We Help Amazing Companies Grow Fast
Through Fractional Marketing Services

Helped a Fintech startup get $10 million in Series A funding with a growth marketing strategy & investment plan venture capitalists LOVED to put their money behind.

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Decreased paid marketing investment by 48% for an online marketplace by prioritizing search engine optimization in 2020, saving the company $1.4 million a year.

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Managed a startup’s marketing growth from $1 to $7 million in online sales accomplished in less than 11 months of working together.

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Our Clients Love Us, and They Tell the World About it

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Leading Marketing Strategy Firm
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Top Digital Marketing Company in Chicago
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Chicago's Top Marketing Strategy Firm
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Award-Winning Innovators in Interconnected Digital Strategy at CES
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Top Digital Agency on Upcity
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Distinguished as One of the Top 1000 Global Companies
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What is
Fractional Marketing?

Fractional Marketing is the outsourcing of the marketing function to a team of experts to help you define, prioritize and manage the execution of key tactics designed to grow your company. This service is best suited for businesses with in-house marketing resources but lacks the overall marketing leadership required to take your company to the next level.

Here are the top 3 reasons you should invest in Fractional Marketing:

  • You Need Access to Marketing Leadership: You want to see your company grow but you’re not sure what marketing tactics you should be investing in? That’s what a fractional marketing expert will help define.
  • You’ve Been Investing in Marketing But the Results Are Not There: Your company has already been spending money on marketing for the last year but the results have been disappointing. You don’t know why. But something is not right. Fractional marketing is the answer!
  • You Only Have A Handful Of Full-time Marketing Employees: A small team of marketers can accomplish a lot. But only with the right leadership in place. Fractional Marketers can efficiently manage those full-time resources and focus their efforts on the highest-value tactics & initiatives. 
  • Access Other Fractional Services Required: From SEO to PPC, and everything in between, your company may need to tap into additional marketing skills to successfully meet your business objectives. Fractional marketing is the way to go.

Hire Digital Authority Partners’ fractional marketing experts to gain access to a wealth of resources, know-how and expertise for a fraction of the cost required to build a robust marketing department in-house. We help companies define and launch the right set of marketing tactics. Eliminate the guesswork & get the highest ROI for your marketing spend today.

Meet With One Of Our Fractional Marketing Experts Today

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How Our Fractional Marketing Experts
Will Help Your Company Succeed

  • 1

    Perform a complete audit of your marketing initiatives.
  • 2

    Create a marketing roadmap for the next 12 months.
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    Optimize and improve your online presence.
  • 4

    Evaluate and improve your marketing automation infrastructure.
  • 5

    Build and execute on your organic search and paid media strategies.
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    Improve your branding, PR, and content marketing efforts.
  • 7

    Hire the right people and vendors for your marketing team.
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    Monitor marketing KPIs and optimize your marketing spend.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Fractional Marketing

A Fractional Marketing Company is a professional services agency which provides outsourced fractional marketing leadership to emerging businesses who need to grow fast on a budget. In order to properly scale a marketing department, a company needs a diverse set of resources with specialized skills across different disciplines in digital marketing. That includes copywriting, search engine optimization, social media, display advertising, email marketing and more. But most companies do not need all these resources on a full-time basis. Fractional Marketing Agencies offer these resources to a company only for the duration of the time they are needed, usually less than 10 to 20 hours a week.

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.

Companies Who Swear By Our
Fractional Marketing Expertise

Schedule Your
Free Consultation

Questions about fractional marketing? Schedule a consultation with a DAP marketing expert and discover how our fractional marketing services can scale your business.

Why Companies Choose to Work With Our Fractional Marketing Consultants

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We’re Experienced.

From startups to established companies, we’ve helped over 100 companies streamline and grow their marketing presence over the last six years. Our fractional marketing industry veterans have revamped underperforming teams to achieve a positive marketing ROI.

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We’re On-Time and On-Budget.

Our aim is to provide a complete marketing strategy within the first 1-2 months of working together.

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We’re Award-Winning.

This year alone, Digital Authority Partners was named the: One of the Top B2B Companies by Clutch, an Expertise Best Agency, and one of UpCity’s Top Digital Agencies in the USA.

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We’re Focused on the Future.

We provide forward-thinking fractional marketing experts who are well-versed in digital channels for the 21st century.

Industry Results

Learn More About Fractional Marketing

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Still Not Sure if Fractional Marketing Is Worth Your Investment?

Fractional marketing may be the single most important strategic decision you can make if you want to achieve fast growth this year. I’ll show you why.

