Senior marketing leadership without the full-time executive salary.

A Fractional CMO from Blair & Co. gives your business a senior marketing leader who owns the strategy, manages the budget, holds the agencies accountable, and reports to you for the days per month you actually need, not the salary you cannot yet justify.

Branding

Advertising

Email Marketing

Website Design

Most growing businesses reach a point where marketing is too complex to run without real leadership, but not large enough to justify a full-time executive hire. A Fractional CMO from Blair & Co. fills that seat.

Built for businesses at a specific stage.

A Fractional CMO is not the right fit for every business , and we will tell you that in the first conversation if it is true. It is the right fit for businesses in one of three situations.

Growing too fast to manage marketing without leadership

You have a marketing budget, a team or set of vendors, and more marketing activity than any one person without a senior strategy background can coordinate effectively. You need someone who owns the function, not just executes tasks inside it.

Not ready to justify a full-time CMO salary

A senior in-house CMO in Calgary costs $180,000 to $260,000 per year before benefits, bonus, and the recruitment cost to find the right one. Your business needs that level of thinking and accountability but not five days a week of it yet. A fractional arrangement gets you the outcome at a fraction of the overhead.

Conversion Tracking & Attribution

Agencies are producing work, things are being published, money is being spent but there is no coherent strategy behind it, no clear measurement of what is working, and no single person accountable for making the whole thing add up to something. That is the gap a Fractional CMO closes.

Strategy, leadership, and accountability not another set of hands doing task

A Fractional CMO from Blair & Co. sits within your leadership team for the number of days per month your business requires and takes accountability for your marketing strategy, budget allocation, agency and vendor relationships, team direction, and the marketing results your business needs to achieve. This is not an advisor who provides recommendations and disappears. It is embedded senior marketing leadership that owns the function and answers directly to the CEO.

The first thing a Fractional CMO from Blair & Co. does is establish where the business actually stands, including its competitive position, audience, budget, current marketing performance, and the gap between where marketing is today and where it needs to be. From that foundation, a clear marketing strategy is built that guides the entire engagement. No activity without a plan. No spending without rationale. No reporting without a direct connection to the business outcomes that matter.

Blair & Co. is a full-service agency with 25 years of Calgary and Western Canadian market experience. When your Fractional CMO requires creative development, campaign execution, branding, website development, content production, or media buying, those capabilities exist internally rather than being outsourced to third parties at additional margins. This creates faster execution, stronger alignment between strategy and delivery, and one integrated relationship that manages the full marketing function instead of multiple disconnected agencies.

A Fractional CMO from Blair & Co. attends leadership meetings, presents to boards when required, manages the marketing budget, establishes KPIs, and reports against them every month. If a marketing channel is underperforming, adjustments are made. If a vendor is not delivering, those conversations are handled directly. If the market signals a need to shift strategy, that direction is communicated before it becomes a larger issue. Senior marketing leadership is about accountability for outcomes, not simply activity.

Most Fractional CMO engagements are designed for a specific stage of growth rather than permanently. They are typically the right solution for businesses over a 12 to 36 month period until the company reaches the scale required to justify a full-time in-house executive. During that time, we build the strategy, systems, team structure, processes, and institutional marketing knowledge required for long-term success. When the transition to an internal CMO eventually happens, the business is operating from a far stronger and more organized marketing foundation than when the engagement began.

Marketing Strategy & Annual Planning

A clear, written marketing strategy aligned to your business goals with annual objectives, budget allocation by channel, a 12-month campaign calendar, KPIs, and the rationale behind every major decision. Built at the start of the engagement and updated as the business and market evolve.

Agency & Vendor Management

Your Fractional CMO manages every agency and vendor relationship on your behalf briefing, reviewing work, holding vendors to scope and timeline, and making sure every dollar spent on external production is connected to a strategy rather than a request. You stop being the translator between your business and your agencies.

Marketing Team Leadership

If you have in-house marketing staff, your Fractional CMO manages them, setting priorities, reviewing output, developing their capabilities, and making sure the internal team and external vendors are working from the same plan. If you are building a marketing team, we help you hire the right people in the right order.

Brand & Positioning Oversight

Your Fractional CMO owns the brand making sure positioning is consistent across every customer touchpoint, that creative decisions align with the strategy, and that the brand is building equity rather than drifting with every campaign. When a rebrand or brand refresh is warranted, we lead that process using Blair & Co.’s full brand capability.

Budget Management & Reporting

Full ownership of the marketing budget forecasting, tracking spend against plan, reconciling results against investment, and presenting marketing performance to leadership and the board in language that connects to business outcomes rather than marketing metrics. You always know where the money went and what it produced.

Growth & Lead Generation Strategy

The marketing strategy exists to drive commercial outcomes. Your Fractional CMO builds and manages the marketing programs campaigns, content, digital, advertising, and events that generate leads, build pipeline, and create the market presence a growing business needs to win the customers it is going after.

