Hiring a Fractional Marketing Director: A Guide for Consumer and DTC Founders
I’ve been working this way since early 2025, and before that I spent sixteen years in-house first and then agency side. What follows is the version I’d give a founder over a coffee, including the parts that don’t help me win work.
WHAT IT IS
/01
A fractional marketing director is a senior marketing leader who runs a company’s marketing function on a part-time, ongoing basis, usually one to two days a week, and who is accountable for a commercial outcome rather than for producing recommendations.
The word fractional describes the time, not the seniority. You’re buying fewer hours of a director-level person, not a cheaper version of one.
In practice the title overlaps heavily with fractional CMO. I’d draw the line at scope rather than skill. A fractional CMO is usually running marketing at board level across brand, comms, product marketing and sometimes commercial strategy. A fractional marketing director is more often running the function itself, closer to the plan and the team.
The thing that separates the role from consultancy is ownership. A consultant tells you what they’d do. A fractional director does it, or directs the people doing it, and carries the outcome either way.
THE MODEL
/02
$5.7bn
Global fractional executive market in 2025, growing at roughly 14% a year.
340%
UK fractional role growth since 2019. Britain is now the second largest market after North America.
110,000
LinkedIn profiles self-identifying as fractional executives in 2024, up from 2,000 in 2022.
I’d treat all of these as directional. Most are published by firms who sell fractional leadership, and the definitions vary between sources. They tell you the direction of travel rather than the size of the thing.
WHAT THE ROLE COVERS
/03
/01
Diagnosis
A proper read of the market, the category, the customer base and the P&L before any plan gets written.
/02
Strategy
Who you’re targeting, where you’re positioned, what you’re spending and against what.
/03
Budget allocation
Deciding the split between brand and performance, between channels, and between acquisition and retention.
/04
The measurement framework
Deciding what counts as evidence, and getting the reporting to a state where the leadership team can actually read it.
/05
Team and supplier management
Briefing and holding agencies, freelancers and in-house specialists to a standard.
/06
Board reporting
Being the person in the room who can explain what marketing did to the numbers, and what it didn’t.
The role is a director’s job done in less time. That works because a lot of a director’s value is in decisions rather than hours, and decisions compress better than execution does. It isn’t a way to get a marketing team for less money, and it isn’t a substitute for people who can execute. If you don’t have either a team or a budget for suppliers, you’re not ready for the role yet.
VS. THE ALTERNATIVES
/04
FRACTIONAL DIRECTOR
INTERIM DIRECTOR
CONSULTANT
AGENCY
Time
Part-time, ongoing
Full-time, temporary
Project-based
Ongoing, per scope
Typical length
6 to 18 months
3 to 12 months
2 to 12 weeks
Rolling
Owns the outcome
Yes
Yes
No
For their channel only
Sits in leadership
Yes
Yes
No
No
Best for
No senior owner, not yet ready for a full-time one
Covering a vacancy or a transition
A specific question that needs answering
Executing a channel at volume
Cost basis
Retainer or day rate
Day rate at full-time volume
Fixed fee
Retainer plus media
The one I’d flag is the agency comparison, because it gets framed as a choice and it usually isn’t. An agency runs a channel well. Somebody still has to decide what the channels are for, how much each one gets, and what happens when one of them stops working.
WHAT IT COSTS IN THE UK
/05
FRACTIONAL
£54,000
A day and a half a week on a £4,500 monthly retainer. No NI, no pension, no recruitment fee, and a notice period measured in weeks.
FULL-TIME HIRE
£132,000
£95,000 salary. Employer NI at 15% adds £13,500. Pension at 5% adds £4,750. Recruitment at 20% adds £19,000. First year, before the laptop.
I’d be careful with that arithmetic, because it flatters my side of the argument. You’re not getting the same thing for less. You’re getting fewer hours, no cover between them, and someone whose attention is genuinely divided. If the volume of decisions in your business needs five days a week of senior attention, the fractional version will feel thin and you should hire.
WHEN TO HIRE
/06
THREE SITUATIONS WHERE IT WORKS
The gap
Revenue is coming in and there are people doing the work, but nobody senior owns the strategy behind it. Decisions get made channel by channel. Nobody is accountable for the whole number.
The plateau
Marketing used to work and now doesn’t. CAC is climbing, growth is flattening, and more spend isn’t moving it. What’s needed is a rebuild of the approach rather than another tactic.
The transition
A raise, an acquisition, a marketing director leaving, a category shift. Something has changed the shape of the business and the marketing hasn’t caught up.
FIVE SITUATIONS WHERE IT ISN’T
You’re under about £1m and founder-led. The founder is usually still the best marketer at that stage.
There’s nobody to execute. A director with no team and no supplier budget produces plans.
