Marketing leadership, without the full time hire.

They own the marketing strategy, run the marketing team and defend the numbers, on a fixed part time commitment. In a typical month that means one weekly working session with your marketing team, chairing the agency reviews, rewriting the briefs that are not good enough, sitting in the leadership meeting with the scorecard, and spending real time with sales to keep the pipeline definition honest. Between sessions they are reachable for the decisions that cannot wait a week. What fills the calendar is judgement calls and unblocking, not producing the work.

Cost, speed and risk. A full time chief marketing officer is a senior salary plus recruitment plus a three to six month search, and Spencer Stuart puts average S&P 500 CMO tenure at 4.1 years, the second shortest in the C-suite. A fractional CMO starts in weeks, costs a fraction of the full time commitment, and can be sized up or down as the company changes. The trade is real: you get less of that person's time. For most companies under a certain scale that is the right trade, because the scarce thing is senior judgement, not hours. When you do need someone full time, we write the spec and help you hire them.

Because a leader who also owns delivery cannot judge delivery. If the same party sets the strategy, buys the media and marks its own homework, the strategy quietly bends toward whatever that party sells. Keeping our fractional CMO engagement to leadership and strategy is what makes the advice worth having. Your existing team and agencies keep executing, and if there is a genuine gap we will tell you what to hire or brief out. Web Tonic does run paid search, SEO and paid social for other clients, and if you ever want us to, that is a separate contract with a separate conversation, never an assumption baked into this one.

Two to four days a month suits most mid-market companies, and we agree the number before we start rather than billing hours against a vague retainer. Companies in a turnaround or preparing for a raise often start heavier for the first quarter, then settle. On duration: six to twelve months is normal, with a first review at 90 days once the plan has had a quarter to work. Some engagements end there because the plan is running and the team can hold it. Others continue for years. We would rather you leave when the leadership gap is closed than pay for a dependency.

We quote after the diagnostic, not off a rate card, because the honest answer depends on the days per month and the state of the marketing function. What we can give you is context for the trade-off: Gartner's 2026 survey puts total marketing budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, and a fractional engagement is designed to sit inside that envelope rather than on top of it, usually funded by stopping work that was not paying. You will get a fixed monthly fee with a defined day commitment and a stated notice period, agreed in writing before anything starts. Book a meeting and we will scope it.

The opposite, usually. Good agencies suffer most from the absence of a decision maker: no brief, no priority, no feedback, then a surprise review at renewal. Your fractional CMO gives them a written plan, a single point of approval and a scorecard they can see, which is what a strong partner wants. Where an agency is genuinely underperforming, you get a documented case rather than a hunch, and someone senior to run that conversation for you. We also review the measurement setup underneath it all, because most agency arguments are really conversion tracking arguments.

Decision quality improves in the first month, which is not a metric but is the thing you will feel first. Cost savings from stopping unproductive spend usually land inside the first quarter. Pipeline movement depends entirely on your sales cycle: weeks for a short-cycle consumer business, two to three quarters for considered B2B purchases. We set the leading indicators in the 90-day plan so nobody is guessing in the meantime. And we report flat months as flat: overall marketing spending grew just 1.7% in the last 12 months, the smallest rise since 2021, so a quarter that holds ground while costs fall is often the real win.

No. The model fits any company where the marketing decisions are worth more than a full time salary but the workload does not justify one: mid-market manufacturers, professional services firms, multi-location operators, ecommerce brands past the founder-marketing stage, and private equity portfolio companies where the sponsor wants marketing expertise on the ground without adding permanent overhead to every business. It also fits large companies covering a gap between chief marketing officers, where an interim marketing director keeps the function moving while the search runs.

You do, without exception. The diagnostic, the plan, the positioning work, the scorecard, the hiring specs and the agency scorecards are your documents in your systems from day one. Advertising accounts, analytics properties, domains and tooling stay in your company's name, and where we find them sitting in a supplier's account we move them back as part of the first quarter. If the engagement ends, nothing walks out of the door with us. That is a deliberate design choice, and it is the same standard we apply on our analytics work.

One scorecard, agreed in the first month, with four things on it: pipeline or revenue by source, customer acquisition cost by segment, payback period, and retention. Everything else is diagnostic detail that lives underneath. We state the limits of attribution rather than pretending a dashboard is truth, and where the data cannot support a claim we say so. Most companies discover in month one that their existing numbers cannot answer the questions their board is asking, which is why the measurement fix is almost always in the first 90-day plan.

That is common and it changes the plan, not the model. With a small team the fractional CMO spends more of the engagement on structure: what one person can realistically own, what has to be briefed out, and the sequence of hires that makes sense as revenue grows. We write the job specs, sit in on interviews and set the standards the new people will be measured against. What we will not do is recommend a large team as the default answer. Plenty of companies grow faster with one good marketer, a clear plan and two well-managed suppliers.

Yes, and the shape is slightly different. For sponsors we run a diagnostic-first engagement across the portfolio: a comparable read on customer acquisition cost, channel capacity and marketing capability in each business, then a fractional CMO placed where the leadership gap is widest. The value is usually in finding out which company can absorb growth capital and which one would burn it. This sits next to our growth advisory work, and the reporting is built for an investment committee, not a marketing meeting.

A fractional CMO is the ongoing leadership option. If you need the thinking but not the leadership, marketing strategy consulting delivers the plan as a defined project. If the question is commercial rather than marketing, offer, pricing, segments and the revenue model, that is growth advisory. And if you simply want to know what is broken before committing to anything, start with a diagnostic. We will point you at the smallest engagement that answers your question, including none of them.

Ask four questions and the field thins quickly. First, who is the named executive and what have they personally run, as opposed to what the firm's portfolio claims: experienced marketing leadership is a person, not a brand. Second, does the provider also sell execution, and if so how is that conflict handled in writing. Third, what are the deliverables and the accountability in month one, month three and month six, in plain language. Fourth, what happens to the strategic work if the engagement ends. Any provider who cannot answer those in a first conversation is selling capacity, not expertise.

We work across B2B services, manufacturing and industrial companies, multi-location and franchise operators, professional services, ecommerce and consumer products, and private equity portfolio companies in all of the above. Industry familiarity matters less than people expect, because the recurring failure is rarely industry knowledge: it is unclear positioning, unmeasured customer acquisition and no alignment between marketing and sales. That said, we will tell you if your category needs specialist expertise we do not have, and we would rather lose the engagement than learn on your budget. You can see the sectors we already serve on our AI search and email marketing work.

Governance is deliberately boring: a fixed number of days a month, a written scope, a monthly leadership read, a quarterly review of the engagement itself, and a stated notice period on both sides. Nothing auto-renews into a habit. When it ends, whether that is because you have hired a full time chief marketing officer or because the leadership gap is closed, you keep the strategy, the scorecard, the operating rhythm and the documented capabilities of your own team. We run a handover session with whoever picks it up, and we are happy to be the outgoing party who briefs your new hire properly. Measurable progress and a clean exit are the point of the model.