Fractional CMO North West
Senior marketing leadership for businesses facing growth, change or marketing underperformance
I’m Simon Larkin CFCIM, a Chartered Marketer and Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and an experienced senior marketing leader based in Southport. Through Hiddn Marketing, I provide Fractional CMO support to founders, CEOs, boards and leadership teams across Manchester, Liverpool, Preston, Cheshire, Lancashire, Merseyside and the wider North West.
I typically work with established businesses that have reached the point where marketing has become too important, too complex or too expensive to operate without experienced leadership, but where recruiting a permanent Chief Marketing Officer or Marketing Director may not yet make commercial sense. The business may already have a marketing team, several agencies, significant digital activity and substantial investment in technology and campaigns, yet still lack somebody at senior level who can connect all of those moving parts to the wider commercial objectives.
That is the role I provide. I work as part of the leadership of the business, bringing senior marketing experience, independent challenge and commercial accountability without the commitment and cost associated with another full-time executive appointment.
When marketing activity is high but confidence is low
One of the most common situations I encounter is not a business doing too little marketing. Quite often, it is doing a great deal. There may be PPC campaigns running, SEO retainers in place, content being produced, social channels being managed, websites being developed, CRM systems collecting data and marketing teams working hard across several priorities at once. Despite all that activity, the leadership team may still struggle to explain which parts of marketing are genuinely contributing to growth, whether investment is being allocated effectively or what should happen next.
This is usually where the problem becomes less about individual marketing channels and more about leadership. Without somebody looking across the whole function, activity gradually becomes fragmented. Agencies optimise the parts they have been appointed to manage; internal teams respond to competing requests from different stakeholders; and new initiatives are added without sufficient consideration of what should stop. Marketing becomes increasingly busy while the relationship between activity, investment and commercial outcome becomes increasingly difficult to see.
A Fractional CMO provides the senior-level oversight required to bring those elements back together. The objective is not simply to create another marketing plan. It is to establish what the business is trying to achieve, understand the role marketing should play in achieving it, identify the constraints preventing performance and create the structure, priorities and accountability required to move forward.
What is a Fractional CMO?
A Fractional CMO is an experienced Chief Marketing Officer or Marketing Director who works with a business on a part-time, retained or defined basis rather than joining as a traditional full-time employee. The arrangement gives a business access to senior marketing leadership at the level it actually needs, whether that means several days each month, a more intensive period of transformation or ongoing strategic oversight alongside an existing internal team.
The important distinction is that a Fractional CMO does not simply provide another marketing service. Individual specialists may be responsible for SEO, PPC, content, CRM, design, web development, PR or social media, but somebody still needs to decide how those activities fit together, whether they support the commercial strategy and where money, time and attention should be directed. That is fundamentally a leadership responsibility.
My role therefore extends beyond marketing channels. I look at the commercial objectives of the business, revenue model, customer acquisition, sales performance, positioning, customer journey, CRM, marketing technology, team capability, external suppliers, reporting and the expectations placed on marketing by the wider leadership team. Only when those elements are understood properly does it make sense to decide what the marketing strategy should actually contain.
When does a business need a Fractional CMO?
There is rarely one specific moment when a business suddenly needs a Fractional CMO. More often, several issues begin appearing at the same time. Marketing investment grows, the number of channels increases, more people become involved in decision-making and the founder or CEO gradually finds themselves spending more time trying to understand or manage marketing than they should.
In some businesses, there is already a capable marketing team but nobody sufficiently senior to lead it. The team may be strong operationally, yet lack somebody who can set priorities, challenge the wider business, represent marketing at board level and make difficult decisions about investment. Without that leadership, good marketers can end up operating as an internal service department, reacting to requests rather than working towards a clearly agreed commercial strategy.
In other organisations, the opposite problem exists. Marketing has accumulated agencies, freelancers, systems and suppliers over several years, with each responsible for a particular piece of the puzzle. Individually they may be doing perfectly reasonable work, but nobody has responsibility for the complete picture. The result is often duplicated activity, inconsistent reporting, competing objectives and a growing sense within the leadership team that marketing costs a great deal without providing enough certainty around the return.
