One person is not a marketing department
A few years ago I worked with a client whose head of marketing carried the title of CMO. But she wasn’t one. Not because she lacked the ability; within her capacity, she was brilliant. She wasn’t a CMO because the business had never built anything around her that would allow her to be one.
She reported into business development, which tells you most of what you need to know about how the organisation saw marketing. She ran the brand, the campaigns, the content, the agencies, the events, the reporting and every urgent request that arrived on a Friday afternoon. She had the backing of genuinely excellent agencies. And still the business kept asking the same question: why doesn’t marketing do more?
The answer was simple, even if nobody wanted to hear it. She was one person doing the work of a department.
Strategy is the first casualty
There is a persistent belief, particularly in small and scaling businesses, that hiring a senior marketer is the same as having a marketing function. It isn’t. A marketing department of one is not a department. It is not even a team! It is a person.
When one individual is expected to be strategic, tactical and operational all at once, the strategy is always what gives. Briefs need writing, artwork needs approving and the board pack needs numbers by Thursday. At my client, even with brilliant agencies behind her, the CMO was executing a plan rather than shaping the direction of the business.
The damage showed up in two places. First, the line between marketing and sales had never been drawn. Nobody could say which activities produced marketing qualified leads, how many became sales qualified leads, or how many converted. Without that thread, marketing looked like a cost centre and its value became a matter of opinion.
Second, she had no seat where strategy was decided. Reporting into business development kept her out of the boardroom, so the business wanted more from her while giving her no route to deliver it.
Three models, one deciding factor
Pulling on my organisational design experience from my early career, there are three ways to structure marketing.
Fully insourced. Designers, writers, social and PR all sit in-house, with suppliers brought in only for very specialist needs such as events. It offers control and speed, at a cost that suits larger organisations.
Hybrid. A lean internal team relies heavily on agencies. The team owns the strategy and the briefs; the agencies bring scale and specialism.
Lean internal, fully outsourced. One person, perhaps one and a half, sits inside the business and everything else is external. This was my client’s model which works for organisations of a smaller size. My client had long since outgrown this model.
Structure matters, but it is not the whole story. Just as important is whether there is enough leadership to set direction and enough operational support to run the work. Agencies need to be led, and coordinating several of them is close to a full-time job on its own. In a lean model without that support, the person in the seat becomes a project manager for suppliers, with little room left to lead.
Outsourcing without leadership
Outsourcing is not the problem. Outsourcing without leadership is.
A business that leans on external partners needs at least two roles inside the tent: someone strategic who sits with leadership and owns the link between marketing and revenue, and someone operational who runs the machine, from briefs and timelines to approvals and data. These cannot be the same person. The strategic role does not have to be full-time, and a fractional CMO can fill it well.
But the fractional model has its own version of this trap, and I have learned it the hard way. The engagements that break down are rarely the ones where the strategy is hard. They are the ones where the client believes that hiring me means they have hired a marketing department.
The assumption usually surfaces a few weeks in. Could I just knock out the brochure? Write the website copy? Design the social posts, produce the video, manage the launch? And when I suggest bringing in a designer or a copywriter, there is a pause, followed by some version of: isn’t that what we’re paying you for?
It isn’t. I am not a graphic designer, a copywriter or a production house, and I won’t pretend to be. If I quietly took all of that on, I would be doing several jobs averagely instead of one job well, and the strategy, the thing I was hired for, would be the first casualty. It is the one-person department all over again, just billed by the day.
Two buckets of money
When the positioning lands, it is because the client sees that there are two separate budgets in play, not one.
The first is a resourcing budget. It is the money a business would otherwise spend on a senior hire, and it comes from the same place a salary would: the people budget, not the marketing one. That is the bucket a fractional CMO belongs in.
The second is the marketing budget. It pays for implementation: the agencies, designers, writers, producers and media. It buys the specialist skills that turn a strategy into work the market actually sees.
When both buckets exist, the model works. When the fractional fee is quietly carved out of the marketing budget, there is nothing left to implement with, and the strategy becomes a well-written document that nobody executes.
Three questions worth asking
- Who sets your marketing strategy, and do they actually have the time to do it?
- Can you trace a line from a marketing activity to a qualified lead to revenue?
- Have you budgeted for the people who will execute the strategy, or only for the person who writes it?
My client’s CMO didn’t fail. The structure failed her, and the same thing happens every time a fractional CMO is asked to be the whole department. Strategy needs a team, or at the very least a budget, behind it.
If any of those questions made you pause, start with our CEO’s Checklist for Marketing Impact. It is a practical way to see where your marketing is set up to deliver, and where it is set up to struggle.