Fractional marketing teams help businesses like yours create an ROI-driven connected strategy that takes into account your current business model, growth objectives and competitive landscape.

What Is Fractional Marketing?

Fractional marketing is a strategic technique for companies to address their marketing needs by bringing on marketing experts on an hourly or contractual basis. Especially in early growth stages, it is hard to predict what’s around the corner for your company. The combination of budget shortfalls, evolving market conditions and stagnant growth make the tasks company executives face feel twice as difficult to manage. If this is you, read on.

Factional marketing can lessen your burden.

Fractional marketing experts bring expertise, industry experience, and a new perspective to your company at a fraction of the cost. You are not sacrificing quality when you hire a fractional marketing expert. You are bringing in qualified, objective-driven marketers who will get to work right away to meet your business goals.

How Fractional Marketing Works

By design, fractional marketing can take many forms. It is a flexible and adaptable staff augmentation solution that can be shaped to do exactly what your company needs!

Here are the basics.

Fractional marketing experts work with your company and evaluate your current marketing needs.  Here are some preliminary questions any experienced fractional marketer will ask you up front:

  • What are your expected business outcomes?
  • Are you trying to enter a new market?
  • Is there a shortfall of internal funding, or an increase?

Each business is unique. A fractional marketing executive quickly visualizes the full range of your needs and provides the best customized solution.

The team can become fully-embedded within your organization and ready to start affecting change on the very first day.

When you hire a fractional marketing team you get to set certain conditions such as length of contract, the members of the team, and the priorities. Many executives hire a fractional marketing director for 10-30 hours a week. That’s flexibility nearly all mid-size companies appreciate. The fractional marketing director will work within your team to help you reach your desired outcomes. From the start, they will make sure they are set up to provide quick results with a measurable impact.

The role of a fractional marketing expert within your organization

Here’s why fractional marketing experts aren’t the same as the run-of-the-mill consulting agency you meet with once a week. Your fractional marketing expert or team takes an active role in the leadership and management of your organization.

While working towards your overall business goal, a fractional marketing expert will harness extensive experience and expertise to plan and execute initiatives that will help your company grow.

When a fractional marketing expert joins your team, you will know the rationale behind decisions and understand the thought-process behind changes. Any questions? Not a problem. You won’t have any difficulty directly contacting a fractional marketing director or team.

And even though your hire may be short- or medium-term, a fractional marketing consultant can help you make long-term plans. They make sure they understand every aspect of your business, making  it possible for them to clearly document and set priorities for the most critical improvement areas in your organization.

A fractional marketing expert’s goal is to launch your marketing success by laying down the foundation of a strong and robust marketing plan.

For most organizations that decide to employ a fractional marketing professional, this resource is a true breath of fresh air. Here is someone who can take a 30,000 foot view of your company and provide strategic direction and expertise with quick results and a measurable impact. Not all heroes wear capes.

Shouldn’t I just use a Marketing Agency?

Hiring a fractional marketing expert is very different from contracting with a marketing agency. Usually the fractional CMO you hire will be in charge of managing all of your marketing vendors, relationships, and outcomes to ensure you get a positive ROI for your marketing spending across all relevant channels.

Why do the two play very different roles for the organization?

  • Accountability:

Most agencies create and execute a marketing plan based on a set list of deliverables. As long as they do what they say they will do, they consider that to be a success. They deliver something to you and vanish into the night.

That is the exact opposite of what a fractional marketing team does. They are a part of your team. Fractional marketing experts take full ownership of strategies and initiatives within your company and setup the right analytics foundation to measure success. We are talking about full ownership of initiatives and strategies within your company.

  • Direction:

Do you feel you are in a position to give instructions on marketing tasks, techniques, or strategies that are not within your wheel-house?

You won’t have to do this with a fractional marketing director or team in your company. That is their job and what they are trained to do.

A fractional marketing expert’s job is to take guidance from executives based on business objectives and turn that into a prioritized marketing roadmap.

Benefits of a Fractional Marketing Expert

Having a fractional marketing expert working with your company can have a large impact on the ROI of your marketing activities. Fractional marketing can bring a rapid and demonstrable impact to your organization in several different ways.

Here’s the impact fractional marketing has on your company:

  • Decades of Expertise

Most fractional marketing experts have decades of experience. They have often served in high-impact positions such as chairperson, chief marketing officer, senior vice-president, or vice-president within marketing.

These talented marketers love helping businesses grow! Each opportunity to work with a new team or company is a chance to put their extensive knowledge to work.

You can get a fractional marketing consultant who specializes in your industry with your specific company size.