From first conversation to a marketing function that runs the way it should.

Starting a Fractional CMO engagement is not like starting a project; it is like making a hire. We take it seriously on both sides. Here is how the first 90 days typically unfold.

STEP 1

Discovery Call

A direct conversation between you and the senior strategist who will be your Fractional CMO not a business development person handing off to a delivery team. We learn your business, your goals, your current marketing situation, and whether this engagement makes sense. If it does not, we will tell you that too.

STEP 2

Strategy & 90-Day Plan

A thorough review of where marketing stands current strategy (or lack of one), active vendors and agencies, budget allocation, performance data, brand position, competitive landscape, and team structure. No assumptions. We start from what is actually true, not what the last deck said it was.

STEP 3

Optimize

A marketing strategy and a concrete 90-day action plan built on the audit findings. Priorities ranked, budget allocated, quick wins identified, and the longer-term initiatives sequenced. Presented to leadership before the engagement moves into execution so everyone is aligned on what the CMO is building and why.

STEP 4

Ongoing Leadership

Regular days on-site or in leadership meetings, weekly check-ins with the CEO, monthly performance reporting, ongoing agency and team management, and quarterly strategy reviews. The engagement runs as long as it creates value, and we will tell you honestly when it is time to make a full-time hire instead.

Senior marketing leadership Pick what fits your spend.

A full-time senior CMO in Calgary costs $180,000 to $260,000 per year before benefits, bonus, or the recruitment cost to find the right person. Fractional CMO engagements are structured as monthly retainers, right-sized to your business’s current stage and marketing complexity. Three tiers below; scope confirmed after the discovery call.

Marketing Leadership Essentials

$3,500/mth

For businesses unhappy with their current paid media setup. We audit, document, and either deliver a rebuild plan or rebuild the account ourselves. No retainer required.

Monthly strategy session with CEO
Annual marketing strategy & plan
Budget oversight & recommendations
Agency & vendor review
Monthly performance report
Monthly performance report

Fractional CMO Retainer

$4,500/mth

Google Ads or Meta Ads, managed monthly. The right entry point for businesses spending $1.5K to $5K/month on a single platform. Senior management, weekly attention, and monthly reporting.

Full marketing strategy ownership
Agency & vendor management
In-house team direction
Budget management & reporting
Leadership team participation
Quarterly board-level reporting

Full Fractional CMO Program

$12,500/mth

Google + Meta + LinkedIn (or any combination). For businesses spending $10K+/month across channels that need attribution that connects everything. Weekly check-ins, monthly reports.

Near full-time CMO engagement
Full marketing function leadership
Multi-vendor & team management
Campaign & growth strategy oversight
Hiring & team building support
Full Blair & Co. agency access

Make it Custom.

If none of our packages are the right fit, we’re happy to provide a custom quote. Send us your details, and we’ll be in touch to schedule a time to review the scope of your project.

Questions clients ask before they hand us their ad budget.

What is the difference between a Fractional CMO and a marketing agency?

Depends on your industry, average deal size, and conversion rate. As a rough rule, B2B services with $5K to $50K deal sizes start at $3K to $5K per month and scale up. Local services (contractors, dentists, lawyers) can do meaningful work at $1.5K to $3K per month. Ecommerce typically needs $5K minimum to gather enough data to optimize. We will give you a defensible budget recommendation in the first 30 minutes of a scoping call, before you commit to anything.

How is Blair & Co.'s Fractional CMO different from an independent consultant?

WordPress and WooCommerce are our default for 95% of projects. WordPress is open source, customizable to almost any scope, and your content stays portable if you ever change agencies. We can talk Webflow or Shopify if your situation genuinely calls for it, but we will not push a platform that costs more or restricts you more without a clear reason.

When should a business hire a Fractional CMO instead of a full-time one?

Initial conversions usually start within 2 to 4 weeks of launch. Real cost-per-lead optimization takes 60 to 90 days as the campaigns gather enough data to inform bidding decisions. If your sales cycle is long (B2B, real estate, professional services), full attribution back to closed-won revenue takes 4 to 6 months. We map this against your goals in the scoping call so you know what to expect when.

How much does a Fractional CMO cost, and what should I expect to get for it?

Both options exist and we will recommend the right one after auditing the account. About half the accounts we audit are salvageable with restructuring (kill underperforming campaigns, fix conversion tracking, rework keyword strategy). The other half are better off with a clean rebuild because the historical data is too noisy or the conversion tracking has been wrong long enough to taint the algorithm. Either way, we tell you the truth about what we find before you commit.

Advertising & Leads Generation

Brand Identity & Strategy

Creative and Design

Content & Email Marketing

Market Research & Strategy

Social Media Management

Website Design & Development

Fractional CMO