Fractional marketing gives a practice a senior marketing decision maker for a few days a month instead of a full-time salary, and the thing you are buying is direction rather than delivery. Someone decides what the practice should be known for, which services get promoted, what the website has to say and in what order the work happens. The execution then follows, either from your own staff, from suppliers, or from the fractional person’s own hands.
Practices usually arrive at this after buying the wrong thing twice. The first purchase is a website, which produces a nicer version of the same invisibility. The second is an agency retainer, which produces activity: posts, reports, a monthly call. Neither answers the question underneath, which is what the practice is for and who it is trying to reach.
Key takeaways
- Fractional marketing buys decisions and priorities, where an agency retainer buys execution.
- Size the question on recurring fees and partner count, not headcount, which tells you almost nothing about a practice.
- Expect a few days a month, not a few hours, or the person never gets far enough inside the firm to be useful.
- Positioning comes first in almost every engagement, because nothing downstream works until the practice has chosen who it is for.
- The measure at 90 days is clarity and a working pipeline of activity, not enquiry volume.
- A good arrangement is designed to end, by handing over to someone you hire.
The 30 minute strategy call is the first session of this work rather than a sales call for it. We use the thirty minutes to establish which service line carries your margin, which client type you should be visible to, and whether what your practice is short of is direction or hands. Where the answer is direction, our SEO consultancy and mentoring is the engagement. Where it is hands, the SEO for accountants programme is, and its figures and three ways in are published on that page rather than saved for a call. Book the thirty minutes and we will tell you which one you need, including when it is neither.
What is fractional marketing for an accountancy practice?
Fractional marketing is a senior marketing role bought by the day rather than by the year, with the same responsibilities a marketing director would hold and a fraction of the time. The person works inside the practice rather than beside it. They run a standing marketing session with the partners, work from anonymised fee and margin analysis by service line, know which client types the firm wants more of, and own the decisions about how the practice presents itself.
The boundary matters and is worth writing down. A fractional marketer does not sit in the partners’ own meeting, where drawings, staffing, recovery disputes and client matters are discussed, and does not see client level data. They see which work carries the margin, at service line level, under a non-disclosure agreement signed before anything is shared.
The word fractional describes the time, not the seniority. A fractional marketing director is meant to be someone who has run the function before, brought in for two or three days a month, with authority to decide. An arrangement that buys junior time by the day is outsourced execution wearing a different label.
For an accountancy practice the role has a particular shape, because most of the decisions are commercial rather than creative. Which service lines carry the margin, which client types the firm actually wants, what the firm will stop doing, and how that translates into what the website says. A practice principal recognises this work. It is the same thinking they do for clients, applied to their own firm, and it is the reason so many principals put it off.
How does fractional marketing differ from an agency retainer?
An agency retainer buys a defined set of outputs each month and a fractional arrangement buys judgement about what those outputs should be. The retainer answers “what shall we make”, and it answers it within whatever scope was signed. The fractional role answers “what should this practice do”, which includes the option of doing less.
The practical difference appears when something is not working. An agency operating to a scope will keep producing the agreed outputs, because that is the agreement, and will report on them accurately. A fractional director will stop the work, say so in the partner meeting, and propose something different, because they carry responsibility for the outcome rather than the deliverable.
The cost difference runs in both directions. A retainer is usually cheaper per month and produces visible volume. A fractional day rate buys fewer artefacts and more decisions. Practices that already know what they want built are better served by the retainer, and our guide to building a B2B marketing system for an accountancy firm sets out what that system contains so you can judge which side of the line you sit on.
The two are not exclusive. The common arrangement in practices of any size is a fractional person setting direction and an agency or freelancer delivering against it, with the fractional person managing the supplier. That is usually the cheapest competent structure available to a practice below the point where a hire pays for itself.
How does it differ from hiring a marketing manager in-house?
A hire gives you five days a week of one person’s capability and a fractional arrangement gives you two days a month of a more experienced one. The trade is breadth of time against depth of judgement, and the right answer depends on whether your practice currently lacks hands or lacks direction.
