The job.
A fractional CMO owns a company’s marketing strategy and its results, part-time, as a member of the leadership team. You get a chief marketing officer without the full-time salary, for an agreed number of days a month. In practice that means owning everything below, from the strategy to the channels that deliver it. Here’s what each one means when it’s me.
Book a 30-minute strategy callWhat I own
Digital Strategy /
Team & Agency Leadership /
Data & Analytics /
SEO & AEO /
Paid Social & Display /
Email & CRM /
AI Automation /
Digital Strategy /
Team & Agency Leadership /
Data & Analytics /
SEO & AEO /
Paid Social & Display /
Email & CRM /
AI Automation /
How it works.
Every engagement starts the same way, whatever the brief. The first two weeks are a diagnosis: your numbers, your team, your agencies, where the money goes and where it leaks. I talk to the people doing the work, not just the people paying for it.
In week three you get a written plan with three outcomes I’ll be judged on. The strategy to hit them is built on Flex™, the method set out below. Then we run it in sprints with your team. You get a one-page report every month against those three numbers. At ninety days we sit down and decide together: expand, hold, or stop.
The terms are simple. A set number of days a month, agreed up front, with a three-month term to start. No agency mark-up. You get me.
Book a 30-minute strategy call
The method: Flex™
The strategy framework I built over 22 years and still use on every engagement. Three principles run through it: learn fast, hate waste, love strong culture. Six stages, each with a number attached.
FLEX
Six things every plan has to do:
1
Inform
Know who the customer is before spending a penny. First-party data, research and AI, turned into a clear picture of who buys and why.
2
Attract
Earn attention where those customers already are, with a message built from what the data says they care about.
3
Engage
Make it easy to interact on the channels they choose: search, social, email, in store. Remove every step that isn’t needed.
4
Convert
Turn warm interest into revenue fast. The right offer, a page that converts, and a sales team that gets the lead while it’s hot.
5
Delight
Keep them. Service, lifecycle email and the experience after the sale, so one purchase becomes repeat revenue.
6
Validate
Prove it. Reviews, referrals and results, fed back into the plan. Peer recommendation is the strongest signal there is.
Questions people ask before they call
What does a fractional CMO actually do?
Owns the marketing strategy and the results, part-time, as part of the leadership team. In practice: sets the direction, leads the team and the agencies, builds the reporting, and makes sure the work gets done. The four cards above are the job.
How is that different from an agency?
An agency sells you execution in one or two channels and reports on its own work. A fractional CMO sits on your side of the table, owns the whole function, and decides what the agencies should be doing. Often the first thing I do is get more out of the agencies you already have.
How does an engagement start?
With a diagnosis, not a proposal. Two weeks inside the business looking at your numbers, your team and your agencies, then a one-page plan with three outcomes. You see the plan before you commit to anything beyond it.
How long is the term?
Three months to start, so there's time for the diagnosis, the plan and the first results. After that, a review every ninety days where you decide to expand, hold or stop.
What does a fractional CMO cost?
A set number of days a month, agreed up front, at a day rate. In the UK that typically runs from £700 to £1,400 a day depending on experience, against a full-time CMO's total cost of £180,000 upwards. There's a longer answer in Resources.
Who should own the website, marketing or IT?
Marketing owns what the website is for and how it performs: the content, the conversion rate, the search visibility. IT owns the infrastructure and security. The friction is usually in between, and a marketing lead who can speak to developers in their own language is what clears it.
How do you work with teams outside marketing?
In their language. I've built websites, written code and sat in sales meetings, so I can brief a developer, read a dashboard with a finance director and agree lead definitions with sales. Most marketing problems turn out to be alignment problems, and that's where the time goes first.
What clients say.
Let's talk, get in touch“Mark is creative, organised, and able to deliver complex projects to short deadlines. We were delighted with the process, from start to finish”
Dave Curtis, Jack Daniel's“We chose Mark over other consultants due to his creative ideas and flexibility to meet our needs. He reinvented our online shopping experience and I would highly recommend Mark’s strategy process to others”
Rob Fairhurst, iCandy Pushchairs“Property is a highly competitive industry, but Mark made us really stand out from the crowd online. He is straight talking and gets results”
Sharon Lewis, Hunters Estate Agents“Not only is Mark highly intelligent, experienced, and strategic, but he’s also a pure professional and personable. It was an absolute pleasure working with him over the years at Robert Half”
Sofia Qureshi, Robert Half RecruitmentResources
