Fractional CMO Job Description Template

Job Title

Fractional Cmo — [Full-Time / Part-Time / Contract] · Remote

About the Role

A Fractional CMO provides senior marketing leadership on a part-time, retained basis — typically 15 to 25 hours per week — for companies that need strategic marketing direction and executive accountability but are not at the stage where a $200,000+ full-time CMO is justified. They own the marketing strategy, set the channel mix and budget allocation, establish the measurement framework, lead or coordinate the marketing team, and are directly accountable for growth metrics. A Fractional CMO is not a consultant who produces decks and departs; they attend leadership meetings, review campaign performance weekly, make hiring decisions, and hold the same marketing accountability a full-time CMO would — just distributed across fewer hours.

Key Responsibilities

• Conduct a 30-day marketing audit covering brand positioning, current channel performance, funnel conversion rates at each stage (awareness to trial, trial to paid, paid to retained), competitive landscape, and customer acquisition cost by channel — delivering a prioritized 12-month roadmap with 30/60/90-day milestones and investment-to-outcome projections for each recommendation.
• Own the annual marketing budget: allocating spend across paid acquisition channels (Meta, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok), organic channels (SEO, content, email), brand, events, and tools — with a defined testing budget for new channel experiments and a performance threshold framework that determines when to scale, maintain, or cut each channel.
• Define the go-to-market strategy for new product launches, new market entries, or pricing tier changes: developing the positioning narrative, identifying the highest-propensity customer segments, designing the launch channel sequence, and building the success metrics framework before execution begins rather than after.
• Lead and manage the marketing team: conducting weekly 1:1s with channel specialists (paid media, SEO, email, content), setting quarterly OKRs aligned to company revenue targets, resolving cross-channel attribution conflicts, making hiring and vendor decisions, and onboarding new specialists with structured 30-day ramp plans.
• Own the marketing measurement infrastructure: defining the attribution model (first-touch, last-touch, or data-driven), ensuring GA4 is configured correctly with conversion events matched to business outcomes, building the weekly leadership reporting dashboard in Looker Studio with CAC, LTV, MQL volume, pipeline contribution, and payback period — and presenting findings and recommendations in the monthly executive team meeting.
• Develop and maintain the brand positioning framework: crafting the value proposition hierarchy, messaging architecture by customer segment (ICP profiles, pain points, proof points), competitive differentiation statement, and tone-of-voice guide — ensuring all channel execution reflects a consistent message regardless of who is executing.
• Manage agency and freelancer relationships for any outsourced channel execution: writing detailed briefs, setting SLAs for reporting cadence and deliverable formats, reviewing output against brand and performance standards, and making the decision to continue, renegotiate, or replace external partners based on performance data.
• Drive customer retention and expansion strategy: working with the product or customer success team to define lifecycle marketing programs, identifying upsell and cross-sell triggers from usage data, building referral programs, and ensuring the email program is managing churn risk proactively rather than reactively.
• Report directly to the CEO or COO with a weekly written marketing update covering metric variances versus target, the three most significant findings from the prior week, and specific decisions needed from leadership — operating with the same accountability level as a full-time executive without requiring daily office presence.

Requirements

• 7+ years of progressive marketing leadership experience, including at least 3 years in a head of marketing, VP of marketing, or CMO role at a company with $5–$50 million in annual revenue — candidates should be able to describe the revenue stage they joined, the strategy they set, the team they built or inherited, and the measurable growth outcomes over their tenure.
• Demonstrated full-funnel ownership: experience with both performance marketing (paid acquisition, conversion optimization, email) and brand marketing (positioning, content, PR) — not a specialist who built a career in one channel and claims strategic breadth without a track record to support it.
• Go-to-market strategy experience: having led at least two product or market launches end-to-end, from positioning development through launch execution and post-launch optimization, with the ability to articulate what worked, what did not, and what they would change.
• Marketing analytics fluency: comfortable building attribution models in GA4, reading CAC payback period analysis, interpreting cohort retention charts, and calculating LTV-to-CAC ratios — not dependent on a data analyst to produce the numbers before forming a strategic opinion.
• Team leadership experience: has hired, managed, and in some cases terminated marketing specialists, set performance expectations, resolved team conflicts, and built departmental processes (campaign brief templates, reporting cadence, QA checklists) that allow the team to execute with less direct oversight over time.
• Budget ownership track record: has held a marketing budget of at least $500,000 annually, made allocation decisions across channels, defended investment decisions to a CEO or board with performance data, and reallocated budget mid-year when performance warranted it.
• Experience working in a fractional, consulting, or advising capacity for at least one company — demonstrating the ability to deliver strategic value in limited weekly hours, prioritize the highest-leverage actions given time constraints, and communicate clearly with a leadership team that is not immersed in marketing day-to-day.

Nice to Have

• Industry-specific experience in ecommerce, SaaS, or professional services — the three most common profiles for Fractional CMO engagements, each with distinct CAC/LTV dynamics, channel mix conventions, and marketing team structures.
• Experience with product-led growth (PLG) motion: setting up in-product onboarding sequences, using usage data to trigger lifecycle marketing, and building the metrics infrastructure to measure activation rate and time-to-value alongside traditional marketing KPIs.
• Board-level communication experience: has presented marketing strategy and performance to a board of directors or investor group, answering challenging questions about CAC trends, market sizing assumptions, and competitive positioning without becoming defensive.
• Experience managing a marketing function through a company sale, merger, or private equity transition — including conducting marketing due diligence, maintaining team morale during uncertainty, and integrating with an acquirer's marketing organization.