Fractional CMO vs agency: which do you need?

Responsibility. A fractional CMO is responsible for your marketing as a whole: what gets done, in what order, with what budget, and whether it worked. An agency is responsible for the work it's hired to do, such as your SEO, your ads or your website.

A good agency will advise you, but its focus is its own lane. Nobody there is necessarily asking whether the next pound should go to a different channel entirely.

When you already know what you need. If the strategy is clear, someone in the business owns it, and you need specialists to build a website, run Google Ads or land press coverage, hire the agency.

Just make sure someone on your side can judge the work: read the report, ask the hard questions and decide whether to keep going.

When the problem is direction, not delivery. Typical signs:

• Marketing decisions land on the founder by default, and there isn't time to make them well.
• Money goes into several channels and nobody can say which ones bring in customers.
• You have two or three agencies, each reporting on its own numbers, and nobody joining them up.
• A launch, new market or funding round needs a plan someone will stand behind.
• You're not ready for a full-time marketing director yet, but you need that level of thinking.

In short: in-house gives you full-time attention, an agency gives you specialist delivery, and a fractional CMO gives you senior direction part-time. The table below sets out the differences.

Work through these five questions in order. Stop at the first clear answer.

1. 1Can you say, with numbers, which channels bring in your customers? If not, start with leadership.
2. 2Is someone in the business responsible for the marketing plan and the budget? If not, that's the gap a fractional CMO fills.
3. 3Do you know exactly what work needs doing next? If yes, an agency can get on with it.
4. 4Are you already paying more than one agency? If so, you need someone above them to join the work up.
5. 5Could you justify a full-time marketing director in the next year? If not yet, fractional is the bridge.

Yes, and most businesses that grow quickly do. The fractional CMO sets the plan and holds the agencies to account; the agencies do the work.

The catch is the gap between them. If your CMO hands you a strategy and a list of agencies to hire, you're left finding, briefing and managing them yourself. That gap is what we built our service to close.