Everything You Need to Know about Hiring a Part Time Chief Marketing Officer

One of our clients described it perfectly: “It’s like having a CMO who’s laser-focused only on what drives revenue, without any of the organizational politics or downtime.”

If your business is growing (congratulations by the way – that’s no small feat), you’ve likely hit that challenging middle ground where your marketing needs have outgrown your current resources, but you’re not quite ready to bring on a full-time Chief Marketing Officer at $300K+ per year. You need strategic direction, not just tactical execution, but the traditional options – hiring agencies, using entry level staff, or managing it yourself – aren’t working anymore and you need to find the next logical step.

You, my friend, are in the sweet spot for a Fractional CMO, and why we started Plum Good Marketing to solve this specific challenge for mid-sized businesses. We encourage you to keep reading, but if you’re already intrigued, we’d love to hear from you. 

Explaining The Fractional CMO Model

Putting it simply, you’re bringing in an executive level marketing expert, a Fractional CMO, for the things your business needs, without the commitment of hiring a full time leader. Instead of committing to a full-time executive salary, benefits package, and equity compensation, you’re accessing senior marketing expertise for a fraction of the cost (hence the name).

What does this actually look like in practice? Well, that’s up to you and your Fractional CMO to figure out. Typically, a Fractional CMO will work with your business anywhere from 5-25 hours per week, depending on your needs, growth stage and other resources. They become an extension of your executive team, attending leadership meetings, developing marketing strategy, managing your existing employees or agencies, and driving growth with accountability and clear measurements.

Unlike a marketing agency focused primarily on execution, or a consultant who might deliver a strategy deck and then disappear, a Fractional CMO bridges the gap between high-level thinking and practical implementation.

Most Fractional CMO engagements include:

• • Comprehensive marketing strategy development

• • Leadership of internal marketing teams and external vendors

• • Budget planning and optimization

• • Performance analysis and executive reporting

• • Growth planning and execution oversight

Deciding if a Fractional CMO Makes Strategic Sense

From my experience working with dozens of mid-sized companies, I’ve tried to break it down into five buckets of business scenarios where a Fractional CMO provides the most value:

Growth-stage companies

You’ve reached $2-$10M in revenue and need marketing leadership to scale, but a full-time CMO would consume too much of your budget.

Companies with tactical teams lacking direction

You have capable designers, content creators, or social media managers, but they’re not aligned toward clear business objectives.

Businesses between marketing leaders

You’ve lost your marketing director or CMO and need leadership during the transition period.

Organizations needing marketing transformation

Your existing approach isn’t generating results, and you need experienced leadership to reimagine your marketing strategy.

Looking at the numbers directly: A full-time CMO for a mid-market company typically costs $200-$300K (per salary.com) in base salary, plus benefits, equity, and bonuses that can push the total to $400K+ annually. A Fractional CMO generally ranges from $5-$15K per month, depending on time commitment and responsibilities, a significant difference that allows you to invest the savings in actual marketing activities that drive growth.

Value is More than Cost Savings

While the cost advantage is obvious, the strategic benefits of the fractional model often deliver even greater value.

The Opportunity Cost

According to a recent Deloitte CMO Survey, companies with strong marketing leadership report 3.5x better revenue growth than those with weak marketing leadership. Yet many mid-sized companies simply can’t justify a full-time executive – creating a competitive disadvantage that a Fractional CMO directly addresses.

Cross Industry Perspective

The cross-industry perspective is particularly valuable. As a Fractional CMO who has worked across e-commerce, manufacturing, and service businesses, I regularly apply strategies that have proven successful in one industry to challenges in another. This cross-pollination of ideas is something that even exceptional full-time CMOs can’t match, as their experience is naturally limited to fewer organizations.

Leveraging Their Network

When you hire a Fractional CMO, you’re not just getting their expertise – you’re gaining access to their entire professional network. Most Fractional CMOs have built relationships with trusted specialists, agencies, and vendors over years in the industry. This means when you need a specific skill or service, they can connect you with pre-vetted resources rather than you spending months finding and vetting partners yourself.

