Fractional Marketing Director
Leeds & UK-wide · Senior marketing leadership without the full-time hire
Senior marketing leadership embedded into your business — strategy, delivery, demand generation, and full accountability. As close to an in-house CMO as you can get without the hire.
For founders who've outgrown
freelance, but aren't ready for full-time
Most scaling founders hit the same wall. The freelance patchwork stops working. An agency costs a fortune and doesn't know your business. A full-time CMO is another year away — and the marketing still has to happen.
A fractional marketing director sits in that exact gap. You get senior thinking, senior delivery, and someone who's sat at the table inside the brands you're trying to compete with — without committing to a six-figure headcount you're not ready for yet.
Founders typically come to Marketiva fractional engagements when one or more of these is true:
- Revenue is past £500k and marketing has stopped being something you can squeeze around the rest of the work.
- You're paying multiple freelancers and agencies, and nobody owns the strategy — including you.
- You've tried two agency relationships and ended each one feeling like you knew your business better than they did.
- You need to build a marketing function over the next 12 months, and you'd like someone senior shaping it from day one.
- You want to bring AI into how marketing runs — but you don't want a tool implementation; you want a strategist who already works that way.
Senior marketing leadership,
embedded weekly
Strategy & positioning
A clear quarterly marketing strategy that ladders up to business outcomes — not a deck of campaign ideas. Positioning, segments, channel mix, and the operating cadence that holds it all together.
Weekly delivery direction
Weekly strategy and delivery sessions with you. Briefs and quality oversight on every piece of work shipped. Direct Slack/email access between sessions — the way an in-house CMO would work.
AI-native execution
An AI-native delivery stack that ships in days what traditional agencies ship in months. Content, research, customer insight, and ops workflows powered by AI tools — managed by someone who understands both the marketing and the technology.
Demand generation
Demand generation strategy and oversight: paid acquisition, content engine, outbound, SEO, partnerships. The mechanics that move pipeline — built around your stage, not a generic playbook.
Agency & freelancer management
Brief specialists where you need them. Manage their work to a single standard. Cut the relationships that aren't earning their fee. You stop being the project manager.
Marketing function build-out
If the goal is to hire in-house eventually, the fractional engagement leaves you with the recruitment brief, the org structure, the systems, and a marketing function someone can step into — not start from scratch with.
Leverage AI partnership
For technical AI implementation, my husband Said Lopez leads Leverage AI (opens in a new tab). On fractional engagements, that pairing is part of the deal: marketing strategy and AI systems architecture, working in the same direction on the same brief.
Fractional director vs the alternatives
The three usual options for marketing leadership at this stage — and where each one breaks down.
Marketing agency
£3k–£10k+/mo, multiple agencies usually needed
- Sells delivery, not ownership of the function
- Junior account managers usually run the work day-to-day
- Doesn't sit on internal calls, doesn't know your customers
- Brilliant for specific channels — wrong shape for "own the marketing"
Fractional Marketing Director
Engagement-dependent · senior decision-maker
- Owns the marketing function, not just a workstream
- Senior judgement on every brief, not a junior buffer
- Embedded — joins internal calls, knows your team
- Briefs specialists when you need them, cuts what you don't
- AI-native delivery built into how the work happens
Full-time CMO
£90k–£150k base + equity + on-costs
- Right answer when the function justifies the headcount
- Typically a year or more of recruitment + onboarding
- Full operational load — including the work a fractional could absorb
- Hard to reverse if you hire too early
A senior decision-maker,
on a repeatable cadence
-
01
First conversation (free)
A short call. Where you are, what you've tried, and whether a fractional engagement is even the right move. If it isn't, I'll say so. About a third of these conversations end with "you don't need this yet."
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02
Foundations (optional)
If we're not sure, we start with a Foundations engagement — a paid audit and 30-day roadmap. By the end of it both of us know whether ongoing fractional makes sense, and where to begin if it does.
-
03
Engagement
Six-month minimum. Weekly strategy/delivery rhythm with you, async work in between, quarterly strategy review. Direct line on Slack or email. You always know what's being worked on and why.
-
04
Review & renew
Every six months we look at whether the engagement is still the right shape — fractional, full project, or time to hire in-house. The exit door stays open by design.
Questions founders actually ask
What does a fractional marketing director actually do day-to-day?
A fractional marketing director holds the marketing function for your business: sets the strategy, owns the roadmap, briefs and quality-checks delivery, manages agencies and freelancers, and reports to you the same way an in-house CMO would. At Marketiva, that's typically one to two days of focused work per week, with weekly strategy/delivery sessions and direct Slack/email access in between.
How is this different from a marketing agency?
An agency sells you delivery and bills you for hours. A fractional director sells you ownership of an outcome and is accountable for the function. The work either gets done directly or by specialists I brief and manage — but the responsibility doesn't change hands. And the work is done by a senior decision-maker, not a junior account team behind one.
When does a fractional director make more sense than a full-time CMO?
Usually when you're past £500k revenue, your founder is doing more marketing than they should be, your freelance/agency mix has stopped scaling, and a full-time CMO at £100k+ is still a year away. A fractional engagement gives you CMO-grade thinking at a fraction of the cost, and lets you keep the strategy stable while the business catches up to the role.
What's the typical investment?
Engagements scale with the level of involvement — from a senior-strategy day a week up to a full embedded fractional director. Pricing is shared on the first call once we've understood the brief; engagements typically run on a six-month minimum so the strategy has time to compound. Most fractional engagements sit in the £3k–£8k/month range.
Do you work outside Leeds?
Yes. Marketiva is based in Leeds, with a particular focus on founders across the North of England — Manchester, Sheffield, York, Bradford, Liverpool, Newcastle. But fractional engagements run UK-wide, mostly remote with in-person sessions at agreed intervals.
What industries do you work with?
I've spent twenty years across CPG, consumer electronics, food, and regulated industries — and worked on demand generation programmes inside both B2B and B2C. The constant is "scaling founders with a real business and a real audience to reach." Industry matters less than the shape of the marketing problem.
Ready to talk?
The first call is free, and honest.
About a third of these calls end with "you don't need this yet." That's deliberate. A short conversation is usually enough to know whether a fractional engagement is the right next move for your business.