Fractional digital marketing director

Senior digital marketing leadership for SMEs and scale-ups — 1 to 3 days a week, inside your team, on your tools, owning the outcome.

When this is the right answer

You’re £2M–£50M in revenue. Marketing matters commercially, but it’s missing senior direction — either a busy team that isn’t commercially calibrated, or a founder steering it whose time is better spent elsewhere. A full-time senior hire is on the horizon, but it’s expensive (£80k–£160k+), takes 4–6 months to recruit, and you don’t yet know exactly what the role should be. And the board keeps asking “what are we actually getting back from marketing?” — and the honest answer is “not sure.”

What it is

A 6-month-minimum embedded engagement where I run your digital marketing function alongside your team: strategy ownership, team coaching, agency management, board-level reporting, and hands-on involvement where it earns the engagement. Three intensities, so the shape matches the actual need rather than padding to fill a role you can’t yet justify. The strongest engagements end with us recruiting your permanent hire together — and me handing over a function that already works.

fixed terms, three shapes

Buyable, not bespoke. Billed monthly in advance, 6-month minumum.

ONE day per week

£6,000

/month

A senior voice and ownership of direction, your team executes day-to-day.

TWO days per week

£12,000

/month

Strategy plus meaningful hands-on involvement, weekly senior calls, board attendance.

Three days per week

£18,000

/month

Effectively a part-time senior hire. Team management and your permanent-hire recruitment.

Then, optionally: Maintenance £1,500/month (keep it sharp) or Operate £3,000/month (ILAW stays on as a senior editorial layer). Self-manage is free and an honourable choice.

WHat good looks like

A knowledge base a new senior hire could learn the business from in two hours. Agents that produce on-voice first drafts 80% there on attempt one — so the editorial pass is the value-add, not the heavy lift. Six months in, clients typically report 30–50% less time to produce content, better voice consistency, and a measurable lift in junior-team output quality.

Not for

Sub-£1M businesses still finding fit; execs using “AI” as code for cutting headcount; anyone wanting an outsourced daily content team. The system makes a good marketer better — it doesn’t turn a bad one good, and you can’t market your way out of a bad offer.

Why me?

I operate this system on ILAW itself — I’m not a consultant who learned about AI-native marketing, I’m one who runs one. 25 years of senior judgement deciding what’s worth automating and what to keep manual. One operator, no markup. Commercial outcome first: if it can’t show a measurable lift over six months, the system’s wrong and I’ll fix it.

First conversation is 45 minutes, mostly listening, no pitch deck.

Book a call