Investing in Growing Your Team

A good Fractional CMO doesn’t just execute marketing for you – they help build your internal capabilities. Through mentorship, training, and hands-on collaboration, they transfer knowledge to your existing team members, elevating their skills and preparing your organization for long-term marketing success. This investment in your team’s growth creates lasting value. 

Why Not Just Hire a Marketing Agency?

I occasionally get this question, and it’s a good one. After all, everyone knows what a marketing agency does, but not everyone has heard of a Fractional CMO (hence, this article). Marketing agencies are everywhere, and they all promise big results and amazing account management. But there’s a fundamental difference between a traditional digital marketing agency and a Fractional CMO approach that’s worth understanding.

Contracted Services vs. Objective and Strategic Flexibility

A traditional digital marketing agency typically focuses on tactical execution in specific channels. They might be excellent at running Google Ads, managing social media, or building websites. But here’s the catch – they’re incentivized to recommend solutions in their specific area of expertise, whether or not that’s what your business actually needs most.

Think about it this way: When you hire a Meta ads agency, what’s their solution to every problem? More Meta ads. When you hire an SEO agency, their answer is always more SEO work. It’s not that they’re being dishonest – they’re simply operating within their specialty.

A Fractional CMO, on the other hand, sits on your side of the table. We’re not incentivized to push any particular marketing tactic. Instead, we’re focused on finding the right mix of strategies and channels that will drive your specific business goals, whether that’s lead generation, e-commerce sales, brand awareness, or something else entirely.

Order Takers vs. Strategic Executives 

The biggest complaint I heard when running a traditional agency was a lack of consistent strategic insight. Agencies can easily fall into becoming order takers rather than partners, falling into a passive role in the relationship vs. pushing the company forward the way that a CMO would. They’re great at executing what you tell them to do, but they can struggle to challenge your assumptions or suggest a completely different approach that might actually work better. It can feel like the difference between working with a vendor trying not to get fired and a passionate, driven employee that is invested and energized by success. 

What Else is Different?

Business Strategy First, Tactics Second

A Fractional CMO starts with your overall business objectives and works backward to determine which marketing approaches make the most sense. Agencies often start with their tactical specialty and try to make it fit your needs.

Channel-Agnostic Recommendations

Since a Fractional CMO isn’t selling a specific service, we can objectively recommend the most effective channels for your business – especially when that means scaling back in areas that aren’t performing.

Executive-Level Integration

Fractional CMOs join your leadership team, understanding how marketing fits into broader business operations, financial constraints, and growth plans. Most agencies remain external vendors with limited visibility into your overall business strategy.

Results Accountability

Agencies measure success by channel-specific metrics (clicks, impressions, rankings), while a Fractional CMO focuses on business outcomes like revenue growth, customer acquisition cost, and return on marketing investment.

Marketing Team Development

A Fractional CMO builds your internal marketing capabilities over time, while agencies typically maintain dependence on their services.

Don’t get me wrong – marketing agencies can be valuable partners. In fact, at Plum, we often help clients select and manage specialized agencies as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy. The difference is that these agencies become tools in our strategic toolkit rather than the drivers of your marketing strategy.

When we execute tactics for clients, it’s very flexible. We often will recommend they stop doing one thing and push the resources into another because we’re looking at the big picture. This is fundamentally different from agencies that are incentivized to keep you spending in their specific channel.

What Type of Fractional CMO Engagement is Right For Your Business?

Not all Fractional CMO services are created equal, in fact, the beauty of the situation is, there are a ton of options and, when you work with us, the opportunity to craft a unique plan that works for you together. Here’s an overview of the most common Fractional CMO models. 

Strategy-Only Model

Some Fractional CMOs operate primarily as strategic advisors, providing monthly guidance with minimal involvement in execution.

This approach works well if you have a strong internal marketing team that just needs direction, or if your budget is particularly limited. You’ll typically pay less for this model, but you’ll need to handle the implementation yourself.

