
- Choose consultancy when you need a diagnosis, a plan or an independent second opinion.
- Choose consultancy when you have capable delivery resource but no strategic direction.
- Choose a Fractional CMO when the gap is ongoing ownership and accountability, not knowledge.
- Choose a Fractional CMO when your team needs managing, not just briefing.
- Many clients start with an audit and move to a retainer once the priorities are clear.
How this works in practice
The detail behind the headline: how the work is structured, what it depends on and how progress is judged.
How a marketing audit is structured
The audit works front to back through the commercial funnel rather than channel by channel. It starts with the numbers — revenue target, average order value or contract value, sales cycle length, win rate — because those determine how many qualified enquiries marketing has to produce and what one is worth.
From there I review positioning and proposition, target segments, the website's structure and messaging, organic visibility, paid activity, content, email, CRM data quality and reporting. Each finding is graded by commercial impact and effort, so the output is a prioritised list rather than an inventory of everything that could theoretically be improved.
Consultancy for B2B, retail and SaaS
In B2B the constraint is usually clarity and pipeline quality: too many segments, a proposition written for the industry rather than the buyer, and enquiries that sales does not rate. The work concentrates on sharpening the offer, building technical content that answers real buying questions and aligning marketing to sales' definition of qualified.
In retail and ecommerce the constraint is unit economics: contribution margin after ad spend, repeat purchase rate and lifetime value. In SaaS it is efficient acquisition and retention: activation, trial-to-paid conversion, churn and payback period. Same discipline, different scoreboard — which is why the audit always starts with your numbers rather than a template.
What you receive, and who executes it
Deliverables are written, not verbal: a diagnosis document, a prioritised twelve-month roadmap with sequencing and budget, a proposition and messaging summary your sales team can use, a channel plan with expected enquiry volumes, and a measurement framework with named owners.
Execution can run three ways: your internal team, your existing agency working to a proper brief, or specialists from my network coordinated by me. Consultancy engagements are deliberately finite — you should be able to act on the plan whether or not you continue working with me, and that is the test of whether the document is any good.
Independence and incentives
Projects and website rebuilds are scoped and priced before work starts. I do not take commission from suppliers or a percentage of your media spend. If your current agency is doing good work with a bad brief, the recommendation is a better brief.
That independence is the point of consultancy. You are buying an outside view from someone who has run marketing inside a business, understands the commercial context and has nothing to defend — including the decisions your team made last year.
Marketing thinking in short form
Strategy, SEO and paid search explained in a couple of minutes on Instagram and TikTok.
Where this service has done the work
Live engagements that used this service, and the sectors it applies to most often.
- PropTech / SaaS
Logical Planning
New site launch — Planning Potential Score with a paid self-serve funnel
- EdTech / education
SuperDiss
£9.99/mo — student subscription launched behind a free-forever core
- SaaS / AI website builder
Wishly
Free — AI website builder that goes live in minutes
Clients on work like this
Verbatim quotes from engagements that used this service, attributed by role as agreed. Read the case study to see exactly what was delivered.
“We had the data and the technology. What we did not have was a way of explaining it that made someone reach for their card. Sam turned it into an offer, decided the pricing with us and built the route people take to get there.”
Founder
Logical Planning · PropTech / SaaS
Engagement: Launch positioning, pricing and acquisition
“Everyone assumes an AI dissertation tool is cheating, so that objection had to be answered on the first screen. Sam turned the thing we refuse to do into the reason to trust us, and gave students a free version good enough to prove it.”
Founder
SuperDiss · EdTech / education
Engagement: Positioning, pricing and launch marketing
Where to go next
A few things worth reading — and the pages most people move to from here.
Related insights
- Marketing StrategyWhy Your Marketing Isn't Working (And It Probably Isn't the Tactics)The positioning and priority problems that make good execution look like bad marketing.
- AnalyticsThe Five Marketing Numbers Your Board Actually WantsThe reporting set that turns marketing activity into a commercial conversation.
- AIAI in SME Marketing: Where It Genuinely Helps and Where It Wastes MoneyA practical view of where AI earns its place in a small marketing function.
Frequently asked questions
How long does an audit take?
What do I actually receive?
Will you tell us to fire our agency?
Can you help implement the plan?
How much access to our team do you need?
Do you work with small businesses and sole traders?
How much is a full website rebuild?
Can I hire you for a one-off project?
Who will actually do the work?
Where do you work?
Start with an honest audit
Send a short note about what you need, or book a free 15-minute introduction. We can agree a sensible next step without a sales pitch.