Hire Fractional Marketing · Fractional Marketing Jobs UK
Fractional Marketing Jobs · Hire a fractional marketing director, or hire marketing director
Hire a fractional marketing leader — or find your next fractional marketing job — anywhere in the UK, from marketing manager to CMO. What each level pays, how engagements work, and where the demand is. Senior marketing leadership at 1–3 days a week, without the full-time hire.
- £700–£1,400 a day, interim director to fractional CMO
- £5k–£10k a month at 4–8 days · The Marketing Centre
- 1–3 days a week
- 3–5 candidates on every shortlist
How a brief runswhat we undertake
- 01Brief30-MINUTE SCOPING CALLDay 0
- 02Shortlist of 3–5VETTED · RATE BENCHMARK · IR35After the brief
- 03InterviewsYOU MEET THE SHORTLISTYour diary
- 04Scoped startFIRST-MONTH OUTCOMES AGREEDYou set the date
- 05Fractional, interim and permanentIR35 POSITION SET OUTOn every brief
Shortlist3–5
In the press
Marketing Week Demand for fractional CMOs ‘driven by expertise over cost’ · 27 May 2026
Marketing Week reports UK research finding that demand for fractional marketing leaders is driven by access to senior expertise more than cost. Scope the role around the expertise you are missing.
15 minutes · video or phone
Book 15 minutes to hire a fractional marketing leader
Tell us the scope and the days a week. We come back with fractional marketing leader candidates, their day rates and availability.
- 0115 minutes, video or phone
- 02We scope the role and the days a week
- 03A shortlist of 3–5 after the call
- 04Fractional, interim and permanent briefs
Pick a day that suits · live availability
Fractional marketing jobs · last 3 months
Live Fractional Marketing jobs
No live Fractional Marketing roles in the last three months. Showing live fractional executive roles instead.
- FractionalSyndicated
Fractional CISO (Contract / Project Based)
Cambridge Spark · United Kingdom
est £1,500/day2 d/wk - FractionalSyndicated
Head of Medical Compliance, Governance & Diligence (Fractional)
CNX Therapeutics Ltd · Greater London
est £1,000/dayGreater London - FractionalSyndicated
Head of Applied Legal – AI Product (Fractional)
Stealth Startup · London
est £1,600/day2 d/wk - FractionalSyndicated
Fractional Product Practice Leader - 9 Month Contract
Tails.com · London
est £1,000/day2 d/wk - FractionalSyndicated
Fractional CPO
Log my Care · City of London
est £3,250/day3 d/wk - FractionalSyndicated
Fractional Finance Directors
PWF Associates Limited · Manchester
est £750/dayManchester - FractionalSyndicated
Fractional legal counsel
Nifina · London
est £750/dayLondon - FractionalExclusive
Fractional COO
Confidential client (Fractional Quest mandate) · London
Rate n/aLondon - FractionalSyndicated
Fractional Financial Controller
MarcoPolo Learning · City of Westminster
est £750/day2 d/wk
Marketing leadership roles: CMO, marketing director, head of marketing and head of growth.
01/ definition
What is fractional marketing leadership?
A fractional marketing leader is an experienced marketer who runs or steers a company’s marketing part-time — typically 1–3 days a week. All levels give you senior marketing capability without the full-time salary, employer NI, pension or long-term commitment.
EXECUTION
Fractional marketing manager
Hands-on execution and coordination — campaigns, channels and content that need running.
STRATEGY + TEAM
Fractional marketing director or head of marketing
Sets the strategy and leads the team — when marketing people exist but direction doesn’t. See head of marketing.
COMMERCIAL ACCOUNTABILITY
Fractional CMO
Board-level marketing strategy and commercial accountability — the senior tier, with its own fractional CMO page.
Our rule of thumb: execution → manager; strategy + team → director; commercial accountability → CMO. The most common hiring mistake on this ladder is buying execution when the gap is strategy.
02/ the craft
Core skills for fractional marketing roles.
Successful fractional marketing leaders combine strategic thinking with hands-on execution capability to drive measurable commercial outcomes. Different levels focus on execution (manager), strategy (director) or commercial accountability (CMO).
ESSENTIAL
The core
Digital marketing strategy · brand positioning · demand generation · content strategy · performance marketing · team leadership.
SPECIALISED
The specialisms
Marketing automation · SEO/SEM · social media strategy · product marketing · ABM · customer acquisition · measurement frameworks.
03/ the ladder
Marketing rates by level and role.
Full-time UK salary benchmarks by level, from manager to CMO — the ladder the fractional levels map onto (Robert Half 2026 Salary Guide). Board-level depth: the fractional CMO page.
