Fractional Marketing Services are visibly on the rise, but the truth is they’ve always been around in some way..
Whether you call yourself a freelancer, portfolio CMO, advisor, or account manager for an agency, giving over part of your time to help a business with their marketing, essentially has a new name.
Startups like the word fractional, as it sounds mathsy, it’s quantifiable.
The Benefits:
It can be cost-effective:
Startups often have limited budgets, and fractional marketing allows them to access the expertise of an experienced marketing professional without the cost of a full-time hire. A fractional marketer at CMO or Marketing Director level typically charges on an hourly or project basis, which can be more cost-effective than hiring a full-time marketing employee.
It’s way more flexible:
Fractional marketing support offers startups and scaleups the flexibility to scale their marketing efforts up or down as needed. It’s actually more responsible, too - if you’re an early stage startup, you’d tend to think about hiring ‘a person’ but hiring a person when your finances are tight or uncertain means you can end up having to hire and maybe have to fire - all processes that take time and are costly. Fractional marketing support is generally a lower risk to your business.
Plug in expertise:
Hiring in someone that’s been there and done it saves you time, headaches and guesswork. Whether it’s an equivalent industry, have run a channel on a bigger scale, or executed within a similar looking business, having that expertise on tap is hugely beneficial.
Hit the accelerator:
Need to get going now? Bring in the right level of Fractional marketing strategist and doer and you can get going with your go-to-market strategy, fast. They’ll be able to work with you, assess your needs, and get going. Go, go, go!
Focus on your roadmap:
If you’re a product led business in tech, or selling a physical product, you can concentrate on developing your products or service, or navigating operational tasks, while your fractional marketer takes care of the marketing tasks. They should always work together, but handing off to an experienced pair of hands frees up your time.
Depending on the level of experience, and how involved they need to get in your business, you can expect to pay between £400 - 1000 per day for these services.
Getting the most:
Be upfront about your needs, and when you need them:
Fractional marketing experts will work with a number of businesses at once. This is often reflected in the number of hours you agree to work with them. Scope creep is something many fractional marketers experience - it’s natural when you build a rapport with someone you like and trust, but when you’re hiring someone on an hourly basis, time is literally money. An experienced fractional marketer will help you help them manage their time with a plan and detailed availability, so you know when to expect them to be available for your business.
Always book discovery time:
At the beginning of any process, you’ll need to help your fractional marketer get to know your business. Because they’ll be bringing a certain level of prior knowledge with them into your business, this will be faster than hiring a junior employee, but don’t expect them to know all the intricacies. Discovery time upfront is time for you to download what you know to them, and make sure you know what you want to get out of the process. This is also a good opportunity to establish fit in terms of ways of working, tonality and culture - if you’re a super laid back organisation and you bring in someone very corporate, this can do some harm to your internal culture, so make sure you’re bringing someone in that can blend in, but help bring you forward.
Message the why clearly:
If you bring in an external marketer to an established team, it can be easy to be misconstrued as the internal team being viewed as not working well. This can set the whole project off on the wrong foot. External marketing support isn’t a magic wand to fix all your marketing woes, but IS a useful tool to help cut through where marketing may have been getting stuck, with fresh ideas, lack of prior knowledge, and a particular understanding of a particular area that might be missing within your business.
Fractional marketers are not the same as hiring in a manager for a junior marketer, and when not communicated clearly to the organisation, this can lead to confusion of responsibility, line management, and conflicting directions.
Get ready for asynchronous working:
Experienced fractional marketers should be experts in asynchronous working. They’ll know how to tee you up to pick up when they’re next ‘on’ - use tools like Slack, Google Docs and Loom to help projects keep rolling on when they’re not in the business.
