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Marketri
Fractional Marketing

Fractional CMO Services

Senior marketing leadership, sized to what your business actually needs. Your fractional CMO builds the growth plan, leads its execution, and is accountable for the pipeline it creates.

01 — Definition
01 — Definition

The leadership layer of your fractional marketing model

A fractional CMO is the leadership slice of our fractional marketing services: an experienced senior marketer embedded in your business, setting direction, and accountable for results.

Where a fractional marketing team gives you specialist hands, your fractional CMO provides the strategy and judgment that decide what those hands work on and why. The model is embedded, not adjacent.

Your fractional CMO works inside your leadership rhythm, sits in your planning meetings, and carries your goals as their own. What changes is not who does your marketing, but who leads it.

02 — Working Model

Embedded, not scheduled

The Fixed-Day Model
Tuesdays and Thursdays, invoiced monthly. Clear, and it works well for defined project work. Anything that surfaces on a Wednesday waits until Thursday.
How We Work
Your email domain. Your chat channels. Your Level 10s, all-hands, quarterly retreats and board meetings. Reachable the way any leader is reachable.

Fractional engagements are often structured around fixed days. It is a clear way to structure an arrangement and it works well for defined project work. It works less well for leadership, because the decisions that need a marketing leader do not arrive on schedule.

Your fractional CMO is in the rooms where marketing decisions get made, or quietly unmade, and a leader who is not in them is managing the consequences a week late.

The scope of the role is agreed before we start and reviewed every quarter. The calendar is not. What you are buying is a level of involvement rather than a block of time, and where it shows up is in how quickly your team stops routing around marketing.

03 — Scope

Two versions of the same role

The spread in what a fractional CMO costs is not a negotiating range. It reflects how much of the role you are asking one person to hold.

What You Already Have
Positioning settled, a plan written, a team in place
What The Role Covers
Leadership of the function: managing the team, prioritizing programs, data-driven decision making, accountability for pipeline
Where The Fee Sits
$7,500 / mo — Lower end
What You Already Have
Some foundations settled, gaps in others
What The Role Covers
Leadership, plus rebuilding whichever one or two foundations are missing
Where The Fee Sits
$10,000–$15,000 / mo — Middle, where most clients sit
What You Already Have
Little settled, or a business model that has changed underneath the old positioning
What The Role Covers
Brand, positioning and messaging, the go-to-market plan, P&L responsibility, executive and board representation
Where The Fee Sits
$20,000 / mo — Upper end

Most engagements start between the two and move. Scope is reset at each quarterly planning session, and the fee moves with it in both directions.

04 — Cost

What a fractional CMO costs

Most Marketri fractional CMO engagements run $7,500 to $20,000 per month. Where you land is set by the scope described above, not by how hard you negotiate.

Every engagement is priced from a senior leadership rate of $350 an hour, applied to the level of involvement the role requires. We publish that because the alternative is asking you to accept a number with nothing behind it. The rate is how an engagement is scoped, not how it is tracked. You will not be asked to approve a timesheet, and nobody stops working at the end of an allotment.

$7,500–$20,000

per month
Full-time CMO, fully loaded at the 25th percentile$309,000
Fractional, top of our range$240,000
Fractional, bottom of our range$90,000

Both fractional figures include a specialist team behind the leader rather than one person and one person's depth. Source: Glassdoor, chief marketing officer base salary, 25th–75th percentile, 2,209 reported salaries, retrieved July 2026.

Engagements run on a six-month minimum, with 30 to 60 days written notice depending on size. The minimum is not a lock-in device. It is how long a marketing function takes to produce pipeline you can read, and quoting anything shorter would be selling you a result nobody can deliver.

Downloadable PDF Guide
Downloadable PDF Guide

Featured Guide: Before You Hire Your Next Marketing Leader

What the data says, what keeps going wrong, and how to design the next engagement to succeed.

Deb Andrews
Written by Deb Andrews, Founder & President
05 — The People

You will know who you are getting before you sign

Every Marketri fractional CMO is a senior operator who has run marketing functions, not a consultant who has advised them. You meet the person who would hold the role during the sales process, and that is the person who shows up on the first day. We do not sell with a senior name and staff with a junior one.

