Skip to contentHow SMEs Cut Wasted Marketing Spend with a Fractional CMO
by Christopher Spencer B.A. (Hons) MCIM - Co-Founder of Peak Media Marketing
Marketing waste isn't always obvious. It doesn't necessarily look like a failed advertising campaign or thousands of pounds being spent without generating a single enquiry. For many SMEs, it builds up gradually until one day somebody looks at the marketing budget and thinks, “How did we end up paying for all of this, and what are we actually getting from it?”
A website here, an SEO retainer there, some Google Ads, social media support, email software, a CRM and a collection of subscriptions that somebody signed up for because they seemed like a good idea at the time. Individually, there may be nothing wrong with any of them. The problem is that nobody is looking at the whole picture and asking whether the business needs all of it, whether it's working together and whether the money could be better spent elsewhere.
This is where a Fractional CMO can help an SME cut wasted marketing spend. Not by coming in with another marketing service to sell, but by taking responsibility for deciding what the business actually needs from its marketing in the first place.
Marketing waste doesn't necessarily mean bad marketing
It's easy to assume that if marketing money is being wasted, somebody must be doing a bad job. That's not necessarily the case.
Your SEO company might be improving your search visibility. Your PPC agency could be generating traffic at a sensible cost. Your social media company might be producing good content and your web developer could be doing exactly what you've asked them to do. They can all be doing a perfectly good job individually while the business as a whole is still spending money in the wrong places.
The question is who decided those were the right priorities?
Specialists naturally approach a business through the service they provide.
An SEO company looks at search, a PPC specialist looks at advertising and a web company looks at the website. That's why you employ specialists, but somebody still needs to decide how those individual activities fit into the wider commercial priorities of the business.
For an owner-managed SME, that responsibility often sits with the owner whether they're comfortable making marketing decisions or not. In a larger SME, there may already be a Marketing Manager, executive or external agencies doing the work, but nobody senior enough to make decisions across all of them.
Different businesses, but essentially the same gap.
How SMEs end up buying marketing they don't need
Most SMEs don't sit down one morning and deliberately create a complicated marketing operation. It happens over time.
Marketing might begin with the owner. As the business grows, somebody builds a better website. Then SEO is added. Google Ads comes next. Social media becomes too time-consuming, so that gets outsourced. An email platform, CRM and various other pieces of software gradually join the mix.
None of those decisions necessarily looks unreasonable at the time. The problem is that marketing is being bought one requirement at a time, often without going back and looking at everything the business is already paying for.
Before long there can be overlapping suppliers, duplicated software, campaigns that have continued long after their original purpose disappeared and monthly retainers that nobody has seriously questioned for years.
Adding more marketing isn't always the answer to a marketing problem. Sometimes the first job is working out what you can stop doing.
A Fractional CMO starts with the business, not the channel
This is one of the biggest differences between buying another marketing service and bringing in senior marketing leadership.
Instead of starting with “Should we spend more on Google Ads?”, the conversation starts with “What does the business need to achieve?”
Only then do you decide whether Google Ads, SEO, social media, email, a new website or something else belongs in the plan.
That can lead to very different decisions. Perhaps paid advertising genuinely is working and deserves more budget. Alternatively, the advertising could already be generating plenty of enquiries and the real problem is that the website isn't converting them. The website might be fine, but the sales follow-up is weak. Or the business could simply be investing in a channel that isn't particularly important to its customers.
A Fractional CMO can make those calls because they aren't there to justify one particular marketing channel. Their job is to decide where the marketing budget can make the biggest commercial difference.
For a business owner, that means having somebody experienced enough to challenge a recommendation before money is committed. For an existing marketing team, it means having senior direction around priorities, budgets and resources while the team gets on with delivering the work.
Sometimes the most valuable marketing decision is to stop
Marketing spend has a habit of becoming permanent.
Retainers renew, software subscriptions keep being charged and advertising campaigns continue running. Reports arrive every month showing what happened, but nobody asks the more fundamental question: should we still be doing this at all?
That's a difficult question to leave entirely to suppliers. If you've employed an SEO agency, you're paying them to provide SEO. You wouldn't normally expect their primary role to be deciding whether you should stop buying SEO from them.
A Fractional CMO sits on your side of the table. They don't need SEO to be the answer, or PPC, social media, a new website or another piece of software. Sometimes their most useful recommendation can simply be to stop spending money on something the business no longer needs.
How does a Fractional CMO find wasted marketing spend?
The first step is surprisingly simple: work out what you're actually spending.
That means looking beyond the headline advertising budget and including agency retainers, freelancers, software, technology, content production and other regular marketing costs. Once everything is visible, the next question is what each investment is there to achieve.
From there, a Fractional CMO can look at whether each activity supports the commercial priorities of the business, whether its performance can be measured sensibly and whether suppliers or tools are overlapping.
