Fractional CMO Services From a Working Head of Marketing

Fractional CMO services give you a senior marketing leader for part of the month, without the cost, recruitment time and commitment of a full-time executive hire. You get someone who sets the strategy, owns the budget, manages the people and agencies doing the work, and reports to you in business terms: revenue, margin, acquisition cost and pipeline.

Our fractional CMO is Mustafa, the founder of 95 Solutions. This is not a consulting sideline built on past experience. He has been Head of Marketing for a Florida-based resort wear brand since January 2016 and, since July 2024, contract Head of Marketing for a second fashion brand. The work he does there is the work you are hiring for: planning seasons and launches, setting budgets, managing agencies and freelancers, hiring, and answering to owners about results.

What Does a Fractional CMO Actually Do?

A fractional CMO does the job of a marketing executive on a part-time basis. The title matters less than the responsibilities, which fall into five areas.

• Strategy and positioning. Who you sell to, why they should choose you over the alternatives, which channels can reach them profitably, and what to stop doing.
• Budget and targets. Setting spend by channel and by month, tied to acquisition cost and payback targets that your finance lead agrees with.
• Team and vendor management. Briefing, reviewing and holding accountable your in-house marketers, freelancers and agencies, including our own team where we run channels for you.
• Measurement. Making sure the numbers in your leadership report are real: tracking, the attribution approach, dashboards and one agreed source of truth.
• Hiring. Writing role scorecards, interviewing and onboarding marketers, and deciding which roles belong in house and which should stay outsourced.

Our Fractional CMO Services

Our fractional CMO services come in three engagement shapes. They differ in how much of the operating work the fractional CMO takes on, not in seniority. Every level is led by Mustafa personally, so you are never handed to whichever fractional CMO for hire an agency has free that month.

Because 95 Solutions also runs channels, the plan can be delivered by our own team in performance marketing, SEO, PPC, analytics and tracking and email marketing. You are never required to use them. Keeping your existing agencies and using us only for leadership works just as well.

What Our Fractional CMO Services Include Each Month

The engagement level changes how much time goes into each item, but these responsibilities are part of every fractional CMO retainer.

Fractional CMO vs Marketing Consultant vs Full-Time CMO

These three options are often confused. The main differences are commitment, accountability and who owns the outcome after the advice is given.

A marketing consultant, or a fractional marketing consultant booked for a few days, is the right call when you have a specific question, such as whether a channel is worth expanding. If that is where you are, our free marketing audit is a sensible first step. A fractional CMO makes sense when the problem is ongoing: nobody senior owns the plan, and decisions keep slipping between the founder, the team and the agencies.

Fractional CMO vs a fractional marketing agency

A fractional marketing agency sells part-time execution: a share of a designer, a media buyer or a writer each month. A fractional CMO sells leadership: deciding what those people work on, holding them to targets and reporting to you. Many companies need both. It works best when leadership sits apart from the execution budget, so the person setting priorities is not also selling the hours. That is why our fractional CMO work is scoped separately from our channel services.

How Our Fractional CMO Engagements Work

1. Diagnostic (weeks 1 to 3). Over the first 2 to 3 weeks we interview the founders and the people closest to customers, such as sales and support. We review 12 months of spend, results and tracking, and read customer reviews, support tickets and survey answers to hear how buyers describe you.
2. Written marketing plan (weeks 3 to 5). You get a plan covering positioning, target segments, channel mix, budget by month, targets, team and vendor structure, and the priorities for the next 90 days. It is short enough to be read and specific enough to be checked against.
3. Measurement you can defend (weeks 4 to 8). Before spend goes up, we agree one source of truth for revenue and leads and fix the tracking that feeds it. Leadership decisions are only as good as the numbers under them.
4. Operating rhythm (from month 2). Regular meetings with your team and vendors, a shared priorities tracker, and a monthly leadership report that explains results in plain language, including what did not work.
5. Quarterly planning (every 3 months). Each quarter we reset budgets, review vendor performance and decide on hires. Agencies that are not delivering get a clear brief and a deadline, and are replaced if needed.
6. Planned handover (4 to 8 weeks before a full-time hire starts). When you are ready for a full-time marketing leader, we help write the role, interview candidates and hand over documentation. A good fractional engagement should make itself replaceable.

What the First 90 Days Usually Produce

• A written diagnostic of your current marketing, with the three to five problems that matter most.
• A marketing plan with a monthly budget by channel and the targets each channel is expected to hit.
• A leadership dashboard built on one agreed source of truth.
• A scorecard for each agency or freelancer, with clear expectations for the next quarter.
• A launch or campaign calendar tied to stock, seasons or sales cycles.
• A hiring plan that says which roles to fill, in what order, and which to keep outsourced.

How fractional CMO success is measured

A fractional CMO should be judged on the same things a full-time one would be, scaled to the time you buy. We agree three to five measures in the plan, usually drawn from these: new customer acquisition cost or cost per qualified lead, payback period, marketing efficiency ratio (total revenue divided by total marketing spend), pipeline created by marketing, and the share of revenue from returning customers. Alongside the numbers, we hold ourselves to operating outcomes you can see: decisions no longer waiting on the founder, every vendor working to a written brief, and one report the whole leadership team trusts.

Fractional CMO Services for SaaS, Ecommerce and Service Businesses

The job title is the same across sectors, but the first 90 days look different depending on how your business sells.

