Questions B2B leaders ask us most

Marketri is a B2B marketing firm that provides marketing strategy, execution, and analytics to mid-market companies on a retainer basis. Deb Andrews founded the firm in 2004 after two decades in finance and marketing across Big Four accounting, private equity, and investment banking. We focus on professional services firms and operate as a fractional marketing team, which means you get a slice of every specialty a full marketing department requires, from senior strategy through content, digital, PR, analytics, and AI, without hiring for each one. We are a fully remote firm serving companies across the United States, including international firms building a presence in the US market.

Neither description quite fits, and the difference matters. Digital agencies work in a single lane. They will run your paid media, your social, or a website rebuild, and they optimize that lane well, but they are not connecting the pieces to a business result. A fractional CMO gives you high-level strategy and then hands execution back to you. We sit in the middle. We do the strategic thinking, we do the execution, and we measure all of it, with live dashboards and monthly optimization that shift time and budget toward what is producing and away from what is not. Companies hire us because they want growth, not a plan they still have to implement or a campaign running in isolation. The only thing we do not build in-house is full website development, where we bring in a partner.

Fractional marketing gives a company access to an entire marketing team on a part-time basis instead of hiring one generalist and asking that person to do everything. Marketing is a discipline of specialties, and a mid-market company rarely needs a full-time content strategist, a full-time digital lead, a full-time PR specialist, and a full-time analyst. It needs a slice of each. In a fractional model you get that slice of every specialty under one roof, with senior strategy directing it and a single accountable team behind it.

Our clients are mid-market B2B companies, with the lower middle market as our sweet spot. Most are past the point where one marketing hire can carry the function but are not ready to fund a full department. Many come to us having already tried something else: a marketing manager or two who could not cover every discipline, or a digital agency that ran campaigns without a strategy behind them. Engagements are retainer-based and scale with how fast you want to grow.

Our roots are in professional services and financial services. The earliest clients were CPA firms, and we expanded across management consulting, engineering, investment banking, and private equity. Technology and SaaS companies are now about a quarter of the portfolio, manufacturing is roughly another quarter, and B2B services make up the balance.

It is rarely a barrier. B2B is full of niche businesses, and for us a new industry is a new buyer to understand rather than a new discipline to learn. Our due diligence is built for this. We read your existing plans, your market research, and your positioning, interview your leadership and your sales team, and where it helps, talk to a few of your clients about what actually changed for them. From there we map how your buyers search, where they spend their time, what they need to read, and how you show up in front of them.

Usually not, and we do not recommend it when there is a good alternative. Our strongest engagements pair our team with a champion inside your company. Fully outsourced arrangements work, and we run them, but they make it harder to get the time, attention, and internal context that good marketing depends on. Some clients also bring us in to build the function and then transition it in-house over time, which we support openly rather than resist.

Marketri engagements are retainer-based. Our smallest client is $7,500 a month, most clients fall between $10,000 and $20,000 a month, and our largest engagements reach roughly $50,000 a month. Where you land depends on how fast you want to grow and how much is already in place, since a company with a clear message, a working website, and an active digital footprint needs far less foundation-building than one starting closer to zero. For context, a B2B marketing director earns $145,000 to $210,000 in total compensation, and fully loaded with benefits, payroll taxes, recruiting, and software, that one hire runs closer to $200,000 a year, or roughly $17,000 a month. Most of our clients get an entire senior team for less than the cost of the single person who could never own every skill the work requires.

Often, yes. The first month carries the discovery and audit work that everything after it depends on, so it typically runs above the ongoing retainer. If you already have current research, buyer personas, or a recent competitive analysis, that shortens the work and we price accordingly. We can also structure discovery as an hourly engagement with a cap, so you are never paying for work you do not need. The upfront research is necessary, but it should not be the obstacle to a good partnership.

Retainer. We price against the hours and technology an engagement requires, then hold that as a monthly fee. The model exists because we want to be embedded rather than transactional. Project work rewards big one-time pushes. A retainer rewards a partner who stays close to your business, learns it deeply, and compounds results over years, which is why many of our clients have been with us a long time.

Six months is our minimum, and we encourage a full year. The reason is practical rather than contractual. The first month is discovery, the second puts the plan in market, and meaningful pipeline movement typically shows up around the six-month mark. A shorter term means paying for the foundation without staying long enough to benefit from it. A year gives the program time to compound, which is where the return actually lives. Many of our clients stay considerably longer than that.

Engagements end with 30 to 60 days written notice, depending on the size of the engagement. Larger programs carry more work in flight, so they need a longer runway to wind down cleanly. There is also nothing to hand back. Your data, campaigns, and reporting live in your own platforms throughout, so you keep everything by default. Some clients use that window to move the function in-house, and we support that transition rather than resist it.

Each option carries a different cost and a different risk. A B2B marketing director earns $145,000 to $210,000 in total compensation, closer to $200,000 fully loaded once benefits, payroll taxes, recruiting, and software are counted. However good that person is, one hire cannot own strategy, content, digital, marketing technology, PR, analytics, and AI, so you pay a senior salary and then pay agencies and freelancers on top to fill the gaps. A digital agency can be cheaper per campaign but earns its margin on project pushes rather than on connecting those campaigns to revenue. A retainer with us sits between them: senior strategy plus a full specialist bench, no headcount commitment, and accountability to the whole plan instead of to a single channel.

