Hire Fractional Head of Marketing — own the function, coach the team, ship the work

A head of marketing leads the function hands-on; a CMO sets company-level strategy and typically manages other leaders. If you need someone in the work with the team, the head role fits; if you need board-level strategy, go CMO.

That is the core of the role — player-coach leadership. Your marketers get direction, feedback, and development from someone senior enough to actually teach them.

Typically two to three days a week — enough to lead the function, run the cadence, and stay hands-on with key campaigns without full-time cost.

They govern them. Agencies get proper briefs, performance standards, and accountability — many brands keep agencies for execution while the fractional head owns strategy and quality.

When the function’s scale and revenue justify it. The fractional mandate builds the machine and writes the role spec, so the full-time hire starts leading instead of fixing.

It is priced as a monthly retainer tied to the days you need, typically two to three a week, so you get senior leadership at a fraction of a full-time head's salary plus bonus, equity and recruitment cost. I keep the commercials simple: a fixed monthly fee, a clear scope, and a rolling notice period. We scope it on a call once I understand your stage, team and targets, because an early demand build and a mature optimisation mandate are different jobs.

Expect clarity in two to three weeks and compounding results over the quarter. The fast wins are fixing broken tracking, cutting obviously wasted spend, and aligning sales and marketing on one definition of a qualified lead. Demand generation and SEO take longer to pay back by nature, so I set expectations by channel rather than promising same-month ROAS everywhere. When you hire a fractional head of marketing mid-quarter, the first 90 days are about building a reliable engine, not a one-off spike.

I work with what you have wherever it is sound. I am comfortable across GA4, server-side GTM, HubSpot and Salesforce, the Google, Meta and LinkedIn ad platforms, lifecycle tools like Customer.io and Klaviyo, and warehouse reporting in BigQuery with Looker Studio or Metabase. I only recommend replacing a tool when it is actively costing you accuracy or money, and I document the reasoning so you are not locked into my preferences after the engagement.

An agency executes a channel; a fractional head owns the whole function, including the agency. I sit on your side of the table, set strategy and budget across every channel, and hold your agencies accountable to shared briefs and standards. The simplest test: if something underperforms, an agency defends its scope, whereas I am accountable for the business outcome regardless of which lever moved it. Many clients keep their agencies and hire me to lead them.

Both, deliberately. The role is a player-coach, so I will get into the ad accounts, write or direct creative briefs, build the reporting, and fix the tracking myself, while also coaching your team to hold the standard. Pure advisory rarely sticks at this stage because the gap is usually execution and ownership, not ideas. If you need someone who will only produce strategy decks, I am probably not the right hire.

Yes, and that combination is the main reason to hire a fractional head of marketing through someone with a Fractional CTO background. I can lead the demand programme and personally fix the tracking, server-side events, consent handling and CRM reconciliation underneath it, so your channel decisions rest on numbers you can defend to finance. Most marketing leaders depend on another team for that foundation, which is where the delays and arguments usually start.