Most practices below the hiring threshold lack direction rather than hands. They have partners who could write, a website someone can update, and no agreed answer to what the firm is for. Hiring a marketing manager into that vacuum is how firms end up employing a capable person who spends two years producing activity nobody can evaluate, because nobody set the target.
The cost comparison is less favourable to the hire than principals expect once it is done properly. A salary carries employer national insurance, pension contributions, holiday, equipment, recruitment cost and the management time of whichever partner supervises. It also carries risk, because a single marketing hire in a firm with no marketing function has nobody to learn from and a high failure rate.
The argument for hiring is volume and continuity. A practice running several service lines, a content programme and two or three channels genuinely needs someone present daily, and at that point the fractional person’s job becomes hiring them and handing over.
What does a fractional engagement actually cover, month to month?
A typical month contains one working session with the partners, a review of what happened since, decisions about what changes, and direct work on whatever is the current binding constraint. The session is the centre of it. Everything else is preparation for that conversation or execution of what it decided.
The first quarter is disproportionately positioning. What the practice is for, which client types it wants, what it will decline, and what that means for the services page, the fee structure and the language. Practices find this uncomfortable, because choosing a client type feels like turning work away. Close to half the practice websites in our own sample declined to choose at all, which is why the generic services page is the default rather than the exception.
After the first quarter the month tends to settle into a rhythm: one substantial piece of work in progress, one channel being improved, one measurement being watched, and the supplier relationships being managed. A fractional director who has three things running is doing it correctly. One who has eleven is producing a report rather than a change.
Between sessions the practice should expect responsiveness rather than presence. A question answered the same day, a draft reviewed, a supplier call taken. The arrangement fails when the fractional person becomes a monthly visitor who arrives, presents and leaves.
At what size does a practice start to need this?
Size the question on recurring fee income and partner count rather than headcount, because headcount is the least informative number a practice has. The band where a fractional arrangement earns its fee usually starts somewhere above three quarters of a million in recurring fees with two or more partners, and closes when the volume of execution work justifies a permanent hire. Headcount tracks that loosely and is worth using only as a secondary check.
Staff numbers mislead in both directions. An eleven person firm might be two fee earning partners and nine support, or four partners carrying full books. A thirty person practice can bill less than a twelve person one. Practices are valued on recurring fees, fees per partner and partner dependence, which is how a broker prices them and how the marketing question should be sized too.
The real trigger is whether the practice has more marketing decisions than the partners have attention. A firm launching a specialism, rebranding, merging or losing a referral source has crossed that line regardless of its size, and a firm running steadily on referral may not have.
There are roughly 30,000 accountancy and audit firms in the UK and the great majority are small, which is precisely why this band exists. It is too big to run on the principal’s spare evenings and too small to carry a marketing director’s salary, and nothing in the market has been built for it.
How is fractional marketing priced for a practice?
Pricing is almost always a monthly fee for a committed number of days, with the day rate reflecting seniority rather than the practice’s size. Two days a month is the common entry point and three is where most engagements settle once the work is real. Some arrangements are priced as a retainer with a scope instead, which is closer to consultancy and suits a practice with a defined project.
Ask what the fee buys when the days run out, because that is where arrangements sour. A fractional person who stops at the contracted day is behaving reasonably and will still feel absent to a practice with a problem on day nine. Agree in advance what happens to an urgent question outside the days.
Watch for the arrangement priced per month with no stated time commitment. It is the structure most likely to drift into a supervisory relationship where the practice pays for availability and receives correspondence.
What should the first 90 days produce?
The first 90 days should produce a decision about who the practice is for, a written plan with an order of work, and one thing actually shipped. Clarity alone is not enough, because a practice that has bought three months of thinking and no output will not renew, and correctly so.
Expect the shipped item to be unglamorous. A properly written page for the service the firm most wants to sell is the usual candidate, because so few practices have one. Our own self published audit of 494 practice websites drawn from ACCA and ICAEW listings, deposited under DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22280523 with its method and fault definitions in full, found that 344 of them, 69.6%, carried no dedicated page for the service they most wanted to sell. We sell the work that closes that gap, so read the finding with that interest declared, and note the study measured websites rather than outcomes.
