How to Maximize Your Time and Efforts When Hiring a Fractional Marketing Strategist

Written By Yvethe Blackmore

Preparation is key before hiring a fractional marketing strategist. Unlike a full-time hire, when hiring a fractional marketing strategist you’re aiming for high-impact in limited time. Here are three steps to take to maximize your budget, efforts, and strategy.


1. Assess & Clearly Define Where the Pain (or Opportunity) Is Coming From Before Hiring a Fractional Marketing Strategist

Sometimes, we can feel overwhelmed with the number of opportunities, challenges, ideas, and pain points. Before jumping to hire a strategist - clearly defining what you’re trying to solve for and why will help crystallize the challenge at hand and provide the best opportunity for positive results. To do so, first - try to articulate your need within a couple of sentences. Here are some examples of what that might look like:

  • We are launching a new product to help customers get access to [X features] to help them with [Y]. We need expertise in bringing this product to market in [X amount of time] to deliver [end-of-year results] before our competition launches similar products.

  • Our marketing team is above capacity, and by collaborating with a marketing strategist, we can gain bench strength that can help streamline our processes, integrate tech & AI, train our team in various areas to continue to foster growth, and further drive retention.

Once you’ve done this, make sure to take the time to unpack your initial assessment to further articulate the “why.” For example: We are losing [X amount] of revenue or are having issues with retention due to capacity issues, costing us over [X] in the next 3 or 4 years. This will help when creating KPIs.

Note: Ideally, in your yearly planning sessions - you’re planning for when you’d need engagement from a fractional marketing strategist.

2. Get More Granular And in the Internal Details Before Considering Outsourcing Marketing Support

Once you have clearly defined where your pain or opportunity is coming from and what you need, get more granular. This is the bridge between your pain points/opportunities and how you’ll deliver expectations to build KPIs and track against them once you hire a strategist.

Examples:

For the product launch example above: What information do you already have or potentially need? Consider:

  • Research on market opportunity?

  • Buy-in from specific departments within your organization?

  • How defined is your product or service, and when do you expect it to be ready?

If you’re solving for a team that’s above capacity:

You could begin to identify who in your team needs the most support and what their areas of opportunity are. What are your team’s biggest pain points? You could use many tools to gather this information like surveys, assessments, and more.

Again, it’s about crystallizing the opportunity/challenge and setting yourself up for success.

Note: If you aren’t too sure on how to do this - having a marketing consultant assess your marketing efforts, goals, and strategies can help; alternatively you can partner with the fractional marketing strategist to assess opportunities, pain points, challenges and come up with a plan of action- and finally, execute.

3. Have High Expectations of the Marketing Strategist You Hire– and Also, Be Realistic

As you’re vetting fractional marketing support, check for the following:

  • Executive Presence: If they’re to routinely interact with leadership.

  • Cross-Department Collaboration: If they’re expected to work with various departments and teams.

  • Skills: Do you need product marketing, growth marketing, brand & marketing strategies, content creation, training, or oversight across efforts? If you’re not sure, ask the strategist to walk through the differences for each and explain their experience in more detail.

  • Industry: In an ideal world, there is significant industry experience - but don’t discount transferable skills as hiring someone that has a mix of experience could bring a competitive advantage

  • Culture Fit: How does this person’s soft skills fit with your culture? This might be a difficult one, but if you have limited time to accomplish your goals, you need to ensure they’re a culture fit and their soft skills complement your team members and company culture.

  • Trust: Ask for case studies, recommendations, and also have a look at some of their work. You could also give them a smaller project as a start to then gradually add or make a longer-term commitment.

Most importantly, ensure you have clear and realistic KPIs and track against those. You might have some specific in mind, which is a great start. You should also work with your marketing strategist to define what those will be and how you’ll track against them.

Final Thoughts

When you’re vetting fractional marketing strategists, they should be able to quickly connect dots on opportunities and challenges as well as provide guidance on how to track performance, milestones, and ask questions on what success looks like for your engagement. Having a trusted marketing partner to collaborate throughout these steps can also be beneficial.

Ready to bring on a fractional marketing strategist or looking for a marketing partner for guidance? Get in touch today.


Yvethe Blackmore