A Fractional CMO can also become particularly valuable when a business is entering a new phase. Rapid growth, investment, restructuring, acquisition, international expansion, a new product, a change of leadership or a significant repositioning can all alter what the organisation requires from marketing. The strategy, structure and capability that got the business to its current size are not necessarily what it will need to reach the next one.
Marketing problems are not always marketing problems
One of the most important responsibilities of senior marketing leadership is being willing to establish whether the problem the business has identified is actually a marketing problem at all.
I have been brought into businesses because they believed they had a revenue problem and the natural conclusion was that marketing or sales needed fixing. Once you start looking properly at the commercial model, however, the issue can turn out to be somewhere quite different. Lead volumes may be perfectly adequate, but sales conversion is poor. Customer acquisition may be strong, but retention is undermining growth. Marketing may be generating demand that operations simply cannot fulfil, or pricing, product, proposition or financial constraints may be making growth considerably harder than the leadership team originally realised.
In those situations, increasing marketing activity can make the problem worse rather than better. Driving more leads into an ineffective sales process wastes budget. Increasing customer acquisition when retention is poor simply increases the speed at which customers leave. Generating more demand than the operational side of the business can handle can damage both margin and reputation.
That is why I approach marketing as part of the wider commercial system rather than as an isolated department. My job is not to arrive determined to prove that the answer is more marketing. It is to understand what is preventing the business from achieving the outcome it wants and establish what marketing can genuinely influence.
Sometimes that results in a significant marketing transformation. Sometimes only a relatively small number of changes are required. Occasionally, the most valuable conclusion is that marketing is performing reasonably well and attention needs to be directed elsewhere. All three are useful answers.
What I do as a Fractional CMO
Every Fractional CMO engagement begins from a different starting point, so I do not arrive with a pre-written playbook and try to force the business into it. My first priority is to understand the organisation properly: how it makes money, where its customers come from, what the leadership team expects marketing to achieve, how sales and marketing interact, what information is available and where performance is currently being constrained.
From there, I can provide the level of leadership the business actually requires. That may involve creating a new marketing strategy, restructuring an existing function, leading the internal marketing team, reviewing agencies and suppliers, improving reporting, rebuilding CRM and customer journeys, repositioning the brand or establishing a much clearer relationship between marketing investment and revenue.
A significant part of the role is also prioritisation. Most businesses have considerably more marketing opportunities than they have time or budget to pursue. Good marketing leadership therefore involves deciding what not to do as much as deciding what should happen next. By giving teams clearer objectives and reducing competing priorities, marketing usually becomes more effective without necessarily becoming larger.
Marketing strategy and commercial alignment
Marketing strategy should begin with the objectives of the business, not with a list of channels. I work with the leadership team to understand the commercial priorities, the markets and customers that matter most, the growth assumptions behind the plan and what marketing can realistically be expected to influence.
From that foundation, we can establish clear priorities for acquisition, retention, positioning, customer experience, digital performance and brand development. This creates a strategy that can be explained throughout the organisation and, importantly, measured against outcomes that the wider business actually understands.
Marketing leadership and team development
A capable marketing team can often achieve considerably more when it has experienced senior leadership above it. I can provide that leadership without requiring the business to make an immediate permanent CMO or Marketing Director appointment.
That may involve setting priorities, developing team members, establishing clearer responsibilities, improving processes and giving marketers the authority and support they need to operate effectively. It also means representing the function properly at senior leadership level, so marketing is involved in the commercial decisions that affect its ability to perform rather than simply being asked to execute decisions after they have already been made.
Marketing measurement and commercial reporting
Marketing reporting can easily become dominated by the numbers that platforms make easiest to measure: impressions, clicks, traffic, reach, engagement and leads. Those metrics can be useful, but on their own they rarely tell a leadership team whether marketing is contributing enough commercial value.