04/ comparison
Fractional vs part-time vs permanent.
Choose the right marketing leadership model for your growth stage and budget. Fractional buys strategic seniority by the day; permanent buys a full-time seat plus employer NI, pension and benefits on top.
→ The two terms are often used interchangeably; the difference is a contract with a company versus an employment contract.
→ If the workload is consistently full-time across strategy and execution, permanent may be right. Otherwise fractional buys the seniority for the days you need it.
05/ hiring
When to hire fractional marketing leadership.
Strategic marketing scenarios where experienced leadership drives growth without full-time executive commitment — including the honest one about when a full-time hire is right instead.
Which sounds like you?
You’re doing everything — you need someone to own marketing strategy while you focus on product, sales or operations.
- → Strategy + execution
You have marketing people but no senior strategic leadership — you need someone to set direction and priorities.
- → Leadership gap
Revenue growth requires systematic demand generation, lead nurturing and attribution — beyond ad-hoc marketing.
- → Growth acceleration
Fundraising, rebranding, market positioning or competitive differentiation that needs experienced strategic thinking.
- → Strategic marketing
If you have consistent full-time marketing workload across strategy AND execution, a full-time hire may be right.
- → Honest caveat
06/ rates
What fractional marketing actually pays.
Every band below carries its named, linked source. No source publishes a fractional marketing-manager day rate, so none is shown.
- Interim marketing director£700–£1,000Intelligent People
- Fractional CMO£750–£1,400Connectd 2026
- Contract MD, London£400–£1,000Morgan McKinley 2026
Employer NI on a permanent hire: 15% above the secondary threshold (gov.uk).
07/ economics
Fractional marketing director cost.
Model a fractional marketing director against a full-time one, or what one mandate bills in a year.
£850 a day is within the published band for a UK fractional marketing leader (£700–£1,000, Intelligent People, interim marketing director).
Year-one cost
£78,200
2 d/wk · 46 weeks · day fees, before tax
Fractional costs less in year one£12,475
Book a 15-minute call →Our arithmetic, indicative. Full-time = £90,675: the £79,500 Robert Half 2026 median Marketing Director salary plus employer NI at 15% above the £5,000 threshold. Excludes pension, bonus and a search fee. For CMO-level numbers use the fractional CMO page.
08/ the vp tier
Fractional VP of marketing — the US title, the UK seat
A fractional VP of marketing runs the marketing function part-time: manages the marketers and agencies, owns the plan and the reporting, and makes sure the agreed strategy actually ships. Ads write it as fractional VP marketing or VP of marketing; in US org charts the VP sits between the director and the CMO; in the UK the same seat is usually advertised as marketing director or head of marketing. The ONS occupational classification files it under marketing, sales and advertising directors — people who plan and direct campaigns and set an organisation’s marketing policy, usually reached by progression from marketing manager.
The useful question is the gap, not the title. If the strategy is settled and delivery keeps slipping, you need a manager of marketers: brief the VP tier as a fractional marketing director or a fractional head of marketing. If positioning, the target segment or the budget split is still open, that is board-level work for a fractional CMO — a VP-level hire will deliver the wrong plan efficiently.
Check the scope rather than the label: ask who they have line-managed, which budgets they held, and whether they reported to a CEO or to a CMO. Chartered Marketer status with the CIM is listed in a public directory and can be verified. Whatever the title, our shortlist of 3–5 sets out each candidate’s day rate, availability and IR35 position.
09/ agency or leader
Fractional marketing agency or a fractional leader?
A fractional marketing agency sells senior marketing leadership packaged with its own delivery team — a strategist on retainer plus the specialists who run content, paid media or design. It is a real model, and it suits a business that needs hands as much as a head. The trade-off is independence: the agency’s lead is choosing channels its own team is paid to deliver. An independent fractional leader directs whichever agencies, freelancers or staff the plan needs, and can replace any of them.
Some things stay with you whichever you choose. The marketing done in your name is still your responsibility: the CAP Code must be followed by advertisers, agencies and media alike, and the ICO says that if you pay someone else to send your marketing messages, you are both responsible under PECR — so put the contractor’s duties in a written contract (ICO guidance).
Tax is structured differently too. Buying a genuinely contracted-out service from an agency puts the off-payroll rules on the supplier — HMRC warns against contracts relabelled to avoid them — while engaging a named leader who works through their own company makes you the client, and a medium or large client makes the status determination (HMRC guidance for clients; our IR35 guide). If you want leadership plus delivery without buying both from one firm, see the fractional marketing team model, or map the seats first with the team architect.
