Hire Marketing Director — marketing run properly, at your scale

Full-time typically $90k–$140k depending on market. Fractional or contract directors run significantly less monthly and make sense when you need senior management without a full-time salary on the books.

Usually zero to five people: they may be your first marketing manager, or they manage a couple of specialists plus freelancers. They are comfortable being the senior-most marketer in the room.

Audit, calendar, quick wins on obvious waste, then steady execution. By day 90 you should have a functioning campaign rhythm and reporting you trust.

Campaigns shipping on time, spend tracking to plan, and channel metrics moving: CAC down or stable, lead volume and quality up, and leadership able to see it in one report.

A director runs marketing at your current scale; a head typically owns the whole function as the senior-most marketer and sets company-level strategy. If you need strong management more than org-building, the director is the efficient choice.

Honestly, it depends on what is broken. Fixes to tracking, obvious waste, and the sales handoff show up within weeks. Genuine pipeline growth takes a full quarter. Paid channels respond fastest once events and attribution are correct, while organic and lifecycle compound over months. If you hire a marketing director expecting a clean first-month miracle you will be disappointed, but a credible plan, early wins, and a dashboard you actually trust should exist inside the first thirty days.

If marketing already produces reliable pipeline and you mainly need day-to-day management and headcount, hire full-time. If you need senior judgement to set the plan, fix the data plumbing, and prove what works before committing to a salary, fractional is cheaper and faster. I often run fractional for a quarter or two, then recruit and onboard the permanent hire who takes over, so you do not pay director-level salary just to find out what was broken.

Both, and that is the whole point. I am hands-on enough to log into Google Ads and Meta, read the search terms report, fix conversion tracking, and QA a landing page, not just chair meetings about them. For specialist depth I bring in trusted freelancers, but I keep ownership of the numbers. A director who cannot operate the tools cannot credibly judge the people who do, and that gap is where budgets quietly leak.

I am tool-agnostic but opinionated. Typically GA4, HubSpot or Pipedrive, Looker Studio for reporting, Google and Meta for paid, Klaviyo or Customer.io for lifecycle, and Ahrefs or Semrush for organic. If you already own a stack I will use it rather than force a migration, because the priority is clean data and one source of truth, not swapping logos. Coming from a technical background, I can also fix the tracking, events, and integrations that most marketers have to outsource.

Yes, and it is often the smartest way to do it. I write the scorecard based on what the role genuinely needs at your scale, screen for shipped work rather than buzzwords, run the technical and campaign assessment myself, and hand over documented systems. You end up with a tested operating model and a successor who inherits a working machine instead of a blank page and a backlog of guesswork.

No, most of my work is B2B and technical, where the hard part is connecting long sales cycles to marketing spend. That means multi-touch attribution, a real MQL and SQL definition, and tight alignment with sales, not just clever creative. If anything, when you hire a marketing director for B2B, understanding product, data, and a considered buying journey matters more than it does in fast-twitch consumer marketing, where a single channel can carry you further.