The limitation becomes clear when strategy documents collect dust because your team lacks the bandwidth or specialized expertise to execute properly. You don’t want to have a bunch of beautiful slide decks but nobody to turn them into actual results. 

Network Model

Other Fractional CMOs operate as the hub of a marketing service network, where they provide strategy but subcontract all execution to their own network of specialists.

This model offers the convenience of a single point of contact for all your marketing needs. However, it often comes with variable quality control across different services and coordination challenges. You’re also typically paying a markup on all subcontracted work.

The Plum Approach: Strategic Leadership + Execution Support

At Plum Good Marketing, we’ve developed our model based on what actually works for mid-market businesses: combining high-level strategic leadership with hands-on execution support in critical areas.

Our approach includes dedicated hours for both strategic guidance and direct execution of your most important marketing priorities. We believe that strategy without implementation is just an expensive opinion, which is why we don’t just tell you what to do – we roll up our sleeves and help you get it done.

Our clients have a variety of plans, most of which fall into these four buckets: 

They Need Help with Everything

No internal marketing team, Plum directs and completes all marketing work. 

They Have a Team Without a Leader

An internal team of do-ers that needs direction. We act as a department head, supporting, guiding and teaching them to not only execute quarterly strategies, but grow in their positions. 

They Have Agencies Without Accountability

No internal marketing team, but hires agencies to do things like Google ads, web or SEO. We manage agency performance, pushing for results in a way that’s easier for us to do as marketing experts, help source new agency partners when needed, and fill in the gaps with our internal team for areas the agencies might not cover. 

They Have a Combination of Resources and Needs

A combination – some internal team members, some agencies to manage and some tactics completed by Plum. 

All 4 of these include a Fractional CMO engaged in your company’s leadership team, quarterly strategies and ongoing, close management of results and pivots. 

Which Model Should You Choose?

Most growing businesses find themselves somewhere in the middle – you need strategic leadership but also require some level of execution support, especially in specialized areas. The key is finding a Fractional CMO whose engagement model can flex with your evolving needs. We’ve found that starting with a combined approach gives businesses the best of both worlds: executive-level strategy to point your marketing in the right direction and hands-on support to ensure that strategy becomes reality. As your internal capabilities grow (often with our mentorship), we can shift more toward strategy and oversight, creating a sustainable marketing function that delivers consistent results.

So, Do You Need a Fractional CMO?

To determine if a Fractional CMO is the right solution for your current challenges, ask yourself these questions:

• • Do we need strategic marketing leadership more than we need tactical execution?

• • Are we large enough to need CMO-level thinking but not ready to commit to a full-time executive?

• • Is another leader on my team taking on Marketing as a “part time” endeavor on top of their primary role?

• • Is our current marketing approach delivering disappointing results despite adequate funding?

• • Do we have some marketing resources but lack clear direction and cohesive strategy?

• • Would we benefit from cross-industry marketing expertise rather than industry-specific tactical knowledge?

If you answered yes to three or more of these questions, a Fractional CMO likely makes sense for your business.

However, be aware of these situations where a Fractional CMO might NOT be the right solution:

• • You need primarily tactical execution rather than strategic direction

• • Your budget can’t support both strategy development and adequate marketing spend

• • Your business isn’t ready to make recommended changes to improve marketing performance

• • You want someone with full time availability, or to work in your office. 

Have You Learned Enough About Fractional CMOs Yet?

For mid-sized businesses facing marketing challenges, a Fractional CMO offers the rare combination of executive expertise, practical implementation, and cost efficiency. It’s not about getting discounted leadership – it’s about right-sizing your marketing leadership to match your current business needs.

In our experience working with growth-focused businesses across multiple industries, the companies that benefit most from this approach are those ready to treat marketing as a strategic function rather than just a creative service. They want proven leadership without the full-time executive cost, and they value both strategic thinking and practical execution.If that sounds like your situation, a Fractional CMO could be the missing piece in your growth strategy – and we’d love to talk. Book time here to explore working with Plum Good Marketing.