Fractional, but not Fragmented. The Future of Marketing for SMEs.

Fractional solutions for leadership resourcing are in the ascendant across all sectors. We believe marketing is particularly ripe for this revolution, and we’re not alone in this. Joseph Vito DeLuca’s “Manifesto for the Future of Agency Partnerships & Marketing” was published on the very eve of the global pandemic. DeLuca’s argument for remote, and distributed talent networks scripted what followed. 

“Rather than one homogeneous in-house workforce, a team as we will come to know it will actually be a number of extensions tethered together to achieve a common cause. 

The concept of team will come to encompass employees, consultants, freelancers, agencies and the like … The focus will shift from offices on Madison Avenue and yachts at Cannes to inclusion and breaking down borders so agencies can source the best global talent and provide the best work for their clients.”

The pandemic loosened many of the ties DeLuca’s timely polemic sought to sever, allowing the symbiosis between in-house and outsourced talent and teams to become a possibility. 

Of course, Covid is not the only macro force enabling this paradigm shift. On the supply side there’s digital nomadism, the gig economy, and the fact that restless millennials are seeking leadership roles but refusing to relinquish their freedoms. 

On the demand side, the sheer volume of startups and scaleups needing to grow fast during a VC funding drought opens the door to more efficient and agile ways for marketing to propel that growth. 

Although fractional fits for SMEs in all fields, let's continue to focus on the startup and tech world to dig deeper into why fractional is now. 

Why fractional is needed

“Agility” has been a buzzword across all sectors for some time but embraced most convincingly in the working methods of design and development teams within the tech sector. With their sprints, scrums and applied design thinking, these teams have redesigned ways of working within their worlds as much as their solutions have redefined business and consumer experiences beyond. The startup survivors thrive and enter legend through their ability to pivot product to match or create market need, and then to promote and evolve that product with the same agility and sharpness through storytelling. They are legends because they are rare. 

The agility that shaped the product, and the flexibility and efficiency it promises if it’s a B2B solution, are rarer outside of the design and development cultures that gave it birth. This disconnect is often apparent in marketing departments which can fail to reflect the promises of the products they promote.  

And what of those products, and the tectonic shifts in technology that brought them into being? The insatiable innovation that relentlessly redefines our day-to-day reality, offers one further final analogy for fractional approaches that is hiding in plain sight. 

The Cloud liberated dependency on in-house servers. Every B2B SaaS product promises liberation from rigid, inflexible, inefficient habits and approaches. Software has eaten the world. Now AI is eating software. 

The machines are learning from the humans; and we humans can learn to apply the principles of Software as a Service to how teams are built, serviced and scaled.  

What fractional brings 

Talent as a Service (TaaS) might be another way of defining the fractional paradigm. The agility, freedom and efficiency baked into software development and its promises might now be embraced by those responsible for shaping and sharing its stories. Fractional is the next frontier for agility and scalability, extending the principles of B2B products into the staffing and servicing of those who promote their promises. Human Resources, in short, needs to get more resourceful if it wants to access the most talented humans in this emerging ecosystem. 

To loop back to the macro trends Joseph Vito DeLuca identified, the best, brightest most ambitious will be those forging their own path instead of sticking to the traditional corporate highways. 

Connecting supply with demand in this new paradigm can be win win. The best talent goes where it can make an impact, and businesses serious about growth don’t get stuck with costly mediocrity holding them back.

How fractional works

“Fractional” refers to the partial allocation of time and budget, for a leadership role such as a CMO. A fraction of the time equates to a fraction of the costs. A startup needs to take growth to the next level, and get serious about its brand. Its investors are impatient for profitability and payback, so it needs to do this efficiently. What it doesn’t need at this time is a full-time, board-approved, locked-in CMO. They can be expensive to gain and maintain and difficult to let go. 

Fractional provides the more flexible efficient alternative. If you want seasoned senior marketing professionals steering your growth, but not all the time, you can go further (strategically) and make your budget go further too. And whilst we’ve focused on the tech and startup world, the fractional approach is a perfect fit for any SME in any sector that wants to scale smarter. 

Articulated marketing 

Why is marketing ripe for this revolution? Despite arguing passionately for decades that what we do is an investment not an overhead, marketing is under more intense pressure than ever to prove its value with less. As marketers we can carry on protesting, or we can embrace a workable alternative to outdated practices and perspectives steadily being eroded. Fractional is that alternative. 

But the advantages of this approach go beyond the balance sheet, and it needn’t stop with the CMO. It’s possible to access a trusted constellation of talent to support the fractional leaders and cluster around customer needs. Projects demand scaling up or down as required, enabling purposeful progress without the in-house frictions impeding velocity and impact. Like an external agency, only leaner. You cherry pick the talent, and decide the time-frame and model, either retained, project-based or ad hoc. 

Embraced as a strategic alternative, fractional is not just about breaking things down, but bringing them together, in more coordinated, collaborative and complementary ways. 

Fractional, but not fragmented, the future of marketing is in connecting all these dots.

Written by: Robert Mighall, Director of Brand Strategy & Lead Writer, Co-Founder, The Articulate Collective and Tanya van Soest, Fractional Chief Marketing Officer, Co-Founder & Managing Director, The Articulate Collective.