The outcome doesn't need to be complicated. Each part of the marketing operation can broadly be put into one of five categories:
keep it, improve it, reduce it, stop it or invest more in it.
That last one matters because cutting wasted marketing spend isn't the same thing as cutting the marketing budget.
Cutting waste doesn't necessarily mean spending less
Imagine an SME is spending £5,000 a month on marketing and discovers that £1,000 is going into activity that isn't delivering enough value.
The obvious answer might appear to be reducing the budget to £4,000, but that isn't necessarily the best commercial decision. There may be another channel that is performing well and could benefit from additional investment, or an obvious weakness elsewhere that is holding the rest of the marketing back.
The better decision might be to move that £1,000 rather than save it. In some circumstances, the evidence might even support increasing the overall budget.
The objective isn't to spend less on marketing. It's to waste less of what you spend.
For an owner looking at an increasingly expensive marketing operation, that's an important distinction. For a Marketing Manager struggling to get budget for something they know the business needs while money is tied up elsewhere, it can be equally valuable.
A Fractional CMO can make your existing agencies more valuable
Bringing in a Fractional CMO doesn't mean replacing all of your agencies, freelancers or existing marketing people. In many cases, the opposite should happen.
Good specialists become more useful when they're given clear objectives, proper briefs and an understanding of how their work contributes to the wider plan. A Fractional CMO can provide that direction, coordinate different suppliers and make sure everybody is working towards the same commercial goals.
They can also spot the overlaps that are difficult to see when each supplier is viewed separately. Two agencies might be charging for similar work, software functionality may be duplicated across different platforms or an internal employee might be doing something that's already included in an external retainer.
The aim isn't fewer suppliers for the sake of it. It's having the right people doing the right work.
Better measurement makes it easier to stop wasting money
Most SMEs don't suffer from a complete lack of marketing data. If anything, there is usually too much of it.
Website visits, impressions, clicks, rankings, followers, open rates and engagement statistics can all be useful, but they don't automatically tell you whether the business is spending its marketing budget well.
What matters is connecting marketing activity as far as reasonably possible to the things the business actually cares about: enquiries, customers, sales, revenue, retention and ultimately profit.
Not every piece of marketing can or should be tied neatly to an immediate sale. Brand building and longer buying journeys still matter. But there needs to be enough useful information to make sensible decisions about where money should go next.
Otherwise it's very easy to continue paying for marketing because the monthly report contains plenty of numbers and most of them appear to be going upwards.
AI makes this even more important
AI is already making marketing faster and cheaper to produce. Businesses can create content, analyse information, automate tasks and generate ideas in a fraction of the time those jobs once took.
That's a huge opportunity, but it also makes it incredibly easy to create more marketing that the business didn't need in the first place.
More content, more emails, more campaigns and more data aren't automatically better. If the strategy is wrong, AI can simply help you do the wrong things more efficiently.
A good Fractional CMO should be using AI themselves to achieve more in the time the business is paying for. The value they bring isn't in avoiding the technology. It's in combining it with the experience and judgement needed to decide what is actually worth doing.
When does an SME need this level of oversight?
There isn't a particular turnover or marketing budget at which a Fractional CMO suddenly becomes necessary. The signs tend to appear in how the marketing is being managed.
Perhaps you have several suppliers but nobody managing them collectively. Maybe you're spending more on marketing but can't confidently explain what's producing the return. New tools and services keep being added, priorities regularly change or every significant marketing decision still ends up back with the business owner.
Alternatively, you may already have capable marketing people internally who don't need somebody else doing their jobs. What they need is somebody experienced enough to set the direction, manage budgets, challenge suppliers and connect marketing decisions to what the wider business is trying to achieve.
A Fractional CMO isn't automatically the answer to either situation. Sometimes an SME needs a better agency, an internal Marketing Manager, a specialist freelancer or simply to stop doing something that isn't working.
But there comes a point where the quality of the decisions about your marketing becomes as important as the marketing itself.
So, how do SMEs cut wasted marketing spend with a Fractional CMO?
They put experienced marketing leadership between the commercial objectives of the business and the money being spent trying to achieve them.
That person can look across the whole marketing operation, challenge what's already happening, decide where specialist support is genuinely needed, improve measurement, coordinate the people doing the work and move money away from activity that isn't contributing enough.
A Fractional CMO doesn't save an SME money simply because they cost less than employing a full-time CMO. The bigger saving can come from putting an experienced marketer in charge of the money the business is already spending.
Think some of your marketing budget could be working harder?
If your marketing has grown over time and you're no longer completely sure what's working, what's worth keeping or where your money would be better spent, we can help you take a proper look at it.
Our Fractional CMO support gives SMEs access to experienced marketing leadership without the cost or commitment of employing a full-time CMO. We'll look at what you're spending, what you're trying to achieve and where there may be opportunities to stop wasting money, improve what you already have and invest more intelligently.
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