Fractional marketing support: aka the answer to growing your business
Picture it: you’re running your business, making those sales, and things are going great. Then it gets to the point where you realize, ya know, it’s probably time to start spreading the word about this fantastic thing I’ve created. You start thinking about hiring a marketing savant to, well, market your business.
But when you start thinking about all the skills and talents you’ll need, you realize you’re not looking for one person—you need an entire team to execute your dream marketing plan. And pal, that ain’t in the budget.
Before you go entirely off the deep end, take a breath, and put down the M&Ms. You don’t actually need to hire 10+ full-time employees to get the most out of your marketing. Instead, you can turn to fractional marketing support and build a team that you design specifically to meet your needs.
But what is fractional marketing, and how can it help your business? We’ll explore that and oh-so-much more below. (Otherwise this would be a pretty shitty blog post, amiright?)
Table of contents
- What is fractional marketing anyway?
- How specialist marketers are replacing generalists
- Why the best marketers are now working as fractional marketing experts
- How fractional marketing services can take your business from alright to all right 👌
- How to build a fractional marketing team designed to grow your business
- Where to go when you need the best fractional marketing professionals in the business
- Fractional marketing services FAQs
What is fractional marketing anyway?
Fractional marketing is when a business outsources some of its marketing to freelance marketing professionals. They hand a fraction of their marketing needs over to outside support (get it?). These businesses typically have in-house marketing team members, but they fill knowledge and resource gaps with part-time marketing consultants who usually work freelance.
Fractional marketing, also referred to as freelancer marketing, can cover any role on a marketing team, from graphic design to SEO to copywriting to paid ads and more. But it can also include marketing leadership roles.
Hiring a fractional chief marketing officer (CMO) is one reason fractional marketing has gained popularity. With a fractional marketer on your team, you can hire senior marketing professionals for a few hours a week at a fraction of the cost of a full-time employee. And because you can hire a more senior employee, you get first-rate marketing strategies and campaigns.
You, after hiring a fractional marketing team
How specialist marketers are replacing generalists
When “digital marketing” first hit the scene, it was a term that encapsulated everything there was to know about marketing in a digital world. A Director of Digital Marketing or a Marketing Manager could be responsible for all digital marketing efforts at a business because there were only a handful of marketing channels.
This was true for lots of other marketing roles—they were seen as generalist roles, and the individual in that role was expected to market the business in any and all ways possible. And for a while, this worked really well. Because there were only a few channels, generalists could learn what they needed to manage an entire marketing strategy successfully.
Fast-forward to the present day, and having a generalist, or even a team of generalists, is—to put it nicely—ridiculous.
A marketer who knows how to run successful paid Google Ads campaigns most likely doesn’t know how to manage an influencer marketing campaign. A marketer who knows how to generate leads through email marketing may not know how to build your SEO. And a marketer who knows how to build community on social media quite possibly doesn’t have the knowledge to write content that converts to leads, build a website, write landing page copy, and design print hand-outs for your direct mail campaign.
The shift happened fast, as most things do in the digital world. While some businesses are still lagging behind, most understand that hiring one person and expecting them to execute across all digital channels just isn’t an option anymore if you want to beat your competitors.
And that’s why so many marketers have niched down to find their area of expertise.
Instead of trying to do it all, marketers find an area of digital marketing that interests them and double down on becoming an expert in their field.
This switch from generalist to specialist is another reason more professionals are offering fractional marketing support. Sure, It may not be feasible to hire a full-time employee to cover every digital marketing niche, but you can hire help when needed to fill the gaps in your team.
Why the best marketers are now working as fractional marketing experts
More and more talented marketing professionals are turning to a life of fractional marketing gigs. Why?
Working as a fractional marketer has a lot of positives for both the professional and the businesses they work with. When they shift to fractional marketing, marketers realize they can make a bigger impact on multiple businesses. They also have more flexibility, which so many individuals crave, especially since the pandemic shifted what we expect from our careers.
The best marketers started to realize they could have way more control over their work—and the people they worked with—if they went the route of working in a fractional capacity.