I prefer marketing numbers that can be traced back towards revenue. That means understanding lead quality, acquisition cost, conversion, customer value, source, pipeline and the relationship between marketing investment and commercial outcome. The exact metrics will vary depending on the business model, but the objective is always the same: giving leadership information that helps them make better decisions rather than simply providing a larger monthly report.
This often requires improvements beyond the marketing dashboard itself. CRM structure, attribution, sales processes, analytics and data quality can all determine whether the business can genuinely understand where growth is coming from.
CRM, data and customer journeys
CRM is frequently treated as a sales database when it should be one of the most important commercial systems within the organisation. If customer data is fragmented, definitions differ between departments or opportunities cannot be traced back to their original source, both marketing and leadership are forced to make decisions using an incomplete picture.
I work across marketing, sales and technology to improve how customer information moves through the organisation, how leads are classified, where automation can improve the customer journey and what information should be available at each stage. The aim is not simply to implement another piece of software. It is to create a system that makes the business easier to understand and the customer journey easier to improve.
Agency and supplier management
Agencies can provide excellent specialist capability, but the business still needs somebody on its own side of the table who understands enough to challenge recommendations, evaluate performance and decide whether the work being commissioned supports the wider strategy.
As a Fractional CMO, I can take responsibility for those relationships, ensuring that PPC, SEO, content, web, creative, PR and other suppliers are working towards agreed business objectives rather than optimising their own individual channels in isolation. Where an agency is doing good work, my role is to help it perform even better by providing clearer strategic direction. Where it is not delivering enough value, I am comfortable challenging the relationship and identifying alternatives.
A Fractional CMO is not another marketing agency
A marketing agency and a Fractional CMO perform fundamentally different roles. An agency is usually appointed to deliver a specific capability or set of activities. A Fractional CMO sits within the business and is responsible for deciding what marketing should be doing in the first place.
That independence matters. I have no incentive to recommend additional PPC spend because I manage the PPC budget, to recommend a new website because I sell websites or to increase content production because my commercial model depends on producing more content. My responsibility is to the business and the outcome it is trying to achieve.
That may mean working closely with existing agencies and giving them better direction. It may mean consolidating suppliers, moving capability in-house or identifying areas where external expertise is required. The right answer depends on the organisation, but the decision should be made from the perspective of the business rather than from the perspective of the supplier.
Strategic enough for the boardroom, practical enough to investigate the detail
There can be a perception that senior marketing leadership means spending most of the time in meetings, producing strategy documents and delegating the practical work to other people. I do not work that way.
My background spans marketing strategy, brand, digital, CRM, analytics, websites, SEO, PPC, automation, conversion, marketing technology and customer journeys. That means I am comfortable discussing business strategy with a board or leadership team, but equally comfortable going into the underlying data when something does not make sense.
If the CRM is preventing the business from understanding where revenue is coming from, I can get into the CRM. If website conversion looks wrong, I can investigate the customer journey and analytics. If an agency report does not withstand scrutiny, I can challenge it. If the marketing technology stack has become unnecessarily complicated, I can understand where the problem sits.
That combination is particularly useful in fractional leadership because businesses often need more than somebody who can describe what good marketing should look like. They need somebody capable of understanding why the current system is not producing it.
Fractional CMO support across Manchester, Liverpool and the North West
Hiddn Marketing is based in Southport, placing me within easy reach of businesses across Merseyside, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Cheshire. I work with businesses throughout the North West using a combination of on-site and remote support, with the balance determined by the organisation, team and nature of the engagement.
For leadership meetings, strategic workshops, team development, major planning sessions and periods of significant organisational change, there is still considerable value in being physically in the room. Being based in the North West means I can provide that level of involvement to businesses in Manchester, Liverpool, Southport, Preston, Warrington, Chester and surrounding areas without fractional leadership having to become a purely remote consultancy relationship.
At the same time, not every marketing decision requires another meeting. Remote working allows the day-to-day relationship to remain efficient, with on-site involvement used where it adds genuine value. The result is a flexible model that can operate as part of the organisation without creating unnecessary overhead.
