Fractional Marketing Director for Manufacturers

You have a sales team. Someone runs the floor. Somewhere underneath all of that, marketing is happening too, except nobody actually owns it. A freelancer built the website a few years back. An agency runs some ads, or used to. Every few months someone new cold-emails you about SEO. You end up making the call on all of it, because there’s no one else whose job that actually is.

That’s not a marketing problem. That’s a marketing leadership problem, and it’s a different thing to fix.

The usual two options, and why they both fall short

Most companies in this spot solve it one of two ways.

They hire a full-time marketing director. That’s a real salary, real benefits, and a real risk that the person you hire has never run marketing for a manufacturer before.

Or they hire a fractional CMO. A strategist sets the plan, then hands it to two or three vendors to execute: an ads agency here, a web shop there, maybe a freelance writer. Half the retainer ends up going toward managing those vendors instead of doing the actual work.

I do this differently. I’m the strategist and the person doing the work. When I set your marketing plan, I’m also the one running the ads, building the HubSpot workflows, and writing what the plan calls for. There’s no translation layer between the strategy and the execution, because it’s the same person doing both.

Who this is for
Manufacturers with roughly 50 to 200 employees, usually $5M to $25M in revenue. You have a sales team. Maybe someone in operations touches marketing on the side. What you don’t have is anyone whose actual job is marketing strategy, and every vendor who pitches you is trying to sell you their one channel, not tell you the truth about your whole marketing picture.

If you’re a smaller shop, ten to fifty people, with no marketing budget at all right now, this probably isn’t the right starting point. Look at the RFQ Growth Partnership or the 90-day Google Ads pilot instead. This is the next rung up, once you’ve got enough structure that the gap is leadership, not budget.

What the work has actually produced

I’ll say the honest part directly: this specific retainer shape, strategy plus hands-on execution reporting to ownership, is new. What isn’t new is the execution underneath it, the same Google Ads, SEO, and website work I’ve been running for manufacturers for years.

One industrial equipment client went from 4 sales opportunities a month to 14 in 90 days, while cutting ad spend by 46 percent. Another manufacturer cut cost per lead from $171 to $88 while organic search traffic grew 76 percent. Full detail on both, including a third case study, is in the results page.

You’re not betting on an unproven idea here. You’re betting on someone who already does the execution for a living, now also owning the plan that decides where that execution points.

What’s included

A quarterly marketing plan, reviewed with you directly, not a monthly report on last month’s ad spend and nothing else.

Direct execution of whatever that plan calls for: Google Ads, SEO and AEO, HubSpot, website work. Done by me, not handed to a subcontractor you’ve never met.

An honest read on any vendors you already have in place. If something’s working, it stays. If it isn’t, I’ll tell you, even if that means less work for me.

One point of contact. No account manager, no rotating cast of people who don’t know your business.

Pricing

$4,000 to $6,000 a month, depending on scope. This reflects the level of the person doing the work, not a menu of add-ons stacked on top of each other.