Ask a founder how marketing is going and you’ll mostly hear about channels. The SEO agency, the paid ads freelancer, the email platform somebody signed up for two years ago. What you rarely hear about is marketing leadership, meaning a person who decides which of those channels deserves the next dollar and which one should be switched off.
That gap often shows up in companies somewhere between early traction and a full executive team. And it tends to stay invisible until results stall and nobody can explain why.
Key Takeaways
- Marketing budgets at large companies barely moved in 2026, while expectations kept climbing.
- Channel vendors are easy to hire, but each one tends to report on its own metrics.
- Research on CMO turnover points to poorly designed roles more than weak marketers.
- The fix is clear ownership of the plan, and fractional leadership is only one way to get it.
Budgets Are Flat, Expectations Aren’t
Even big marketing departments are working with less room than they’d like. Gartner’s annual survey of CMOs found that marketing budgets barely moved in 2026, landing at 7.8% of company revenue against 7.7% a year earlier. Of the marketing leaders surveyed, 56% said they lack the budget to deliver their strategy, and 54% said they’re short on resources.
Those figures describe large organizations, since most respondents report more than $1 billion in revenue. The survey doesn’t tell us how a $10 million company experiences its marketing budget. Smaller businesses can feel a similar squeeze for different reasons, though: thinner margins, smaller teams, and often no one whose job is deciding where marketing money goes.
There’s an AI wrinkle too. The same survey found CMOs putting an average of 15.3% of their budgets toward AI initiatives, while 70% acknowledged their internal marketing processes aren’t mature enough to scale it. Gartner’s own analyst described the risk as companies buying tools faster than they build the processes, data and talent to use them. Smaller companies can run into a version of the same problem, just with agencies instead of software.
Why Tactics Get Hired Before Strategy
Channels are easy to buy. You can sign an SEO retainer on a Tuesday and have a kickoff call by Friday. Strategy is harder to shop for, because it’s tough to say what you’re buying until someone has done it.
So companies stack vendors. Each one may be good at its piece. The trouble is that each vendor tends to report on the metrics closest to its own work: rankings, cost per click, open rates, follower counts.
None of those numbers is wrong, exactly. They just don’t answer the question a CEO cares about, which is whether marketing spend is turning into revenue. When several channels touch the same customer, more than one report may count that sale, so the combined numbers can look stronger than the business results.
That isn’t a knock on the vendors. Good channel work matters. It just needs someone coordinating objectives, measurement and priorities across all of it.
Without that person, a few things tend to happen:
- Budget can drift toward the channel with the most persuasive report, not the one moving revenue.
- Channels may end up claiming credit for the same buyer.
- Nobody owns the decision to cut a program that isn’t working.
- The CEO ends up as part-time marketing director, usually late at night.
That last one is easy to slide into without noticing.
The Role Design Problem Has Been Around a While
None of this is limited to small companies. In 2017, Harvard Business Review ran a package on chief marketing officers, and the lead piece by Kimberly Whitler and Neil Morgan reported that 80% of CEOs say they don’t trust or are unimpressed by their CMOs. The authors pinned most of that on faulty role design rather than on the people doing the job.
Their argument was pretty specific. Companies often can’t agree on what a CMO is supposed to do, so expectations drift away from the authority and metrics the role carries. They describe three broad versions: CMOs focused on strategy, CMOs focused on commercialization, and CMOs with enterprise-wide P&L responsibility who handle both.
The piece opens with a retailer that hired a CMO to drive growth, then mostly limited him to advertising and social media. He didn’t stay long.
For a growing company, the lesson carries over almost directly. If no one has decided what marketing is accountable for, the role gets defined by default, often by whatever the current vendors happen to measure.
Where Fractional and Client-Side Advisory Models Fit
A full-time CMO can be a big commitment for a company with a small team and a modest marketing budget. That’s part of why fractional marketing leadership has become a more common option. A senior marketer works part-time with a handful of companies, sets the plan, and manages the vendors already in place.
The more useful versions of this model start with the business, not the channels. Some firms are built around that idea. Northbound Growth Advisory, a Toronto-based growth marketing agency offering strategic advisory, fractional leadership and execution, begins engagements by assessing business goals, economics, current marketing and available data before recommending a strategy or channel work.
Client-side experience matters more than it sounds. Someone who has hired and managed agencies tends to ask different questions than someone who has only worked inside one. They’re used to reading channel reports against business results and judging what a realistic scope of work looks like.
But fractional leadership isn’t a fit everywhere. A pre-revenue startup probably needs the founder doing the marketing, messy as that is. A company with a large in-house team may be better served by a full-time executive who can sit in every meeting. The middle is where the model tends to make sense: past product-market fit, spending real money, still without anyone who owns the whole picture.
And a fractional hire is only one way to close the gap. A promoted internal marketer, a full-time head of marketing, or an agency given clear authority over the plan can all work. What matters is that someone owns it.
Questions Worth Asking Before the Next Marketing Hire
Before signing another retainer, it helps to get honest answers to a few things:
- Who decides how next quarter’s marketing budget gets split across channels, and on what evidence?
- Can anyone connect marketing spend to pipeline or revenue, not just traffic and leads?
- If one channel underperformed for six months, who would notice, and who has the authority to stop it?
- Do your vendors know what the others are doing, or is each one working in isolation?
- Is the CEO the de facto head of marketing right now?
If most of those answers point back to the CEO, or to nobody, the next hire probably shouldn’t be another channel specialist.
What Shifts When Someone Owns the Plan
Less than people expect, at least on the surface. Same channels, often the same vendors. But reporting starts using business terms like revenue and cost per customer, weak programs get cut sooner, and the CEO gets a few evenings back.
Better marketing performance doesn’t always require a bigger budget. In many cases it starts with clear ownership of priorities and measurement, so the money already being spent has someone accountable for where it goes.