Do not expect enquiry volume at 90 days. Search takes longer than that in a competitive service market, referral programmes take longer, and a practice measuring a fractional arrangement on enquiries in the first quarter will cancel something that was working. The 90 day measures are clarity, a plan being executed rather than discussed, and the first artefact live.
How do you measure whether it is working?
Measure the decisions taken and the work shipped in the first two quarters, then move to pipeline measures from the third. The reason for the sequence is that positioning work produces no measurable output for months and then produces most of the result, so an early metric will always say it is failing.
Four measures carry most of it: whether the practice can now state who it is for in one sentence, whether the planned work is actually shipping on the agreed cadence, whether enquiries are arriving from sources other than referral, and whether the enquiries arriving are the type the practice wanted. The fourth is the one that matters most and gets tracked least.
Track enquiry quality by writing down, at the point of enquiry, which service it was about and how the enquirer found you. Six months of that beats any dashboard, and most practices have never done it. Where the answer turns out to be that search is bringing almost nothing, the constraint is visibility rather than direction, and that is the work our SEO for accountants programme does: the pages, the technical foundation and the local presence a chosen specialism needs before anyone can find it. Where your website is receiving visitors and producing nothing, the problem is usually the page rather than the traffic, and our walkthrough of what stops an accountancy website turning visitors into enquiries covers the fixes in order.
What goes wrong when a practice buys delivery instead of direction?
A practice that buys delivery without direction gets competent execution of the wrong thing, and it usually takes a year to notice because the reports look fine. Posts are published, the blog grows, the rankings report shows movement on terms nobody searches with buying intent, and the enquiry count does not change.
The mechanism is simple. Execution suppliers are scoped to produce outputs, so they produce outputs. Without someone deciding what the practice should be known for, the outputs default to whatever is generic enough to be safe, which is the same content every other firm publishes. Generic content competes with every other firm in the country. Specific content competes with the handful who share your specialism.
This is the strongest argument for the fractional model in accountancy specifically. The decision everything downstream depends on is a commercial one about which clients the firm wants, and no supplier can make it for you. Our guide to finding an accountancy niche with real demand and no incumbent shows how that decision gets made from evidence rather than instinct.
Who is fractional marketing wrong for?
It is wrong for a practice with no capacity to take on more clients, because the first thing a working marketing function does is increase enquiries into a firm that cannot serve them. Fix the capacity or the intake first, and the marketing spend will go further afterwards.
It is harder, though not hopeless, in a practice where the partners want different firms, and the reason is arithmetic rather than stubbornness. Marketing spend comes out of the shared profit pool and is borne by every partner through the profit sharing ratio, while a specialism benefits the books of the partners who already work in it. Partners resisting a niche are usually protecting their own clients under an agreement that gives them a vote, which is a rational position rather than an obstructive one.
Where that is the situation, the first piece of work is a decision process rather than a decision: agreed criteria, a ring fenced budget, a trial scope and a review date, so no partner is funding a repositioning that pays somebody else. Buy that and the rest follows. Skip it and the arrangement produces six months of circular meetings.
It needs care in a practice planning to sell within about eighteen months, and the usual advice to stop marketing is too blunt. A buyer prices recurring fee income, client retention, client concentration and how far the fees depend on the outgoing principal, so work that brings in clients attached to the firm rather than to you lifts the multiple directly. Spend that will not pay back before completion is the part to cut. It is wrong, straightforwardly, for a firm that needs pages written and knows which ones, because that is delivery and a supplier does it more cheaply. Where you want the strategy without the implementation, our SEO consultancy and mentoring is built for exactly that, doing the thinking and leaving the execution with your own team.
Why accountancy practices in particular buy this
Accountancy practices buy fractional marketing more readily than most professional service firms because the model is one they already sell. A practice offering virtual finance director work is selling senior financial judgement by the day to companies too small for a full-time finance director. The marketing version is the same structure pointed at a different function, and principals grasp it immediately.
The second reason is that the buying decision in accountancy is slow and trust-led, which punishes generic marketing more than it punishes low volume. A firm that publishes nothing and is well referred survives. A firm that publishes generic content competes with every other firm publishing generic content and gets nothing from it. Choosing a position is worth more in this sector than activity is.
