What a fractional CMO actually does

"Fractional CMO" is one of those titles that sounds like jargon until you need one. The idea is simple: you get a senior marketing leader who owns your marketing the way a full-time CMO would, for a part of their week instead of all of it. You pay for the hours and the judgment, and you skip the executive salary.

What the job covers

A good fractional CMO owns the function, meaning the decisions land on their desk. Strategy and positioning. The budget and where it goes. Brand and messaging. Which channels you're in and which you're ignoring on purpose. Vendors, freelancers, and whoever else touches your marketing. Reporting, so you always know what you spent and what came back.

The part that varies is execution. Some fractional CMOs only steer and leave the making to your team or an agency. Others, and this is the camp I'm in, do a lot of the work themselves: the copy, the design, the campaigns. If you don't have an in-house team, that difference matters a great deal, because a strategy nobody executes is a document.

What a week looks like

Engagements usually run 10 to 25 hours a week. In a typical week that's a planning call with the owner or founder, a review of what shipped and what it did, adjustments to whatever is live (ads, email, content), and a block of production time. Month to month, the rhythm is set strategy, ship, measure, adjust.

Signs you need one

• Marketing only happens when someone finds spare time, and it stops every time things get busy.
• You're spending real money on ads or tools and nobody can tell you the return.
• You have people who can make things but no one deciding what's worth making.
• You know you need a marketing hire, and the salary for a senior one isn't in the budget yet.

Signs you don't

If you have no budget for marketing at all, hire no one and fix that first. If you already have a strong marketing lead, they may just need more hands, and that's a different hire. And if what you want is one project done, like a rebrand or a website, scope it as a project instead of a retainer.

If you're weighing it, I'm happy to talk it through, even if the answer turns out to be that you don't need me yet.