Executive-Level Marketing Leadership To Scale Fast

• The hourly rates for Fractional Marketing resources range both based on the experience of the expert assigned to a specific account and the industry of the company looking for fractional services. It also varies based on the specific marketing function required for an ongoing project. The standard hourly rate is between $175 and $350 / hour based on the specific role (e.g. SEO manager versus director vs CMO).

Fractional marketing services are used across all industries. It’s not so much a question of your specific industry but where your company is from both a revenue point of view and your growth objectives. Fractional marketing services are most commonly leveraged by companies with annual revenue between $2 and $30 million. Usually, if your revenue goal is $30 million a year, it’s best to leverage a fractional marketing agency. Startups can also benefit from fractional marketing when it comes to defining their go-to market strategy, setting a realistic marketing budget and ensuring that the correct mix of marketing strategies and challenges are leveraged when a product or service is officially launched.

The simple answer is this: it’s always more cost effective to hire fractional marketing consultants than to get full-time resources. For example, the standard full-time salary of an experienced Chief Marketing Officer is around $250,000, not including payroll taxes, benefits or bonuses. But you often do not require a full time CMO unless you’re a very large company. Using the same logic, it’s usually a lot more economical to hire marketing analysts and managers who can execute tactically on specific marketing deliverables than to outsource those functions to external consultants. Fractional Marketing Consultants provide the overall strategy, roadmap and expertise when it comes to what you should be doing from a marketing point of view whereas other resources (usually full-time employees) follow the blueprints of Fractional Marketing experts to actually deliver on a marketing plan.

The most common reason why you should outsource your CMO role is the ability to access marketing leadership at a fraction of the cost of a full-time CMO. Companies often don’t realize that the most important factor that impacts your marketing success is whether you’re doing the right things at the right time. Your current team will likely recommend specific strategies that they’re familiar with. In contrast, fractional CMOs will often draw on their extensive experience to quickly analyze your current product, branding, marketing positioning, competitors and current market conditions to assess and tweak your marketing plan in order to make sure you’re on the right track to meet your business objectives.

Fractional services refer to a series of critical and essential functions your business cannot really succeed without that you may not necessarily want to hire full-time resources for at a specific moment in time. The most common fractional services today include accounting, human resources, marketing and legal. The benefits of outsourcing these services include access to an experienced workforce that is scalable and flexible, quick turnaround to meet certain milestones and deadlines, and the ability to more efficiently manage your current goals and objectives without the burden of a crippling overhead cost.