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Senior marketing strategy. Full execution team. ~30% the cost of a full-time hire.
Fractional CMO services give you senior marketing leadership backed by a full execution team — strategy AND the people who make it happen. For $2-20M businesses that have outgrown freelancers but can't justify a $250K VP of Marketing salary plus the team they'd need to build beneath them. We're the Goldilocks option between hiring in-house and cobbling agencies together.
“You don't need a $250K VP of Marketing. You also can't keep cobbling together freelancers. There's a third path — and it's the one that compounds.”
— Steve Burk, ABMG Co-Founder
If you're a $2-20M business, you've probably hit the same wall every successful operator hits: your marketing has outgrown what one person can do, but you can't justify $250K + benefits + equity for a full-time VP of Marketing. So you tried agencies. Maybe two. Maybe four. They executed tactics but never owned the strategy. You kept ending up as the unpaid marketing director — fielding their questions, telling them what to prioritize, deciding what to spend where.
A fractional CMO solves this by giving you the senior strategist AND the execution team in one engagement. They own the function. You stop being the marketing manager. That shift — from operating marketing to running your business while marketing runs itself — is what unlocks the next stage of growth.
A senior strategist who owns your marketing function — not a junior account manager fielding tickets
Quarterly strategy + monthly tactical planning, anchored in revenue goals, not vanity metrics
Full execution team — paid ads, SEO, content, email, brand, web, CRM — under one roof
Weekly operating cadence: standups, sprints, and a single source of truth dashboard
Conversion tracking + attribution wired end-to-end so you know what's actually working
Direct access to founder-level decision-making, not a layer of project managers
Month-to-month engagement after the initial 90-day foundation (no 12-month contracts)
Every engagement starts with the same 90-day foundation, then adapts based on what the data shows.
Pressure-test the current state. Audit existing campaigns, tracking, CRM, conversion attribution, content, brand. Identify what's broken, what's underperforming, and what's working. Build the strategic plan + KPIs + dashboards. Wire up tracking end-to-end (Meta CAPI + Google Enhanced Conversions + GA4 + Sentry). Lock in priorities for the first 90 days.
Campaigns go live. Content production starts. Email sequences activate. Brand and web updates ship. Weekly standups keep the team aligned. We're deliberately conservative early — the goal is to establish baselines, not throw spaghetti at the wall.
The data shows what's actually moving revenue. We double down on the winners, kill the losers, and start the compounding cycle. By the end of month 3, you have a marketing system, not a list of tactics. By month 4-6, the system compounds without requiring constant intervention.
Service business pricing (canonical anchor; adjusted for automotive, retail, and professional services):
All tiers include the same 90-day foundation period. After 90 days, engagement is month-to-month.
Apex Roofing came to us with a marketing system that was producing 21 conversions per 90-day period at $912 per lead. Their previous setup: a paid ads agency running campaigns with broken conversion tracking, a website that didn't render properly on mobile, and zero attribution from ad click to closed job. They were spending real money and couldn't tell what was working.
Three months under the fractional CMO model: full audit + tracking rebuild in month 1, campaign relaunch + new landing pages + Google Enhanced Conversions wired end-to-end in month 2, optimization + retargeting in month 3.
Apex Roofing 90-day result: 21 → 196 conversions (9X), $912 → $197 per lead (-78%), 15.62% CTR (5X industry benchmark). Read the full case study →
That's not a media-buying story. It's an integration story — strategy, infrastructure, and execution running as one system rather than three disconnected vendors. That's the fractional CMO model in practice.
30-50% lower total cost than hiring a full-time CMO + execution team
Strategy and execution run by the same team, eliminating the 'agency manager' tax on your calendar
Month-to-month flexibility after 90-day foundation — no 12-month lock-ins
Direct attribution from ad click to closed deal so you know which channels actually drive revenue
These services compound when paired together.
Learn more about how fractional cmo services drives growth.
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing leader who operates as a part-time executive across multiple companies — providing the strategic thinking of a full-time Chief Marketing Officer without the full-time payroll commitment. Engagements typically run 10-20 hours per month at $5,000-$15,000 monthly, giving growing companies access to C-suite caliber marketing strategy at a fraction of the $300K-$500K total compensation of a full-time hire. The ABMG model layers execution onto the fractional leadership, so you get strategy and implementation under one roof.
Most agencies use the terms interchangeably. Functionally: a fractional CMO is typically strategy-only, charging $5K-$15K/month for 10-20 hours of planning and oversight — you still need to hire agencies or contractors to execute. An outsourced CMO bundles strategy AND execution into one engagement, typically $3K-$8K/month for both. The ABMG model is the latter: one team, one invoice, one accountable owner for results.
ABMG fractional CMO engagements typically run $3,500-$6,500/month for service businesses depending on scope, channels, and market complexity. That covers both the strategic leadership AND the execution team — paid ads, SEO, content, email, brand, web. Compare to a full-time hire: $200K-$350K base salary + 25-30% benefits + execution team ($200K-$400K) = $500K-$900K/year. Outsourced fractional CMO total cost is typically 10-20% of that.
Best fit: $2-20M businesses that have outgrown freelancers or a junior in-house marketer, are spending $5K+/month on marketing without clear attribution, or have plateaued on a single channel and need someone to see the full picture. Not a fit: pre-revenue startups (you need product-market fit first), $20M+ companies that need a full-time executive, or businesses unwilling to invest in the 90-day foundation period.
Initial 90-day foundation period is the minimum — audit, strategy, infrastructure setup, and first campaign launches all take that long to do well. After 90 days, the engagement is month-to-month. If we're not delivering value, you cancel. 90% client retention rate after 9 years suggests the model holds.
A traditional agency executes specific channels. They run your Google Ads, or your SEO, or your social. They don't make strategic calls across channels. A fractional CMO owns the marketing function: they decide which channels matter, they reallocate budget when one is underperforming, and they connect the dots from awareness through closed deal. The agency reports on impressions. The fractional CMO reports on revenue.
You can, but it rarely works well. The fractional CMO sets strategy that the agencies don't fully buy into or implement consistently. You end up project-managing the misalignment yourself. The model that works is bundled: one team owning strategy AND execution. That's the path ABMG is built around.
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