Senior marketing leadership for B2B tech scaleups, without the full-time hire
Explore how we work
Flexible. Adaptable. The right skills at the right time.
Flexible and designed for impact
Branding Matters works best when fully embedded into the team.
Once engaged, Diane joins the executive team, giving marketing a voice at the C-Suite level. This means she can add much broader value than just in marketing, which touches every part of the business.
Strategic leadership when you need it most
She brings perspective, experience and a network built across decades. Plus AI-first thinking and hands-on experience that superpowers lean teams.
How we work
Our fractional CMO engagements typically follow the pattern: immersion, strategy & foundations and ongoing fractional work. We also work on a project basis, where needed. The best thing about fractional is that it’s flexible, so we can build the engagement to meet your needs and budget as well.
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Two to three weeks. A flat fee. No obligation to continue. Diane gets quickly under the skin of the business, the strategy, the team, the pipeline, the assumptions, what marketing success looks like.
You get a full report:
key observations
what's working & what isn’t
opportunities
topline strategy
quick wins & longer-term wins
This sets the engagement up for success and enables Diane to hit the ground running.
Investment: £5,000–£8,000 + VAT
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Scoped after Immersion. No guessing at timelines or fees before we understand the biggest challenges, opportunities and wins.
A value proposition that holds up. A cohesive narrative that sales can actually use.
These are just some of the foundations that make everything downstream more effective.
Investment: Scoped and priced after Immersion
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Typically one to two days a week. A CMO sitting on your leadership team, embedded in your business. Diane runs the marketing function, leads and mentors the team and stays accountable to commercial outcomes.
The end goal is to help you get the right strategy and team in place to have a self-sustaining function.
Engagement length can range from six months to two years.
Investment: Priced by days/week, scoped to your needs
The founder is still running marketing
You’ve hit that point in the company’s growth where, as a CEO/founder, you can no longer run the marketing function.
It worked early on, but not anymore. The business has outgrown founder-led marketing, but the team is a bit too junior and lacks strategic direction and real ownership and influence.
You need someone who knows what ‘good’ looks like to properly own marketing, create a strategy and accountability, drive brand and demand and build a proper engine for growth.
The ideal scenario at this stage is to have this without the overheads of a full-time CMO hire.
What are the ‘trigger’ moments?
These are the moments when calling in a fractional CMO makes sense
Marketing is happening, but it’s not working
You’ve got lots of activity, but not enough pipeline
The team’s putting out lots of posts on social media. They’re producing content. Events attended. But attribution is murky, pipeline is inconsistent and the board is asking questions nobody can quite answer.
That's not a resource problem. It's a strategy problem.
An exit is on the horizon
You’ve had a solid growth trajectory and you’ve got an exit in your plan. But marketing’s not keeping up.
But when investors start to stress-test the narrative, the positioning and story need to hold up.
And marketing needs to keep pace with the business, work in lock-step with sales and consistently deliver brand and demand for the business.
Diane was CMO at adtech company, Blis, where she was part of the leadership team that took them to a PE exit. She built the brand, the global team, the strategy and was instrumental to growth.
As fractional CMO at MTM, she built a lean marketing function from the ground up. MTM was acquired in 2025. If exit is the goal, her experience matters.
Your CMO is moving on
You’re about to have a leadership vacuum.
You've got a team and a budget, but no senior hand on the wheel. You could recruit, which could take three to six months, if you're lucky, but it’s such a key role and there are downward cost pressures. You’re assessing whether you can afford the talent you want full time.
Hiring fractional gives you the best of both worlds. A senior professional you might otherwise not be able to afford, embedded into the team and effective within weeks, for a fraction of the cost of a full-time hire.
The honest answers
Isn't this just expensive freelancing?
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No. A freelancer executes largely to a brief. This is embedded leadership. A fractional CMO sits on your leadership team, who owns the function, leads the team, makes the calls and is accountable for the outcomes. Read the ‘What the frac’ article for more insight on the differences.
Can’t I hire an agency?
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Agencies can definitely play an important role in your marketing function, but if you’re looking for strategy and ownership, having an embedded marketing leader in the business works best. Agencies can then be briefed properly, managed and held to account by the fCMO. Diane has been on the agency side, so she understands, first hand, how to develop an agency partnership and get the best from agencies.
How do we know if we need a CMO full-time or fractional?
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Most scaleups at £5m–£30m ARR don't necessarily need a full-time CMO yet. They need senior thinking without the overhead. That’s what fractional brings. Once the company is scaling in multiple markets and over £30m turnover, then it might be time for full time. Reach out for a chat and Diane can give you an honest assessment or she can run a marketing audit and give you a detailed perspective on where you stand today and what you need to meet your growth ambitions.
We've tried this before and it didn't work?
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Let’s have a conversation. The most common reason fractional engagements fail is that the CMO doesn’t sit on the leadership team, doesn’t have true marketing strategy and budget ownership or the leadership team don’t truly believe in the power of marketing as a growth engine, versus a cost center. The Branding Matters model is embedded leadership. This makes all the difference.
How many days a week is a typical fractional engagement?
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It really depends on your needs, but Branding Matters’ engagements typically run 1-2 days a week. Diane will scope this out and make a recommendation after the immersion phase. After three years of fractional CMO consulting, a key learning we have is that if you want to make progress quickly, then front-loading days or having a more frequent cadence works best. We can then re-set once the key milestones are reached. Diane is typically on-site in the office on the days she works with her clients.