SaaS and B2B companies

The common starting point is founder-led sales that worked to the first customers but does not scale. The fractional CMO defines the ideal customer profile with sales, connects CRM stages to ad platforms so paid search learns from qualified opportunities rather than form fills, and decides how much to put into content, paid search, LinkedIn and partnerships. A SaaS marketing consultant can write that plan. A fractional CMO stays to run it and answer for the pipeline it produces.

Ecommerce and DTC brands

Here the work centers on margin and repeat purchase. The fractional CMO sets break-even targets by product line, plans launches and promotions around stock, decides how budget splits between Google, Meta and retention, and makes sure discounting does not quietly erase profit. This is the closest match to Mustafa's own in-house work at two fashion brands.

Service businesses and agencies

For firms that sell expertise, the plan usually focuses on positioning, a website that converts, search for high-intent services, referral programs and a clean handoff from marketing lead to sales call. The fractional CMO also sets lead quality rules so marketing is judged on booked work, not on lead counts.

Mistakes Companies Make When They Hire a Fractional CMO

• Hiring for a title instead of a problem. Without a written problem statement, the engagement drifts into general advice. Write down the two or three outcomes you need first.
• Giving no budget authority. A fractional CMO who cannot move spend or change vendors becomes an expensive advisor. Agree up front which decisions they can make alone.
• Expecting full-time output from part-time hours. A fractional leader directs the work. If nobody is available to execute, add a marketer or an agency alongside the role.
• Letting the CMO also sell you the execution. When the person setting priorities profits from the hours they recommend, conflicts follow. Keep leadership and execution budgets separate.
• Skipping the handover plan. Decide early whether the goal is a permanent hire, and ask for documentation as you go so the knowledge stays with you.

Fractional CMO Planning and Reporting Tools

Why Choose 95 Solutions for Fractional CMO Services

• A current Head of Marketing, not a former one. Mustafa has led marketing inside a brand since 2016 and still does. The trade-offs he helps you make are ones he is making himself this quarter.
• Hands-on channel experience. He spent 2015 to 2021 as a freelancer running SEO, paid media and email before founding 95 Solutions. He can review a Google Ads account or a Klaviyo flow himself rather than relying on what a vendor says.
• A team behind the role. When the plan needs execution, our channel leads can take it on. When it needs engineering, such as a landing page, dashboard or integration, our developers are in the same company.
• Straight answers about vendors, including us. We will tell you when a channel we could sell you is not the right move, and you keep ownership of every account, so switching vendors never costs you your data.
• Practical terms. Monthly retainer, 3-month minimum, USD contracts from a US LLC, and working hours that overlap both US and UK business days.

Who Our Fractional CMO Services Are For

A good fit

• Ecommerce and DTC brands with a proven product whose founder is still acting as head of marketing.
• SaaS and B2B companies moving from founder-led sales to a repeatable marketing engine, which usually need more than a SaaS marketing consultant can give in a one-off project.
• Businesses paying two or more agencies with nobody senior coordinating their work or checking their numbers.
• Companies between marketing leaders that need cover while they recruit.

Probably not a fit

• Pre-launch businesses with no product sales yet. At that stage you usually need hands-on execution more than leadership.
• Large marketing departments that need a full-time executive in the building every day.
• Teams that want someone to complete tasks rather than lead. For extra capacity, our dedicated marketers and developers are a better match.

When to Hire a Fractional CMO

Hire a fractional CMO when marketing needs senior ownership but not forty hours a week of it. In practice that moment shows up as one or more of these signs.

• Marketing decisions wait for the founder, and the founder has no time.
• Each agency reports its own success, yet total revenue is not growing.
• Nobody can say what a new customer costs you to acquire.
• You are about to hire your first marketer and do not know what to look for.
• Budget is set by what was spent last year rather than what each channel returns.

If several of these apply, the problem is leadership, not effort, and fractional CMO services are built for exactly that gap. More channels or more agencies will not fix it. For an overview of every channel we can support, see our digital marketing services.

What to have ready before a fractional CMO starts

The first month moves much faster when a few things are in place before day one:

• Read access to your ad accounts, GA4, CRM or store admin, email platform and any existing dashboards.
• Twelve months of marketing spend by channel, plus revenue or pipeline for the same period, even if the data is rough.
• Current contracts and scopes for every agency and freelancer, including notice periods.
• Gross margin by product line or service, or at least an honest estimate from your finance lead.
• Thirty minutes each with the people closest to customers, usually sales, support and the founder.
• One named person on your side who can approve budget changes and vendor decisions.

None of this needs to be perfect. Gaps in the data are findings in their own right, and closing them is often the first job.

Fractional CMO Pricing

Fractional CMO services are billed as a monthly retainer, with the level set by how much of the operating work you want us to take on. All levels have a 3-month minimum term, because the diagnostic and plan alone take the first month. Channel execution by our team, if you want it, is priced separately under each service. What moves the price is how many meetings a month you need, how many vendors and team members the role manages, whether hiring is in scope, and how much reporting and board preparation you expect.

If your situation does not fit one of these shapes, contact us to discuss a custom scope.

The first step is a short intro call with Mustafa. Send a note with your stage, your current team and agencies and the problem you most want solved, and we reply within one business day to book it. After the call you get a written scope with the engagement level we recommend, what the first 90 days would cover and the monthly cost. If a one-off review or our free marketing audit would answer your question instead, we will suggest that.