At some point the founder stops being the marketing department. The question is what replaces them. There are three real options: hire, bring in a fractional CMO, or hand the function to an outside team. They are not interchangeable, they fail in different ways, and the one that is right for you depends almost entirely on a single question: do you need a decision-maker, or do you need output?
The three options, honestly
Hire in house
You get someone whose only job is your company. They sit in your meetings, learn your product properly, and build institutional knowledge that never leaves in a handover. Nothing else on this list matches that.
What you also get: a recruitment cycle measured in months, a salary that continues whether or not the strategy works, and the awkward reality that one marketing hire is rarely enough. A head of marketing who cannot design, write, or build will need people who can. That is where the cost stops being one salary.
Fractional CMO
A senior operator, usually a day or two a week, who sets direction. They bring pattern recognition from companies further along than yours, and they will tell you uncomfortable things a junior hire would not.
The catch is in the job title. A fractional CMO decides. They do not, as a rule, write the blog posts, design the ad creative, or build the landing page. Hire one without anybody to execute and you get a strategy document and a slow, dawning silence. Plenty of companies have paid for the plan and never shipped it.
Outsourced marketing team
An outside team that owns both the plan and the production. They decide what to do, then do it, and report on what happened.
What you give up is presence. They are not in your standups, they will not overhear the thing your best customer said on a call, and they are working with other clients. A good one closes that gap with a real cadence and by asking better questions than a new hire would know to ask. A bad one produces generic work at volume, which is worse than nothing because it looks like progress.
What each one costs
Here are the numbers, because this question is really a budget question and most comparisons of it never get specific.
- Full-time CMO: $250,000 to $400,000 a year all in. Out of reach for most companies asking this question, which is why the other three exist.
- Fractional CMO: commonly $5,000 to $15,000 a month for a day or two a week. Newer operators start nearer $4,000, and well-known ones with a niche go past $20,000. Strategy only. Execution is not included and is not implied.
- Agency retainer: typically $5,000 to $20,000 a month, and usually plus 10 to 20% of your ad spend, often on a twelve-month term. That percentage is the part people forget when they compare two quotes.
- Outsourced marketing team: varies widely, because the label covers everything from two contractors to a real function.
Now the comparison that actually matters. A fractional CMO's day rate against a salary tells you nothing, because they are not doing the same job. The honest benchmark is the full set of roles required to ship marketing at all. For a B2B software company, fully loaded, that is:
- Head of marketing, to decide what happens: $16,500
- Senior designer, for campaigns, collateral and site work: $6,250
- Web developer, for landing pages and anything technical: $9,500
- Content or SEO contractor, for the writing and search work: $4,000
That is $36,250 a month for the complete set. Almost nobody assembles all four. They hire the head of marketing, discover that person cannot design or build, and end up with an expensive strategist making graphics in Canva at eleven at night.
The trap in the middle of this table is the combination. A fractional CMO at $10,000 who hands you a plan still needs someone to execute it, so the real cost is $10,000 plus a designer plus a developer plus a writer. Priced honestly, strategy-only is rarely the cheap option. It is the option that looks cheap until you total the second invoice.
For reference, our own outsourced version runs $7,900 a month for both halves, strategy and production, with no percentage of ad spend and a fixed list of deliverables. We publish the full cost breakdown across every route, including ours.
Which one you actually need
Hire in house if marketing is your primary growth channel and you expect it to stay that way for years. The compounding knowledge is worth the cost and the wait. Also hire if your product is genuinely hard to explain and the learning curve is measured in quarters.
Use a fractional CMO if you already have people who can execute and what is missing is judgement. They are excellent at unsticking a team that is busy but directionless. They are a poor fit if the team they are directing does not exist.
Use an outsourced team if you need the whole function running now, you do not have a year to build it, and the honest answer to "who would do this work?" is nobody. This is the common case for a startup with a product, some customers, and a founder who no longer has the hours.
The questions to ask any of them
- Who decides what gets made this month? If the answer is you, you are buying hands, not a team. That may be what you want, but price it accordingly.
- What lands every month, whether or not I ask? A retainer you have to fill with requests will quietly go unused in your busiest month, which is exactly when you needed it.
- What is not included? Ad spend, software, paid placements and video production are the usual exclusions. Anyone who will not answer this crisply is hoping you find out later.
- What do I own at the end? Source files, account access, and your domain. All three, in writing.
- What happens in month one? If the answer is "onboarding", ask what ships.
The mistake underneath all of this
Most companies do not choose badly between these three. They choose one, get a plan, and then never build the second half. The strategy exists, the execution does not, and six months later the conclusion is "marketing does not work for us."
Whichever route you take, the test is the same: after you sign, does work actually appear? Not a roadmap. Work.
How we do it
We run the outsourced version. We set the monthly plan, write and design the work, build it, publish it, and report on what it did, for one monthly rate and a fixed list of deliverables that lands whether or not you send a single request. See exactly what ships each month, or compare it against our design subscription if what you need is production rather than the plan.
