For B2B and SaaS founders: marketing leadership led by digital PR, SEO, and content, the channels that compound. Strategy ownership, weekly cadence, and agency-level execution through DMR.agency.
~22 years · 50+ companies
For founders without a marketing leader. I take the marketing chair at your table on a monthly retainer: strategy ownership, weekly cadence, agency-level execution through DMR.agency, and the kind of decision-making that does not wait on a six-month CMO search. I show up weekly and own the marketing function end to end: PR, SEO, content, lifecycle, paid, brand, hiring, and board updates when it is time.
Retainers run monthly, a fraction of the $300K+ a full-time CMO costs, with agency execution included rather than billed on top. Six-month minimum, sixty days notice after the first quarter, so you are never locked in. The difference from hiring the agency directly: I own the marketing function and answer for the strategy, you get a seat at the table, not a vendor on a project brief.
Fractional CMO is a phrase that has been used to mean almost anything in the last two years. Here is what it means in my work, specifically.
Positioning, ICP, GTM plan, brand narrative, quarterly OKRs. I write the marketing strategy and answer for it. No fractional handwaving.
A standing weekly call with the founder, plus a weekly sync with the team or vendors. Decisions get made on the call, not in week-long Slack threads.
You get the agency behind me without buying a second retainer. Digital PR, SEO, content production, link earning, journalist outreach: the full stack at agency rates inside the engagement.
When it is time to add a content lead, a paid-media specialist, or a freelance designer, I run the brief, interview the candidates, and stand behind the hire.
Marketing slides for board meetings. Investor updates that show growth in language they trust. Sales support when a founder-led deal needs marketing air cover.
A fractional CMO's most important job is filtering. I will say no to half the marketing ideas in the room. The other half, we will ship.
The Fractional CMO offering is new. These results are from DMR.agency, the same team founded in 2013 that executes inside every retainer.
Their biggest weapon has been doing outreach to earn high-quality backlinks and mentions at scale from the likes of Forbes, Mashable, Reader's Digest, and hundreds of other authority sites. The biggest success story has been helping grow Ridester from zero to 1.5 million monthly visitors.
Syed's team earned us high authority links from publications like MSN and Yahoo. Our main site's organic traffic increased by 120%. Our Public Database saw a 515% increase in clicks, and our average daily signups grew 6x.
Irfan and his team earned high authority backlinks from publications like Reader's Digest and MSN. The web portal's traffic increased by 140% in 3 months, greatly exceeding our goals.
So chuffed to see a keyword rank to position #4 in Google that gets over 160,000 searches a month — most with commercial intent to buy. Cannot thank Syed Irfan Ajmal and the team enough. They are getting hundreds of keywords for this site ranked.
Within 2 months we saw quality links from Healthline (DR 92), The Mirror (DR 90), MSN (DR 92), and Consumer Health Digest (DR 68). Our domain rating went from 1 to 27. If you are looking to boost organic traffic and earn quality backlinks, we highly recommend DMR.agency.
Irfan always goes above and beyond when it comes to strategizing our SEO tactics. He has provided really helpful recommendations and feedback on our website to help us make it as user-friendly and SEO optimized as possible.
These campaigns were run by my team at DMR.agency, the same team that executes inside every Fractional CMO retainer. Full write-ups are in the public record.
Digital PR and journalist outreach earned links from MSN, Yahoo, and niche-relevant sites. Organic traffic rose 120%, database clicks grew 515%, and DR moved 35 to 47.
Read the case file →460% organic growth through digital PR, visual content, and pay-for-performance journalist outreach. DR climbed 43 to 58 on the way.
Read the case file →A multi-year engagement: 500+ earned placements including MSN, Business Insider, and AOL, DR 33 to 57, and the CEO positioned as a quoted expert in national press.
Read the case file →Twelve more case files, including $160K to $1.2M a month in organic revenue for an automotive retailer, are in the archive →
Most fractional engagements drift in the first quarter. To avoid that, every retainer follows the same opening shape, and we calibrate from there.
Founder calls, sales call recordings, competitor scan, audit of every existing marketing asset and channel. You receive a written brief at the end of week two.
A 60-day plan: positioning sharpening, ICP, two or three campaigns to ship immediately. We are looking for early signal, not perfection.
The marketing function gets a real shape. Reporting cadence, content pipeline, PR calendar, the weekly rhythm. Hiring brief if a role needs filling.
Quarterly review. We either renew, sharpen, or part ways. The retainer is monthly; you are never locked in past sixty days notice.
The ones that come up most in discovery calls. Better to have them answered before we speak.
Retainers run $5K to $10K a month depending on scope. For context, a full-time CMO costs $300K+ a year before you have hired a single person to execute; here the execution team comes with the chair. If six months feels like a big first step, the Marketing Leadership Audit below is the smaller one.
The engagement is built around outcomes, not hours. In practice, most months include a weekly founder call (45-60 min), a weekly team or vendor sync (30-45 min), and 6-10 hours of async work: strategy documents, briefs, reviews, and decisions. The right question is whether the marketing function is moving, not how many hours are logged.
A consultant advises. I own. I take the marketing chair, write the strategy, and answer for the results alongside you. The weekly cadence means decisions get made in real time, not in a report you receive six weeks later. And the execution layer through DMR.agency means we can move from decision to campaign in days, not quarters.
Yes. The framework travels across categories: SaaS, professional services, e-commerce, and media all follow the same earned-media and positioning logic. Clients in this portfolio include a government web portal, a gig-economy platform, an addiction treatment centre, and an automotive chain. The pattern is consistent: earned authority, a content system, and a growth loop tied to the sales motion.
You keep everything. Strategy documents, brand guidelines, editorial calendar, vendor relationships, and every playbook we built together. I write a transition brief at the close and will introduce the person taking the seat after me if that is relevant. The goal is to leave the function stronger than I found it, not to create dependency.
It happens occasionally, but it is rarely the right move. The fractional model works because you get senior marketing thinking without a senior salary. If the company grows to a stage where a full-time CMO is warranted, I will help you find and hire the right person, and that is a natural part of the engagement.
No. The retainer is cash-only. Equity complicates the relationship in ways that tend to hurt early-stage companies: it shifts incentives around spending, hiring, and timelines in subtle but real ways. A clean monthly retainer keeps incentives aligned: I need to produce visible results every month to keep the seat.
Hiring the agency gets you execution: PR, SEO, content, link earning. The Fractional CMO retainer adds the layer above that: strategy ownership, weekly decision-making with the founder, marketing function leadership, board and investor narratives, and hiring. I sit at the table and answer for the results. The agency work happens because I direct it, not instead of it.
No, not the formal title, and I would rather say that directly than let "CMO" imply something it hasn't earned. Twenty-two years now, since 2004, as an entrepreneur and operator across sales, tech, and marketing roles and ventures in the US (remote), Sweden, Denmark, and Pakistan. The last thirteen of those years, since 2013, have been founding and running DMR.agency, the same team behind every result on this page. I'm not selling a corporate CMO résumé; I'm selling an operator who has actually shipped the campaigns and is willing to take the chair. If a former in-house CMO with a specific industry pedigree is the requirement, I'm not that person, and it's better you know now than three months in.
The first two weeks of the retainer, sold on its own: founder calls, sales-call recordings, competitor scan, a full audit of every marketing asset and channel, and a written brief at the end. $3,000, fixed. If you move into the retainer, the fee credits 100% against your first month.
Tell me where the business is, where you want it to be in twelve months, and what marketing has and has not done so far. I will tell you honestly whether a Fractional CMO is the right answer, or something else is.
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