What is fractional marketing?
Fractional Marketing or even just the word ‘fractional’ is a new term and one that I only came across in 2024. I see ‘Fractional Accountants’ and ‘Fractional CMOs’ but someone last week said ‘Just tell me what it really means’.
So here goes.
A fraction means a small, or few small parts, but not a whole. So if you’re a small or medium-sized business, and you need *some* marketing support, it’s a new way of saying part-time, or in real terms, a marketing person working to a set budget.
The Difference between Fractional and Freelance
In my mind, if you hire Fractional Support, you’re hiring someone for the medium-longer term, you want them as part of your team to be consistent but also part-time. Freelance can be so many things; from one day one, to becoming a permanent member of the team, coined ‘Permalance’, they’re just not quite on the payroll, but they’re working with you on a regular basis.
Here’s some examples of what fractional marketing support could look like;
- Writing Posts and Case Studies- it won’t take even a week in a month, so fractional marketing support in this example would be 2-3 days a month, depending on how many case studies and how complex or long they needed to be.
- PR – low-level PR each month could be seen as fractional marketing support. Only large or very large organisations would have multiple campaigns running at the same time. A small or medium firm, may have one or two stories to tell at any given time, and given that publications are dwindling, not growing, any more than that would probably not get much cut through.
- Re-positioning and re-writing your offer – again, this wouldn’t be full-time, and if budgets were restricted, this type of project could be split over a few months.
- Writing a Marketing or Brand Strategy- this could be broken down into chunks and again, spread over a few months. Starting with Discovery, then going into Research and Planning, before the final submission of a Strategy that guides the business for the next 12 to 18 months, if not 2-3 years.
- Ad hoc research and writing – a lot of the time business founders want Competitor Research, Client Studies, Trend Research and Industry information, which takes time to research and collate the findings. Sometimes it’s pulling together the research and then putting it into a presentation format- this would be fractional marketing too.
Common Misconceptions
I think that Founders and Senior Leadership may feel that fractional support won’t feel like part of the team or that they would be less effective than a full-time person, neither of which should be true. Whether a team member, part-time, full-time or fractional is part of the team is down to the business’s communication set-up. Have you invited your fractional support to join Slack? Are they invited to come into the office? Have you introduced them by email or during team calls to the whole team in order for them to feel like part of the team? All of these things would help.
The Advantages & Disadvantages of Fractional Marketing Support
Advantages:
- Budget-friendly
- Smaller list of to-dos
- Smarter use of your time for meetings/reviewing work
Disadvantages:
- May not keep up with the workload
- May not wish to travel into offices
- Lack of ‘on-call’ support
Future Potential
It’s my personal view that while NI, Corporation Tax and Inflation have all increased, the demand for fractional support will increase. Companies need to depend on Marketing Support in order to maintain share of voice and market share, but sometimes a freelancer is too hard to place; but a fractional marketing support who is consistent for a duration of time fits the bill.
If you’d like to know more about External Marketing’s services, get in touch with Zara.