You Don't Need a New CMO (Yet). First, Hire a Fractional One.

Your institution’s CMO seat just opened up, and I can already picture your calendar: HR and a search firm on speed dial, a job description getting dusted off from 3+ years ago, and somebody on your board asking how fast you can fill the seat.

Here’s what I’d tell you: slow down. Not because urgency doesn’t matter. But because the fastest way to fill that seat is rarely the smartest one, and you already suspect that, or you wouldn’t still be reading.

I get the pressure you’re under. Your long list of stakeholders is going to ask why you’re paying for temporary marketing leadership instead of just hiring someone permanently and calling it done. Fair question. It also assumes there are only two options: hire now or leave the seat empty. There’s a third direction, and it’s your strategic advantage.

What a Higher Ed Fractional CMO Is and What It Is Not

A fractional CMO is brought in to work alongside the team, make decisions, partner with institutional leadership, and, importantly, they can fully understand the marketing function from the inside. That matters because leadership transitions often surface questions that are difficult to answer while everyone is rushing to fill a vacancy.

A consultant studies a problem, diagnoses, drafts the memo, and moves on to the next client at the end of the agreement. An interim leader (what I’ve been calling a caretaker) holds the seat steady, keeping the calendar moving and the decisions from stalling, but nobody expects them to change direction, because everyone knows someone else is coming to do that.

The Biggest Signal That Fractional Marketing Leadership Might Be the Right Fit

For most institutions the strongest signal is not budget; it is uncertainty. If an institution knows it needs senior marketing leadership immediately but is not yet completely clear on what the permanent role should look like, a fractional CMO should be considered.

So, before you quickly fill that seat, ask: what got us here?

• Is the role itself still designed correctly, or has the institution changed around it?
• Does marketing have the reporting structure it needs?
• What does your president need from this seat now that’s different from what they needed three or five years ago?
• What capability already exists on the team, and what’s missing?
• How should marketing be working with enrollment, advancement, and the rest of the cabinet going forward?

That’s exactly what a fractional CMO gives you: the time to find out what got you here before you hire permanently.

The easiest thing to do is recreate the job that just became vacant: same job description, same reporting lines, and same expectations. But the institution may have changed. The market may have changed, enrollment priorities may have changed, the president’s expectations may have changed, and the team may have changed. And if all of those things have shifted, it is worth asking whether the role should shift too.

If you already know exactly what the role should be, run the search. But if you’re navigating transitions, going fractional isn’t the placeholder. It is the decision, made by someone who knows exactly what they’re buying time to figure out.

You’ll know if the fractional model was a success when:

• The team is stronger than when it started.
• Leadership has real clarity on what marketing needs to accomplish next.
• The structural issues that made the seat open in the first place got fixed, not just covered.
• The next CMO is being hired into the institution you are now, not the one that existed when the last person took the job.

Whoever sits in your CMO seat next should come into a role you defined on purpose, not one they inherited because a search needed to close by October. Fix the seat first. Then fill it.

Fix the seat first. Then fill it.

This is the first in a five-part series on fractional CMO leadership. Next: what to lock into the contract before anyone signs anything.