Fractional CMO Manchester
Manchester and the wider Greater Manchester region have a large and diverse business community spanning technology, financial services, professional services, property, e-commerce, manufacturing and rapidly growing owner-managed businesses. Many reach a stage where the marketing requirement has become more sophisticated than a standalone manager or collection of agencies can comfortably lead, but a permanent executive appointment still feels premature.
For businesses in Manchester, I can provide Fractional CMO and fractional Marketing Director support combining strategic leadership with practical oversight of teams, agencies, digital infrastructure and commercial performance. My Southport base allows me to combine regular on-site involvement in Manchester with remote leadership between meetings, rather than operating as a distant consultant.
Fractional CMO Liverpool and Merseyside
I also provide Fractional CMO support to businesses across Liverpool and Merseyside. Being based locally means I understand the North West business environment and can work directly with leadership teams that want a senior marketer who can become genuinely involved in the organisation rather than simply providing occasional external advice.
Whether the requirement is to build a marketing function, improve commercial reporting, bring several agencies under one strategy, support a marketing team that lacks senior leadership or help a founder step away from day-to-day marketing decisions, the engagement can be structured around the level of support the business genuinely requires.
More than 20 years of senior marketing experience
I have spent more than two decades working across marketing leadership, digital transformation, brand, growth, communications and commercial strategy. My experience spans financial services, technology, property and investment, ecommerce, professional services, hospitality and other complex and regulated environments, giving me exposure to very different customers, commercial models and organisational challenges.
Throughout that time I have built and transformed marketing functions, managed multi-disciplinary teams, brought external capabilities in-house, rebuilt CRM and reporting infrastructure, repositioned brands, overseen complex websites and digital ecosystems and worked alongside sales, finance, operations, legal and executive leadership.
I have also worked inside businesses during periods where the challenge extends considerably beyond normal marketing activity, including rapid growth, restructuring, reputational pressure, financial instability and significant organisational change. Those situations reinforce a principle that now sits at the centre of how I work: marketing needs to understand the business it serves, because commercial reality does not stop at the boundary of the marketing department.
What should change when fractional marketing leadership is working?
The objective of appointing a Fractional CMO should not simply be to produce more marketing activity. In many cases, the business already has enough activity. The more important change is that marketing becomes easier to understand, easier to manage and more closely connected to the commercial objectives of the organisation.
Leadership should have greater confidence in what marketing is trying to achieve, where budget is being invested and why. The marketing team should understand its priorities and have clearer ownership of outcomes rather than simply responding to requests. Sales and marketing should work from shared definitions and better information, while agencies and suppliers should understand their role within a wider strategy.
Over time, the organisation should also become less dependent on individual opinions. Decisions can be informed by data, commercial priorities and an agreed strategy rather than by whoever happens to have the strongest view in the room.
That is when marketing starts behaving like a commercial function rather than a collection of promotional activities.
Fractional CMO, marketing review or transformation project?
Not every business needs the same type of engagement, and I do not believe in forcing every situation into a monthly Fractional CMO retainer.
For organisations that require ongoing senior marketing leadership, I can work as an embedded Fractional CMO, typically alongside the leadership team and existing internal or external marketing resources. Fractional CMO engagements start from £2,500 per month, with the level of involvement shaped around the complexity of the business and the support required.
For businesses that know something is wrong but are not yet certain what needs to change, a Marketing Function Review can provide a better starting point. This involves an independent assessment of strategy, people, agencies, digital activity, CRM, data, reporting and commercial alignment, followed by clear priorities and recommendations.
A Strategic Marketing Consultation is designed for founders and senior leaders who need experienced input on a specific challenge, decision or opportunity without an ongoing engagement.
I also undertake defined marketing transformation projects where a business requires more intensive support over a particular period, such as restructuring the marketing function, rebuilding CRM and reporting, repositioning the business, preparing for growth or establishing the infrastructure required for a new stage of development.
Do you need a Fractional CMO?