The same pattern shows up across the professional service sectors we work in. Law firms, financial advisers and healthcare providers all face a market where the buyer cannot evaluate the service before buying and substitutes trust signals for judgement. Letting agents and ecommerce brands sit differently, because their buyers compare on visible terms, which makes volume and channel work pay sooner. Accountancy sits firmly in the first group, which is why positioning keeps arriving first in every engagement.
Two practices, and what the arrangement changed
Both of these are composites, drawn from arrangements we have run or replaced. Neither is offered as a case study, because neither carries a measured before and after.
A six partner firm in the South West had spent about 2,400 pounds a month for fourteen months on a retainer producing four blog posts and a monthly report, with enquiries from search staying in low single figures throughout. A fractional arrangement at three days a month replaced it. The first quarter went on a decision process rather than a decision: the partners agreed that a specialism would be trialled on a ring fenced budget for twelve months, reviewed against enquiry quality rather than volume, and that no partner’s book would be deprioritised while the trial ran. Only then did they choose owner managed manufacturing companies, where two partners already held most of the experience. That sequence is the reason it held.
A fourteen person practice in the North West hired a marketing manager and lost them within a year, having given them no brief beyond growing the firm. The second attempt used two fractional days a month for six months to set direction and write the plan, then recruited into it. The same salary bought a person with a defined target, a supplier already managed, and a partner who knew what to ask for in a review. The practice has kept that hire three years.
Frequently asked questions
How many days a month does a fractional marketing arrangement need?
Two days a month is the practical minimum and three is where most settle. Below two, the person never gets far enough inside the practice to make decisions with confidence and the arrangement drifts into advice. Above four, a practice is usually better off recruiting, because the cost gap closes and daily presence starts to matter more than seniority.
Is fractional marketing the same as a marketing consultant?
A consultant is engaged for a defined piece of work and leaves when it is delivered, where a fractional director holds the function continuously and carries responsibility for the outcome. The consultant writes the strategy. The fractional person writes it, then lives with the consequences and changes it when it is wrong. Some engagements begin as one and become the other.
Can a fractional marketer also do the work?
Some do and most should not, because a senior day rate spent writing pages is expensive delivery. The better structure is a fractional person setting direction and managing cheaper execution, whether that is your own staff, a freelancer or an agency. Where the practice is very small, a hybrid is sometimes the only affordable option.
What should we have ready before the first session?
Have your recovery and margin by service line to hand, a view of which client types you want more of, and an account of what you have already tried and what it cost. Most practices already run this monthly for the partnership, so it is usually a question of pointing an existing report at a different question rather than producing anything new. Nothing leaves the building before a non-disclosure agreement is signed.
How do we know when to stop and hire instead?
Stop when the volume of execution work needs daily attention and the direction is settled, which usually coincides with the practice running more than three channels properly rather than with any particular headcount. A good fractional arrangement will raise this before you do, and will help write the job description.
Work out which one your practice is short of
Thirty minutes on which service line carries your margin, which client type you should be visible to, and whether what you need is direction, delivery or neither.
See the SEO for accountants programmeOr book the 30 minute strategy callWhere to start
Answer one question before you buy anything: does your practice lack hands, or does it lack direction. A firm that knows exactly what it wants published and cannot get it published needs delivery, and the cheapest competent route is a supplier. A firm that cannot say in one sentence who it is for needs direction first, and buying delivery will waste a year.
One of our two directors is an ACCA qualified accountant and the other has spent thirty years in finance and still works as a fractional finance director, which is why a conversation here starts with margin by service line rather than with a logo. We have sold the fractional model from the inside, which is also why the non-disclosure agreement comes before the data and not after it. True SEO Consultants Ltd works from Startup Stiwdio, University of South Wales, 86-88 Adam Street, Cardiff, CF24 2FN, with practices across the UK and clients worldwide through a fully remote digital onboarding and delivery process.
Book your 30 minute strategy call. Bring nothing but the question of whether your practice is short of direction or short of hands, and we will work the rest out on the call.