Here are some of the key reasons professionals decided to become fractional marketing experts:
- They can work remotely. If the pandemic taught us one thing about work, it’s that we can work from anywhere: the couch, the beach, or a small little town where it’s always Christmas and our high love works as a lumberjack (hey, the rent’s cheap). Also, people are used to working with dispersed teams, so having a freelance or fractional marketing team member working remotely isn’t an issue for most businesses.
- They can drive results for multiple businesses. One of the joys of being a marketer is seeing your work pay off. The best marketers love to drive results and know they can do that for multiple companies if they work in a fractional capacity.
- They work outside the traditional work construct. From 2022-2023, marketing professionals—and the world at large—were hit with some serious layoffs. Some of the best marketers were let go without cause. Many marketers decided not to apply for new full-time positions and instead became fractional marketers to avoid being put in that situation again. More control, more freedom, less ‘your Slack access has been revoked’.
- They can focus on the things they’re passionate about. When you work in-house, you often get pulled in many directions, whether it’s too many meetings or being added to other marketing projects. You know, stuff you might not actually care about—or even be good at. Fractional marketing experts can focus on the work they love to do instead of managing multiple other projects and expectations.
- They can keep things exciting. A fractional marketing expert can work across industries and choose who they work with. One month, they may work with a skincare company, and the next, with a SaaS business. It keeps the work exciting and helps them build their skills across industries.
How fractional marketing services can take your business from alright to all right 👌
So now you know why all the best marketers have shifted to freelance or fractional marketing. But why should your business follow suit and start working with fractional marketing professionals?
Hm. Sure hope we find out.
Save money without sacrificing quality
Hiring a marketing team of any kind is a big financial investment. You want to make sure you’re getting the right people with the right skills to market your business. Even though there’s often an upfront cost, uUsing fractional marketing services can save you a lot of money compared with hiring full-time employees.
Hiring a fractional marketing team with two to four experts can cost $68,000 to $102,000 annually, depending on their skills and experience.
In comparison, hiring a full-time marketing team with two to four experts can cost $250,000 to $500,000 annually. Plus pizza lunches.
When you hire fractional marketing support, you can work with more experienced individuals and save money. Because you’re working with a freelancer, you don’t have to worry about the additional costs—like benefits, paid time off, government contributions, etc.—that come with hiring a full-time employee.
Since you’re paying fractional marketers by the hour or the project, they’re never sitting around through awkward onboarding meetings that won’t actually help them drive your bottom line.
Greater flexibility and scalability
Fractional marketing makes it easy for your business to be flexible and scale up or down when needed. If your business is growing, just add more people to your team with fractional marketers. Or, if you need a specific area of expertise, like when you’re building a website or an SEO blog content strategy, you can hire someone fractionally for that specific campaign instead of hiring a full-time employee.
Fractional marketing services are infinitely scalable, and that flexibility can help your business grow quickly.
Hire experts for each marketing channel
The flexibility of hiring fractional marketers goes beyond when you hire to who you hire. When you work with fractional marketers, you can select the skills you need and hire experts in each relevant field.
Example
If you’re running a social media ad campaign where the call to action is to visit a landing page, you can hire a social media manager, graphic designer, copywriter, and web builder. Does that landing page have an email sign-up? Great: hire an email funnel expert. Is there a cool product demo on the site? Beautiful! Get yourself a video designer!
Hiring experts for each marketing channel is more effective than hiring a generalist who may not have in-depth knowledge of each channel. Fractional marketing support helps ensure you get deliverables tailored to your audience and goals.
Access to a larger pool of professionals
When you hire freelance or fractional marketing experts, you’re opening up your business to a world of possibilities. HR and legal might need you to hire only individuals in your state or province, but hey, with freelancers, your business’s geographical location often doesn’t come with the same constraints.
Tap into fresh creativity and innovation
One of the best parts of hiring fractional talent is that it breathes fresh life into your marketing efforts. Let’s face it: your in-house team can get burnt out from the same campaigns every quarter, especially when the higher-ups never seem to actually want the change they’re asking for…
When you bring in outside talent, you get a new perspective on your business and marketing efforts.
