Agency, Solo Consultant, or Complete Marketing Department

Three Ways to Buy Marketing Help

When a growing B2B company decides it needs outside marketing help, it is choosing among three options: hire a marketing agency, hire a solo consultant or fractional CMO, or get a complete marketing department. This buyer's guide by Deb Andrews, founder and president of Marketri, explains what each one costs in 2027, what each one can and cannot do, and how to tell which one your company actually needs.

It is written for the CEO, president, or founder at one of two moments. Either marketing spend sits below 2 percent of revenue, which the guide calls a useful line in the sand for "not enough," or real money is already going to marketing salaries and vendors without a measurable return.

What You Are Really Buying: Strategy and Execution

The guide's core idea is that every marketing arrangement sells some mix of two things. Strategy is the thinking half: what marketing should accomplish, which audiences matter, and how every activity ties back to revenue. Execution is the doing half: campaigns, the website, content, ads, and data work. Strategy without execution is a plan in a drawer. Execution without strategy is a pile of deliverables nobody can connect to the pipeline.

Most failed arrangements, the guide argues, come from buying one half while assuming the other already existed somewhere.

Agency, Fractional CMO, or Complete Department

Each option gets a full profile of cost, strengths, and limitations:

• A marketing agency sells execution. Most B2B retainers run $3,000 to $15,000 per month plus ad spend. It is the right call when strong marketing leadership already exists in-house.
• A solo consultant or fractional CMO sells strategy, typically at $4,000 to $20,000 per month. It fits when tactical marketers are already in place and need a leader.
• A complete marketing department supplies both halves, either built in-house (a small team of two or three typically costs $300,000 to $500,000 or more per year) or as an embedded fractional marketing team, which at Marketri starts at $7,500 per month.

How to Decide: Start With What's Missing

Two questions settle most of the decision: does your company have real marketing strategy in-house, and does it have real execution capacity in-house? The guide maps the answers onto a four-box grid and a side-by-side comparison of cost, what must already exist in-house, biggest risk, and best fit. Its rule of thumb is to buy the half you are missing, and when both are missing, to buy them together as one coordinated department.

What Choosing Wrong Costs

A case study shows the stakes. A $40 million company with one internal marketing manager chose a deliverables-oriented agency over a fractional CMO. A year and roughly $250,000 later, it had a refreshed website and a marketing automation platform too complex to run, but no plan and no movement in pipeline. It then brought in the fractional CMO it had passed on, paired with new in-house execution hires, and five years later sold at three times revenue.

AI Search and the Self-Directed Buyer

The guide also explains why the bar has risen. Citing 6sense's 2024 Buyer Experience Report, it notes that B2B buyers were about 70 percent of the way through the purchase process before engaging a seller, and made first contact 80 percent of the time. A growing share of that research runs through AI assistants, and getting named on their shortlists takes strategy and execution working together. A closing FAQ covers the time commitment, when to expect results, and what happens to an existing marketer or vendor.

If you're still unsure which way to buy fits your company, talk it through with Marketri.