10/ vetting
How we vet fractional marketing leaders.
What we undertake on every brief, before a candidate reaches you. Chartered status with the Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) is a useful signal of professional standing. IR35 is checked per engagement: CEST · off-payroll guidance.
- 01
Qualification screen
Verify marketing tenure, sector context and stage fit.
SOURCING - 02
Mandate fit
Match to your situation — stage, board dynamics, timing.
MATCHING - 03
Reference deep-dive
We take references ourselves, from recent past clients — real outcomes, not titles.
VERIFY - 04
Shortlist
3–5 candidates with day rate, availability and IR35 position set out.
SHORTLIST OF 3–5
11/ which level
Fractional marketing manager, director — or CMO?
The single most common hiring mistake on this ladder is buying execution when the gap is strategy.
How to hire fractional marketing leadership by level
A fractional marketing manager is hands-on execution and coordination — the right hire when campaigns, channels and content need running, at a £37.5k–£52.8k full-time equivalent (Robert Half).
A fractional marketing director or head of marketing sets strategy and leads the team — the right hire when marketing people exist but direction doesn’t, at a £55k–£90k full-time equivalent (Robert Half).
A fractional CMO carries board-level commercial accountability at £110k–£184k full-time equivalent — the senior tier, with its own page and its own live board.
Growth-stage businesses whose gap is acquisition specifically should look at fractional head of growth roles instead. In US-style org charts the director tier is the VP of Marketing — to hire a VP of Marketing in the UK, brief the same director-level bench.
Ready to hire a fractional marketing director? The dedicated fractional marketing director jobs page carries that tier’s rates and live roles.
12/ the growth seat
Fractional head of growth responsibilities — what the seat owns
The core fractional head of growth responsibilities are acquisition and the system behind it: choosing which channels to test, setting up the experiments, reading the results honestly and scaling what works. Where a marketing director owns the brand and the plan, a head of growth owns the funnel number — sign-ups, activation, pipeline or revenue, whichever the business runs on — and the testing cadence that moves it.
In practice the fractional head of growth — marketing leadership judged on acquisition rather than brand — sets the growth model, prioritises experiments by expected impact, owns the analytics and attribution needed to trust the results, and works closely with product on onboarding and activation. On a few days a week, most of the execution sits with others: a fractional growth marketing manager, freelancers or an agency running the channels the head of growth chooses.
Brief the seat by the metric, not the title: say which number the hire will own and what should be different at the first review. Data-led growth work still has rules — consent for marketing email and cookies under PECR, set out in the ICO’s direct marketing guidance. For live roles in the growth tier, see fractional head of growth jobs; for a brief, we come back with a shortlist of 3–5, each with day rate, availability and IR35 position set out.
13/ digital and executive
Fractional digital marketing manager or fractional marketing executive?
A fractional digital marketing manager runs the channels day to day — paid search and social, SEO, email, the website and the reporting that ties them together — for a set number of days a week. It is the hands-on end of fractional digital marketing: the right hire when the plan exists and the channels need someone accountable for running them well.
A fractional marketing executive can mean two different seats, so check the brief. In UK job titles a marketing executive is usually an early-career role doing the execution; some businesses use the phrase for a senior leader instead — a fractional director of marketing or a CMO. Title inflation runs both ways, which is why our shortlist sets out each candidate’s scope as well as their day rate, availability and IR35 position.
Some businesses need more than one seat: a leader, a digital manager and specialists — in effect a fractional marketing department. Fractional marketing services — marketing leadership bought by the day rather than on a full-time salary — can be assembled seat by seat or bought from an agency; the agency section above sets out the trade-off, and the fractional marketing team page covers the bundled model.
14/ the team model
What is a fractional marketing team?
A fractional marketing team is a fractional leader plus a flexible bench of specialists — demand and performance, content, brand — a whole marketing function on a fraction of the full-time cost.
The fractional leader provides strategy and coordination; specialists execute specific channels or campaigns as needed. It is the model to compare against a single mid-level permanent hire: broader capability, senior direction, and the ability to scale each specialism up or down by the month. See fractional marketing team.
The team architect maps which seats your stage actually needs before you buy any of them.
15/ questions
Fractional marketing questions, answered.
The questions people ask about fractional marketing jobs — each answer also ships as FAQPage structured data.
Book 15 minutes · shortlist of 3–5
Bring the brief. We architect the team.
Manager to CMO, matched to your stage. Shortlist with day rate, availability and IR35 position set out.
For hiring companies
Book a discovery call or submit a brief; we come back with a shortlist of 3–5.
For fractional marketers
Browse live marketing leadership roles, or contact us to register for job alerts.