06 — Operating Rhythm

What the rhythm looks like

Nothing new gets added to anyone's calendar. Your CMO joins the meetings you already hold, and the scope — and the fee — are reset every quarter, in both directions.

01

Weekly

Your CMO runs the marketing team meeting and joins the leadership meeting you already hold. Nothing new gets added to anyone's calendar.

02

Monthly

A reporting session that ends in decisions rather than slides: what to fund, what to fix, what to stop. Pipeline contribution, not activity.

03

Quarterly

Planning. Scope, team composition and priorities are reset against what the next ninety days require, and the fee is reset with them.

04

Annually

The growth plan, built with your leadership team and written to be carried into the board conversation rather than translated for it.

07 — The Hand-Off

We will help you replace us

Fractional engagements end one of two ways. Either the company decides it never needed the role, which means we did not do our job, or the function outgrows a fractional leader and it is time to hire full time, which means we did.

When it is the second one, we help you hire. We write the role against the function we actually built rather than against a template, sit in on interviews, and give you a candid read on candidates. We have no placement fee riding on the decision, so our only interest is that you hire the right person. Once the hire is made we stay through the transition, until the new leader can run the function without us. Then we step back to whatever support you still want, or to nothing at all.

We would rather tell you how this ends than let you wonder. It seems the fair way to ask you to begin.

Our Clients Say it All

Gary Hutchinson

We are thrilled with the work that Marketri has done, and more importantly, the leads they have generated. From revamping our social strategies to building our website to producing media opportunities and brand videos, we’ve seen measurable results all around. We’re impressed with the team’s expertise, and we’ve really enjoyed working with them as well.

Gary Hutchinson

President, Modality

Vince De Leon

Scrubbed has worked with Deb Andrews, Trisha Gallagher, and the rest of the Marketri team for the past 3 years now. It won’t take much to research and compare what our brand looked like before Marketri, and how it looks like now. Spoiler Alert – a huge difference in look and feel. Marketri witnessed Scrubbed’s growth these past few years and it has been a fantastic experience working with them. I strongly recommend talking to Deb Andrews about your growth needs.

Vince De Leon

CEO, Scrubbed

Lauren Page

Marketri has been an invaluable partner for our business, providing exceptional fractional CMO services that have truly elevated our marketing efforts. From strategy development to execution and deep insights based on data, their expertise has helped us move the needle in a positive direction, significantly increasing our company's visibility. Their team is incredibly knowledgeable and insightful, and what sets them apart is how deeply they care about our success as though they are part of our own team. They are true marketing team extenders, seamlessly integrating into our operations and ensuring we have a clear, actionable plan in place. Plus, they are really nice people who are a joy to work with. Every interaction is pleasant and productive, making the collaboration not only successful but also enjoyable. We couldn't be more appreciative of their hard work, dedication, and results-driven approach. Highly recommend!

Lauren Page

Chief of Staff & Strategic Business Partner, Cardiovascular Logistics

Through strategic focus, Marketri drives measurable revenue for an engineering firm

$5–10M

in new revenue annually, attributed directly to marketing, achieved entirely through organic traffic with zero paid advertising.

Featured Case Study

Through strategic focus, Marketri drives measurable revenue for an engineering firm

A National Engineering FirmEngineering

A national engineering firm needed strategic marketing leadership, not just a marketer. As Fractional CMO from 2013–2018, Marketri built a revenue-generating engine that drove $5–10M in new revenue annually — entirely through organic traffic, with zero paid advertising.

Read the Full Story

Outgrow your competition without outspending them

That takes leadership before it takes budget. Let's talk about what a fractional CMO would change in your business.

Frequently Asked Questions

A fractional CMO is an experienced senior marketing executive who leads your marketing strategy and execution on a part-time, ongoing basis. They set direction, build the growth plan, manage the people who execute it, and are accountable for the pipeline it creates. It is one of three fractional marketing services, alongside a fractional CGO and a fractional marketing team.