In addition, these experts are trained to help you manage and get the best ROI from your existing vendors and partners.

Great fractional marketing people keep up with the latest trends, best practices, and tools in marketing. If you want to compete with the best, you need to be on the cutting edge on all fronts. Fractional marketing experts will make sure to bring this necessity for innovation to you for your benefit.

All this expertise at a fraction of the price? That’s correct.

  • Budget and Time Flexibility

Finding a great full-time marketing executive is challenging under any circumstances. Hiring a full-time marketing executive takes a large amount of time and money. As you try to take your business to the next level, where does this time and money come from? For many, especially mid-sized companies,the answer is: nowhere! You simply do not make the hire, or you sacrifice other areas of your company to fill the gap.

In addition, onboarding and training of a full-time employee is cumbersome. Expert fractional marketing teams are accustomed to hitting the ground running.

You can define exactly what you can pay and for how long. If your business needs directed change in the future, or you want to extend the contract, that isn’t a problem. With a fractional marketing team, you are able to react quickly to sudden resource changes or budget shortfalls.

The flexibility you have when hiring and retaining a fractional marketing team frees up time for you and other company employees to focus on what you do best.

  • Project Flexibility

Fractional CMOs will quickly determine the best marketing strategies to include in a budget, advise on ways to save money and quickly change direction, if needed. The whole point of working with an expert is to invest in the marketing strategies that deliver the best ROI.

Can’t decide whether or not you should invest in PPC? SEO? Retargeting? Lead generation? Our marketers will tell you.

They will help you quickly decide what marketing tactics to invest in and why!

  • Clear marketing objectives

Some companies engage different organizations for different aspects of their marketing strategy. This approach can lead to redundant work, miscommunication, or just plain ineffective strategies.

The fractional marketing person leads the overall marketing direction, and watches over marketing cost management. The CMO consultant will make it her job to intimately understand how other vendors are delivering against a unified set of goals for the marketing department. In some cases they may even recommend streamlining your agency relationships.

  • KPI-Driven Marketing Analytics

The adage is always: Show, don’t tell. Proper and accurate analytics is the backbone of any CMO consultants’ decision making process.

With new tactics, channels, testing, and tweaks, a CMO expert will stay on track of what’s working and what is not.

What do we look at? Here are a few marketing analytics metrics an expert marketing CMO would put in place, monitor, and report on.

  • Brand Awareness
  • Net Ppromoter Score
  • Marketing Qualified Leads
  • Sales Qualified Leads
  • Customer Engagement
  • Lifetime Value of a Customer
  • Cost of Acquisition

Ask yourself – are you currently measuring and reporting on these? If not, you absolutely need to work with a fractional CMO.

  • Fresh Perspective

Sometimes, it’s just reassuring to have a second set of eyes on your marketing plan and budget. This applies to any company from small to large Fortune 500 enterprises.

The price you pay covers countless moving parts as you move from your own personnel to client or software solutions as a way to keep your marketing engine going. A fractional marketing expert looks at these components and advises on how to optimize them.

This means they will take a critical look at processes and practices that exist within your company.

Fractional marketing consultants have no qualms about entering the unknown in pursuit of helping your bottom line. For example, will TikTok outperform Facebook Ads? Should the tone of your ads be casual or professional? A great fractional marketing professional will push you towards testing to determine what marketing messaging works best to get you new business.

  • Stability

It may sound contradictory, but a part-time marketing hire can add stability to your company. As outside experts, they are used to working with many different personalities so they can rise above the personal issues of internal politics.

A fractional CMO is used to passionate discussions and will stand by you.

In addition, fractional experts are accustomed to dealing with an incredible amount of uncertainty and ever-changing priorities which, depending on the stage your company is in, may be factors in your business.

Why You Need a Fractional Marketing Expert on Your Team

You want a fractional marketing expert on your team because it will help your business grow. It’s as simple as that. There is often no magic formula to sustain business success. If there is something your company should clearly be doing, your fractional marketing consultant will let you know ASAP.

The most remarkable advantage of bringing in a fractional consultant is they can help define the overall strategy for your business and train your existing employees to it.

Your full-time employees will not be operating in a silo when you bring in a C-level fractional marketing executive. They will soak up knowledge, best practices, and more, from our experts. Every day, our experts do their best to train, educate and improve your existing resources’ skills.

We aren’t shy about sharing what we know! We want your team to improve significantly over time so you can grow a robust marketing department that will push your company to the next level.

It’s amazing that more companies attempting to grow do not take advantage of fractional marketing teams. Are you ready to get started?

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