If you’re stuck in a rut or struggling to grow, a fractional marketing team can help you tap into a wealth of knowledge and expertise to solve problems and help achieve your marketing goals.
Fractional marketers have experience across various industries and spend their time solving multiple business problems. When you bring them onto your team, you get to tap into their experience, and that can be invaluable. They bring new perspectives and marketing strategies to the table that you may have yet to consider.
How to build a fractional marketing team designed to grow your business
Now that we’ve explained everything, you might be wondering how you can incorporate fractional marketing experts into your marketing team. We get it: hiring choices are complicated.
You, trying to make those complicated hiring decisions.
Fractional marketers to the rescue. A strong freelance marketer can help with the below:
1. Defining your marketing goals
Before you bring on any new team members, it’s important to have clearly defined marketing goals. Not sure what your marketing goals are or should be? A fractional marketing strategist can help with that.
A marketing strategist can help you define measurable goals for everything from revenue and growth, to community building and lead generation.
2. Determining how you’ll reach those goals
Next, you need to decide on the tactics you’ll use to reach those goals. A freelancer marketer can help here, but you might also have some ideas.
Think a new website will help improve your top-of-funnel? Want to invest in a refreshed social media strategy? Or maybe it’s an improved email optimization project you want to go for. Whatever it is, your experts are here to give advice and put a plan into action.
3. Deciding which marketing channels you’ll test
Now that you’ve defined your goals and tactics, you have to choose what channels you’ll test to achieve your goals using your tactics. With so many channels available, feeling overwhelmed is a pretty common occurrence.
To avoid overburdening yourself, turn to the experts. Have a fractional marketing expert—or two!—take a look at what you’re currently doing to see where you should focus your efforts. Have an SEO audit, have someone look at your email strategy, have someone deep dive into your competitors to learn what’s working for them.
Data is the most powerful tool you have, so work with the people that can get you that data to help you make the best decisions.
4. Creating goals for each channel
Once you’ve decided on your channels, it’s time to drill down and create specific goals for each channel. This will help you define and measure success on each channel.
Maybe you want to grow your email list, improve engagement on social media, or bring in new leads through paid ads. Define these goals and get as specific as possible. And don’t worry: when you hire a fractional marketing expert, they’ll have no problem gut-checking your goals to make sure they’re realistic.
5. Determining what kind of marketer can help you reach your goals
If you’re looking to grow TikTok, it’s pretty obvious that you need to hire a TikTok marketing expert. If you plan to improve your SEO, you kind of need an SEO expert. But there’s more to what kind of marketer you hire.
You need to think about the level of expertise you need. Do you need someone to manage a channel, or are you looking for someone to build and scale a channel? Do you need someone who can help with creating goals and strategy, or just execute a strategy you’ve already established?
These questions can help you understand what level of fractional marketer you need to add to your team. Then, all you need to do is find the right one who fits your needs.
Where to go when you need the best fractional marketing professionals in the business
There are a lot of places online to turn to these days in your search for a fractional marketing team. We won’t mention them by name, but ‘SchminkedIn’ always seems to return hundreds of unqualified comments, ‘Smupwork’ and ‘Schmiverr’ are a race to the bottom in terms of both fees and quality, and your friend’s mom’s curtain reselling business quite frankly just has different needs than your AI-powered B2B SaaS start-up.
What if you could have access to vetted freelance marketing professionals with proven track records? What if all the marketers you needed were in one place and had experience working as a cool little team of freelancers?
And just to put the cherry on top, what if we weren’t talking about an agency?
Repeat: we’re not an agency.
The Freelance Squad is all that and a bag of chips (are we aging ourselves with that one? Nah. We just really love chips).
We think of ourselves as the best not-quite-an-agency, not-quite-a-recruiting-firm freelance collective you can find. We’re a talented group of freelance designers, copywriters, SEO experts, and so much more. All independent. All talented.
When you need to add one, two, three, 12 freelance or fractional marketing experts to your team, we can help. Vetted freelancers with the talent and experience you’re looking for with experience working together as a team? Oh YES. Skip scouring the Internet searching for several freelancers and managing them all—at The Freelance Squad, we take care of everything.