You need the role but won’t give it authority to move budget, kill a channel, or change an agency. That’s a consultant with a longer contract.
You want a quick number. Any senior marketer promising a transformed P&L in eight weeks is either doing something short-term or telling you what you want to hear.
You want the title on the website. It happens. It doesn’t work.
THE NINETY DAYS
/07
I run engagements in the order Mark Ritson teaches: diagnosis, then strategy, then tactics. The order matters more than it sounds, because most marketing problems I’m brought in for are tactical solutions applied to a diagnostic question nobody asked.
Weeks
1–3
Diagnosis
Market and category, competitor set, customer research or at minimum a proper interrogation of what’s already in the CRM, and a full read of the P&L. Where is growth actually coming from. Where is budget leaking. What should stop on Monday.
Weeks
4–8
Strategy
Segmentation, targeting, positioning. Budget split. A forecast with the assumptions written down so they can be argued with later.
Weeks
9–12
Tactics and setup
The channel plan, the brief, the measurement framework, the reporting rhythm. First things in market.
By day ninety you should have a document you disagree with in places, a number you’re being held to, and a reporting pack that tells you whether it’s working. If what you have instead is a channel audit and some quick wins, the diagnosis phase got skipped.
BEFORE REVENUE MOVES
/08
Binet and Field’s work on long and short-term effects is the useful frame. Brand activity builds effects that show up over months and compound; activation effects show up in weeks and decay when you stop paying. A plan that’s correctly weighted will look underwhelming on a four-week view and better on a twelve-month one. That’s the design, not a defence of it.
/01
Brand search volume and share of search
Searches for your name, as a share of the category’s total. It’s the cheapest leading indicator there is and it moves before revenue does.
/02
Direct and organic as a share of sessions
If paid is carrying an increasing share of the total, the brand isn’t building regardless of what blended ROAS says.
/03
Penetration rather than frequency
Growth comes overwhelmingly from more buyers rather than more purchases from existing ones. New customer count is the number to watch.
/04
The shape of cohort payback
Whether recent cohorts pay back faster or slower than older ones tells you more than the headline figure.
/05
Prompted awareness
A simple panel survey twice a year is cheaper than most people assume, and it’s the most direct measure of whether the brand is landing.
One thing worth understanding: rising CAC during expansion is usually arithmetic rather than failure. As you move beyond your most responsive audience, the next customer costs more than the last. If new customer volume and contribution are both up while CAC has risen, the machine is working as designed. Judging that period on CAC alone will make you stop exactly when you shouldn’t.
THE CONSUMER AND DTC VERSION
/09
Most writing about fractional marketing leadership is written for B2B, where the language is pipeline and MQLs. Consumer and DTC businesses run on different arithmetic and the role changes accordingly. The numbers a fractional director working in DTC should be fluent in:
/01
CM2, not ROAS
Contribution margin after variable costs and marketing. The figure that tells you whether growth is paying for itself. ROAS can improve while CM2 falls, and often does.
/02
New-customer CAC isolated from blended
Blended CAC hides returning-customer revenue subsidising acquisition. Isolating it is uncomfortable and necessary.
/03
Contribution per new customer
What each acquired customer is worth on first order after discounting, returns, shipping and payment fees. In apparel and homewares, returns alone can move this by double digits.
/04
Cohort payback shape
How long until a cohort covers its acquisition cost, and whether that’s getting better or worse. The trend matters more than the number.
+120%
Net sales growth against a 30% target, with CM2 up three percentage points in the same period. The CM2 movement matters more than the growth figure—growth bought at declining contribution isn’t growth, it’s a subsidy with a delay on it.
BEFORE YOU HIRE
/10
/01
What would you want to look at in the first two weeks, and why those things?
/02
What’s the last piece of work you’d want to be judged on, and what did the numbers do?
/03
What would make you tell me not to hire you?
/04
How do you split budget between brand and performance, and what evidence are you working from?
/05
What do you do when the strategy is right and the results are flat at month four?
/06
Who else are you working with, and what does my day actually look like in your week?
/07
What does the handover look like, and when does it start?
The one to weight heaviest is the second. Anyone senior has work they’re proud of and work that didn’t land. Somebody who only has the first is either very lucky or telling you a version.
HOW IT ENDS
/11
A fractional marketing director role is built to hand over. Either the business grows into a full-time hire, or the strategy is embedded and the team can run it, or the diagnosis turns out to point somewhere else entirely.
I’d be wary of an arrangement with no end in sight. If nobody internally is getting better at this, the engagement has quietly become an outsourcing arrangement, and outsourcing is a reasonable thing to buy but it should be priced and described as such.
Practically, the handover starts on day one. Everything is written down, the reasoning is visible, and the reporting is something your team runs rather than something that arrives from outside.
If the whole strategy lives in one person’s head, you’ve bought a dependency.
