“Should we get an agency or bring someone in?” is a question I get asked a lot, usually by a business turning over a few million with marketing that has grown into a bit of a mess. There’s a website somebody built three years ago, a freelancer doing social, an agency running ads, and nobody joining any of it up.
Agencies and fractional CMOs do different jobs, and hiring the wrong one for your situation wastes a year. So it’s worth working out which problem you’ve actually got before you start taking calls.
What an agency is built to do
An agency executes. You give them a channel, a budget and an objective, and they run it with a team of specialists who do that thing all day. Good ones are very good indeed, and they bring people you could never justify hiring on your own — a paid social specialist, a developer, a designer, someone who knows their way around a feed.
What they can’t easily do is decide what your business should be doing in the first place. That isn’t a criticism. An agency is appointed to run search, or build a website, or make content, and their remit stops at the edge of that job. Ask a PPC agency whether your money would be better spent on ads at all and you’re asking them to argue against their own contract.
What a fractional CMO is built to do
A fractional CMO sits inside your business, part time, and owns the whole thing. Strategy, budget, channels, agencies, the in-house team, reporting to the board. Senior marketing thinking at a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire, which for a marketing director is £70,000 to £120,000 plus pension, car, bonus and recruitment fees.
With Rucklidge Law that’s exactly the shape of the work. I created their marketing strategy and I manage it, along with the budget behind it. I run their Google Ads. I manage their website and their quarterly video content in partnership with Genius Division. I look after the strategy for their social channels and email. One person accountable for whether marketing works, rather than five suppliers each doing their bit well while nobody watches the whole.
The website now brings in 30 to 50 qualified leads a month. The part I’m prouder of is that the firm’s partners can explain what their marketing is doing and why, which they couldn’t before.
How to tell which one you need
This is the test I use with businesses trying to work it out.
You probably need an agency if you know what you want to do and need it executed well. You have someone senior deciding strategy. Your channels are chosen and working. You need more hands, more specialism or more capacity than you have in the building.
You probably need a fractional CMO if you’re not sure what to do next. Marketing happens in fits and starts, or it happens constantly but nobody can tell you what it produced. You have suppliers who each report good news while the leads stay flat. You have a capable marketing executive who needs somebody to learn from. Or you’re about to spend a serious amount of money and want someone in your corner who doesn’t earn commission on that decision.
You probably need both if you’re bigger than about £5m and running several channels seriously. That’s the common shape: a fractional CMO setting direction and holding the budget, with agencies doing the specialist delivery underneath. Someone has to brief and manage those agencies, and that job goes badly when it lands on a managing director who has a business to run.
The money, plainly
A full-time marketing director costs six figures once you add everything up, and you’re committing to that before you know whether the strategy works.
An agency retainer for a single channel usually runs between £1,000 and £5,000 a month depending on spend and scope, and it buys execution of that channel only.
A fractional CMO works a day or two a week, so you’re paying for senior experience without the salary, and you can scale the days up during a big push and down when things are steady. For most businesses between £1m and £20m, that’s the gap in the market: too big to run marketing off the side of someone’s desk, not big enough to justify a full-time director yet.
Where it goes wrong
The pattern I see most often is a business buying execution when they needed direction. They appoint an agency, the agency does competent work inside its remit, and twelve months later the numbers haven’t moved because the strategy underneath was never right. Everyone has done their job and the business is no further forward.
The reverse happens too. A business brings in a strategist, gets a lovely plan, and then has nobody to build the thing. A plan nobody implements is an expensive document. That’s why my own work runs from strategy through to hands-on implementation, and why I’ll happily run the Google Ads myself rather than hand you a recommendation and leave.
Questions worth asking either way
Whoever you’re talking to, these three will tell you a lot.
What will you stop me doing? Anyone who only adds to your to-do list isn’t thinking about your business. Some of the most useful advice I give clients is which activity to drop.
How will we know in three months whether this worked? You want a specific number, not “brand awareness”. If the answer is vague now, the reporting will be vague later. I’ve written separately about the checks that tell you whether your advertising is working, and the same principle applies to any supplier.
What happens to this if you leave? Good marketing support leaves your business more capable than it found it. When I worked with the Royal Armouries team I shared the reasoning as we went, so they could keep improving the account without me. That’s the standard to hold people to.
So, which is it?
If your marketing needs doing, hire an agency. If it needs deciding, hire a fractional CMO. If you’re honest that it needs both, get the deciding sorted first, because that’s what tells you which agency to appoint and what to brief them with.
Want to talk it through with someone who’ll tell you if you don’t need them? Book a free consultation, or have a look at what this has produced for other businesses first.