Plenty of businesses need marketing leadership long before they can justify a full-time marketing director. The usual compromise is a junior marketer with no one to learn from, or an agency with no mandate to say no. A fractional arrangement solves both: senior direction, part-time cost, accountable for outcomes rather than activity.
What the role covers
- Owning the marketing plan, budget allocation and priorities
- Directing whoever executes: in-house staff, freelancers or agencies
- Hiring support, including briefing and interviewing marketing roles
- Agency and supplier management, with the expertise to judge their work
- Board and founder reporting in commercial language
- Mentoring junior marketers, which is often the most durable value delivered
Typical engagements run two to six days a month on a rolling quarterly basis. The measure of success is straightforward: the marketing function should be visibly more capable when the arrangement ends than when it started.