Before You Hire a Marketing Employee, Consider a Fractional CMO

When a business reaches the point where marketing needs more attention, the instinct is often: We need to hire a marketing person.

But before opening a full-time position, it’s worth asking what you actually need.

Do you need one employee who can do a few marketing tasks?

Or do you need someone who can lead the entire marketing function?

For many small and growing businesses, a Fractional CMO offers significantly more capability for less than the true cost of even an entry-level marketing hire.

One Employee Is Rarely a Marketing Department

This is one of the biggest challenges with hiring marketing internally.

You might hire an entry-level graphic designer who can create beautiful materials.

But can they also build your marketing strategy?

Manage Google Ads?

Understand SEO?

Develop email campaigns?

Evaluate your website?

Write content?

Analyze performance?

Plan your marketing budget?

Build lead-generation campaigns?

Work with your sales team?

Probably not. And that's not a criticism of the employee. It's simply unrealistic to expect one person to be highly skilled in every part of modern marketing.

So you hire one person…and often still need an agency, freelancer, web developer, ad specialist or consultant to fill the gaps.

Suddenly, that “one marketing hire” becomes much more expensive.

Consider the Real Cost of Hiring

A salary is only the beginning. A full-time employee also comes with payroll taxes, benefits, paid time off, equipment, software, training, recruiting and management.

And if you're hiring someone early in their career, you're also investing your own time into teaching them what to prioritize and how marketing should support the business.

That's a very different value proposition.

You're Not Hiring a Person. You're Gaining a Marketing Function.

A Fractional CMO should be able to look across the entire business and connect the pieces.

That can include:

• Strategy and planning What are we trying to accomplish, and what's the smartest way to get there?

• Website and SEO Is your website actually supporting sales and generating leads?

• Paid advertising Where should you spend and where should you stop spending?

• Email marketing Are you building and nurturing an audience you actually own?

• Content and social media What should you be saying, where should you say it and how does it support the larger strategy?

• Analytics and reporting What's working? What's producing revenue? What needs to change?

• Campaign development How do all of those channels work together around a launch, promotion or business objective?

• Marketing leadership Who is coordinating employees, vendors, designers, photographers, agencies and other partners?

  
  

That's why I think comparing a Fractional CMO to a single marketing employee often misses the point.

You're not simply outsourcing someone's job.

You're gaining access to an entire level of marketing leadership and experience that would typically require multiple hires to recreate internally.

The Biggest Difference: Strategy

An entry-level employee can be incredibly valuable at execution. Give them the campaign and they can create the graphics. Give them the content calendar and they can schedule the posts. Give them the email and they can build it.

But someone still needs to answer:

• Why are we running this campaign?

• Who are we trying to reach?

• What should the offer be?

• Where should we promote it?

• What should the budget be?

• How will we know if it worked?

  
  

That is marketing leadership.

And without it, businesses can become very good at producing marketing materials without necessarily producing marketing results.

What You're Really Buying Back

There is another part of the Fractional CMO model that I don't think business owners consider enough: their own time.

If you hire an inexperienced marketer, you may still be the person developing the strategy, reviewing every campaign, managing vendors, determining priorities and deciding where the marketing budget goes.

You've hired help, but you're still the CMO.

A strong fractional partner should take that responsibility off your plate. Instead of coming to you asking, “What should I post?” They should come to you saying: “Here's what I recommend, here's why, and here's what we're going to measure.”

That's a much more valuable use of outsourcing.

This Is How I Approach Peachy Keen

At Peachy Keen Marketing Consulting, I don't position myself as simply another person who can make social posts.

My role is much broader.

I work with businesses as an extension of their leadership team, helping determine where they're going, what marketing should support that growth and how all of the pieces should work together.

That might include strategy, websites, email, advertising, social media, content, SEO, campaigns, analytics or coordinating other specialists.

The exact mix depends on what the business actually needs. And that's intentional.

I don't believe businesses should be paying for marketing activity simply because it's included in a package.

They should be investing in the things most likely to move the business forward.

When Does Hiring In-House Make Sense?

There absolutely comes a point where building an internal marketing department makes sense.

If your business needs 40+ hours a week of execution, having someone inside the company can be incredibly valuable.

But even then, there is an important distinction between hiring marketing support and hiring marketing leadership.

A business may eventually have both: A Fractional CMO who owns the strategy. An internal coordinator or designer who handles daily execution. Specialists brought in when needed.

That can be a very efficient marketing structure for a growing company because you're paying senior-level expertise for the hours you actually need it rather than paying an executive salary simply to have someone sitting in the office 40 hours a week.

Before You Post the Job

Before hiring your next marketing employee, add up the real cost. Not just salary.

Taxes. Benefits. Software. Equipment. Training. Management. Outside vendors. And the time you'll still spend providing strategic direction.

Then ask what capabilities you're actually getting in return.

Because for less than the cost of many entry-level marketing hires, you may be able to access experienced marketing leadership, strategy and execution across multiple channels.

That's the advantage of the Fractional CMO model.

You don't have to build an entire marketing department to gain the capabilities of one.