The first month is a discovery sprint. Before the kickoff meeting we send a documentation request and start reading: your existing plans, your market and competitive research, your positioning. In parallel we audit your digital footprint against your competitors, baseline your website performance, and review what your paid media and email programs have actually produced. We interview you, and usually your sales leadership, to understand what has worked, what has not, and why. The output is a written view of where you stand today and a roadmap for where to go next.

The audit itself takes a couple of weeks. A full go-to-market due diligence runs closer to six weeks. If you already have solid research in hand, it moves faster. What we do not do is shut everything down while we think. We look for quick wins in whatever is already running, optimize where we can, and keep your momentum going while the plan comes together.

A document request goes out before we begin: existing plans and research, brand and messaging materials, and access to your CRM, analytics, and ad accounts. We ask for time with you and your sales leadership, and where relevant, introductions to a few clients we can interview. After that the ongoing ask is modest. A weekly meeting and a responsive internal point of contact are usually enough.

It depends on four things: where your marketing stands today, how aggressively you invest, how differentiated your offering is, and how crowded your competitive landscape is. A company with a solid foundation and a distinct service moves faster than one that needs a message, a digital footprint, and a market presence built from scratch in a category where everyone sounds alike. At a typical $10,000 to $20,000 monthly investment, expect real movement within six months: more of the right activity, more of the right people entering your funnel, and new conversations with companies that match your ideal client profile. Month one is discovery. By month two the plan is in market, along with any quick wins we found along the way.

We operationalize the roadmap into sprints so you can see exactly what is happening in month one, month two, and month three, with monthly and quarterly goals attached to each. Weekly meetings start at that point and continue. From there it runs like a portfolio: we execute the campaigns, watch what performs, and shift time and budget toward what is working and away from what is not.

Every account gets two primary points of contact, and our largest accounts get three. One is a senior marketer with 20 or more years of experience, typically at the VP level, who owns strategy. The other is a digital and marketing technology lead with 10 to 15 years of experience, who owns channels, martech, and day-to-day execution. Both know your business in depth, so you are never re-explaining it. Behind them is a specialist bench in content, PR, digital, analytics, and AI that flexes with what the program requires.

Yes. Everyone we assign has professional services experience, and we match specialty to client wherever we can. A SaaS engagement gets someone with technology and SaaS background. An accounting firm engagement gets a strategist who has run CPA firm programs. Our team includes a director of AI innovation and a PR specialist, and we bring in outside partners where it makes sense, including a sales excellence firm for sales team structure and a development partner for full website builds.

Yes, primarily through our fractional chief growth officer offering, which bridges marketing and sales. On the enablement side we equip your salespeople with sequences, intent data, and a MarTech stack that actually works, whether you run Salesforce, HubSpot, or something else. For questions about sales team structure, when to hire, how to expand, and what training reps need, we bring in our partner Sales Excellence as part of the engagement. Financial modeling and revenue forecasting sit outside our lane, and we will tell you plainly when a fractional CFO is the better answer.

KPIs go in place as early as the first month, before most of the work begins. Every channel in a campaign carries its own metrics benchmarked to what that channel should produce, and every campaign rolls up into funnel movement: new contacts who match your ideal client profile, marketing qualified leads showing real intent, and sales qualified leads ready for a conversation. We report monthly and quarterly, and you have on-demand dashboards you can open at any time. We use DataBox, which pulls APIs from every source in your marketing stack into one real-time view, so performance is assessed continuously rather than discovered a quarter late.

Weekly at minimum, plus monthly and quarterly reporting and dashboards you can check whenever you want. Our standard is simple: if you ever have to ask what we are doing, why we are doing it, or how well it is working, we have not done our job. You should never wake up wondering what your marketing team has been up to. When something is not working, you will hear it from us first, along with what we plan to do about it.

You do. Everything lives in your instance. If you run HubSpot, the campaigns, contacts, and reporting all sit in your HubSpot, and we are simply the team building and pulling from it. Your data, your platforms, your accounts, at every stage of the engagement and after it.

We say so, and we change course. Marketing programs fail most often by going into a tactical spin, executing month after month without carrying the learnings back into the plan. The roadmap is our best estimate of the straightest path from where you are to your growth goals, and part of the work is learning along the way and correcting toward that line. Every month we look at what to optimize, what to shut down, and where to reinvest.

We are an AI-forward firm with a Vice President of Artificial Intelligence on staff. Generative AI is built into how we work: research, content development, CRM intelligence, reporting, onboarding templates, and analytics. The practical effect is throughput. Clients are consistently surprised by how much ground we cover in a short period, because best practices, technology, and experienced people compound on each other. The strategy, the judgment, and the originality stay human. AI multiplies capacity rather than replacing the thinking.

Yes, and it is increasingly the point. Most of our own prospects now find us through AI search rather than a traditional Google query. That shift changes the funnel. Buyers research on their own, build a shortlist, and arrive already qualified, skipping the lead and marketing qualified lead stages entirely. It puts a premium on a website that answers real questions in the open, content built to be cited, and a credible presence across the sources these engines trust. We audit where you appear in AI answers today and build a plan to improve it.

Many of our clients believe so, and a stalled paid media program is one of the most common reasons companies come to us right now. Fewer people are running traditional Google searches, which puts pressure on channels built to intercept them. The answer is not to abandon paid media but to rebalance it: keep what still converts, measure it honestly, and build visibility in the places buyers are actually going. That is the shift most mid-market marketing programs need to make.