A business does not need a Fractional CMO simply because it wants to do more marketing. The requirement normally appears when marketing decisions become more commercially significant and the organisation no longer has the senior capability internally to make those decisions with enough confidence.
You may have reached that point if the founder or CEO is still effectively running marketing, if a capable team needs more experienced leadership, if agencies are operating without enough strategic oversight, if marketing investment is becoming difficult to justify or if growth has slowed and nobody is entirely certain why.
The same is true when marketing has become disconnected from sales or the wider business. If leadership expectations differ from what the marketing team believes it is responsible for, frustration inevitably follows. The problem is not always performance; sometimes it is that nobody has properly aligned what success is supposed to look like.
A conversation can usually establish fairly quickly whether fractional marketing leadership is likely to help. There may be a substantial transformation required, there may be a small number of issues preventing an otherwise capable function from performing much better, or we may conclude that the real constraint sits somewhere outside marketing.
I am comfortable with any of those conclusions.
Frequently asked questions about Fractional CMO support
What does a Fractional CMO cost in the North West?
The cost depends on the level of involvement and complexity of the business. My ongoing Fractional CMO engagements currently start from £2,500 per month, with the scope agreed according to the leadership, strategic and operational support required. For some businesses, a Marketing Function Review or strategic consultation may be a more appropriate starting point than an ongoing monthly engagement.
Is a Fractional CMO the same as a marketing consultant?
There can be overlap, but the roles are generally different. A consultant is normally brought in to provide advice or expertise around a particular challenge, whereas a Fractional CMO takes ongoing responsibility for senior marketing leadership within the business. That can include leading the internal team, participating in leadership meetings, managing agencies, setting strategy, challenging commercial assumptions and being accountable for marketing priorities.
Can a Fractional CMO manage my existing marketing team?
Yes. Many businesses already have good marketing people but lack somebody sufficiently experienced to lead the complete function. In those circumstances, I can provide the senior leadership above the team, establish priorities, develop capability and ensure marketing is properly represented within the wider leadership structure.
Do I need to replace my existing marketing agency?
Not necessarily. If an agency is delivering good work and fits the strategy, there may be every reason to retain it. My role is to ensure that agencies and other suppliers are working towards the commercial objectives of the business, that performance is being evaluated properly and that the organisation is buying the capabilities it genuinely needs.
Do you work on-site or remotely?
Both. I am based in Southport and work with businesses across Manchester, Liverpool, Merseyside, Lancashire, Cheshire, Preston and the wider North West. Most engagements combine remote working with on-site meetings, workshops and leadership sessions where being physically present adds value.
Can a Fractional CMO help if we already have a Head of Marketing?
Yes. A Head of Marketing may be doing an excellent job but still benefit from more experienced board-level support, particularly during a period of rapid growth or change. A Fractional CMO can provide mentoring, strategic challenge and executive-level representation without undermining the existing marketing leader.
What size of business is fractional marketing leadership best suited to?
There is no single turnover or headcount at which a Fractional CMO suddenly becomes appropriate. It tends to work best where marketing has become commercially important enough to require senior leadership, but the organisation does not require or cannot yet justify a full-time CMO. The complexity of the business and the decisions being made are usually more important than its absolute size.
Fractional CMO North West: start with a conversation
If you are looking for an experienced Fractional CMO in Manchester, Liverpool, Southport, Preston, Cheshire, Lancashire, Merseyside or elsewhere across the North West, the best place to start is a conversation about what is actually happening within the business.
I do not need you to arrive with a perfectly defined brief. In fact, part of the value of an initial conversation is working out whether the challenge you are experiencing requires fractional marketing leadership, a focused review, a defined project or something else entirely.
There is no benefit in turning a straightforward problem into a six-month transformation programme simply because that creates a larger engagement. Equally, if the marketing function needs significant change, I will tell you.
The objective is to understand where the business is now, where you are trying to get to and what is currently standing between the two.
Senior marketing leadership when you need it, without recruiting a full-time CMO.