Most founders I speak to treat this as a cost question. Agency retainer, day rate or salary, pick the cheapest that sounds sensible. That's the wrong place to start. The real question is what's missing from your marketing right now: the thinking, the doing, or someone who owns the result. Answer that honestly and the choice mostly makes itself.
Three models, three different jobs
A fractional head of marketing is a senior person who works for you part-time, usually one to two days a week, and owns the strategy, the budget and the results. They set direction, hire and manage suppliers, and sit in the room when decisions get made.
An agency is a team of specialists who execute. Good ones bring channel expertise you'd struggle to hire yourself, whether that's PPC, paid social, SEO or creative, plus the tools that come with it. What they don't do, however good they are, is own your commercial outcome. They own their channel.
A full-time hire is someone whose whole week belongs to you. They build the team, the processes and the habits, and they hold the knowledge when suppliers come and go.
Each is good at one thing. Problems start when you buy one model to do another's job. The most common version I see is a business hiring an agency because it needs a strategy, then being disappointed that the strategy looks a lot like more of the agency's services.
When a fractional head of marketing is the right call
From 2019 to 2024 I worked as a fractional growth lead across three or four brands at once, with engagements lasting between two and five years. That length matters. Fractional work is often sold as a quick fix, but the setups that work best are long ones, where the person can set a direction, see it through a couple of peak seasons and adjust.
Fractional tends to fit when:
- You're spending real money on marketing but nobody senior is accountable for it
- You have doers, in-house or agency, and no one directing them
- You can't yet justify a senior salary, or you're not sure what the full-time role should look like
- You need experience of a specific stage, such as scaling paid media or building ecommerce, more than you need hours
The rule of thumb I use: if the problem is judgement rather than capacity, fractional is probably the answer. A good fractional lead will make a handful of decisions each month that matter more than anything an extra pair of hands could produce.
Where it falls down is execution volume. One day a week of senior time won't write your emails, build your ads and run your social accounts. Hire a fractional head and expect them to do everything, and you'll get a stretched person doing a little of everything badly.
When an agency is the right call, and how to pick one
Agencies make sense when you know what needs doing and you need specialists to do it. Paid search is the obvious example. The platforms change constantly, and a team that lives in Google Ads every day will usually beat a generalist who dips in once a week.
Picking the right agency is harder than it looks, though. At Fields Luxury, where I owned the P&L for the Swan & Edgar and Anthony James watch brands, I worked through two content agencies and three ad agencies before landing the right ones. That isn't a complaint about agencies. It's what finding a good fit actually takes, and it's a big part of why someone senior needs to sit on the client side.
What that process taught me:
- Judge them on the team you'll actually get, not the people in the pitch. Ask to meet whoever will do the daily work.
- Agree the commercial measure upfront. For ecommerce that's usually ROAS or contribution after ad spend, not clicks or impressions.
- Give them 90 days with a clear review point. Long enough to learn your account, short enough not to waste a peak season.
- Keep ownership of your ad accounts, data and creative files. If you part ways, you should walk away with everything.
The agencies that worked out weren't the biggest or the cheapest. They were the ones that understood the brand and were honest about what wasn't working.
If nobody internally can do that judging, you'll struggle to tell a good agency from a confident one. That's the strongest argument for pairing an agency with a fractional lead rather than hiring one on its own.
When you need a full-time hire
There's a point where part-time stops working, and the signs are fairly consistent. Marketing has become the main growth lever and decisions are needed daily, not weekly. You need someone to build and manage a team of several people. Marketing is tangled up with product, operations and customer service in ways that need constant coordination. Or you're raising money and investors want a senior marketing leader on the org chart.
At that stage a fractional lead becomes a bottleneck. They can't be in every meeting, and the business needs someone thinking about marketing all week, not on Tuesdays.
Hire full-time too early and you pay a senior salary for a role that's still half-defined. Hire too late and the new person spends their first six months untangling a patchwork of suppliers and old decisions. A rough rule: when you'd want your fractional lead for three or more days a week, it's time to recruit.
The questions that actually decide it
If you're stuck, work through these with your co-founder or leadership team. It takes about half an hour.
Who owns the number? If nobody senior is accountable for marketing revenue or leads, you need leadership first. That means fractional or full-time, not an agency.
Is the gap thinking or doing? Thinking points to fractional. Doing points to an agency or junior in-house hires. Both points to a fractional lead plus suppliers.
How much are you spending? If monthly ad spend is modest, a large agency retainer will eat a big share of it, and a fractional lead plus a good freelancer may go further. Once spend is substantial, specialist management usually pays for itself.
How fast are things changing? If you're launching a product, opening a new channel or heading into Black Friday, you need experience now. A fractional lead can start in weeks. A full-time search often takes months.
What does the business look like in 18 months? If you expect a marketing team of five or more, start shaping the full-time role now, even if a fractional lead holds things together in the meantime.
The hybrid most growing brands end up with
In practice, the setup that suits most DTC and consumer brands between early traction and real scale is a fractional head of marketing directing a small number of specialist agencies or freelancers, with one or two people in-house handling the day-to-day.
The fractional lead sets strategy, owns the budget, hires and manages the agencies, and reports to the founder. The agencies run the channels they're best at. The in-house people keep the brand consistent and own the work that needs deep context, such as email, social and customer insight.
Later, the fractional lead often helps hire their own full-time replacement: writing the brief, sitting in interviews and handing over properly. That's a good outcome, not a failure. Getting that transition right is one of the more valuable things a fractional person can do.
Making whichever option you choose work
A few things apply whatever model you pick, and you can do all of them this week.
Write a one-page brief before you speak to anyone. Cover what the business needs to achieve in the next 12 months, what's been tried, the budget, and who makes decisions.
Set three measures, no more. One for revenue or leads, one for efficiency such as ROAS or cost per lead, and one leading indicator such as email list growth or conversion rate.
Sort access on day one. Analytics, ad accounts, the CRM, the ecommerce platform. Waiting a fortnight for logins is a surprisingly common way to waste a new hire's first month.
Book a monthly review that looks at numbers and decisions, not a slide deck full of activity.
FAQ
How much time does a fractional head of marketing usually work?
Most work one to two days a week, sometimes spread across the week rather than in a single block. The hours matter less than being available when decisions need making. Agree upfront how quickly they'll respond between days and how they'll work with your team and suppliers.
Can a fractional head of marketing manage my agencies?
Yes, and it's one of the best uses of the role. They can brief agencies properly, hold them to commercial targets and spot early when something isn't working. Without that, founders usually end up managing agencies themselves, which is rarely a good use of their time.
Should I hire an agency or a fractional head of marketing first?
If nobody senior owns marketing, start with the fractional lead. They'll work out which channels matter and which specialists to bring in. Hiring an agency first often means the agency sets the strategy, and that strategy tends to favour what they sell.
There's rarely one perfect answer here, but there's usually an obvious wrong one, and it's normally buying execution when what you need is ownership. If you're weighing this up for your own brand, I'm open to Head of Marketing and Head of Growth roles, with DTC and consumer brands first, and I take on consulting work too. Get in touch via the contact link on tomosborne.me and tell me where things stand.