Senior marketing direction every month, with the hands to carry it out
A fractional CMO gives you a few days a month of strategy and leaves the execution to a team you still have to hire. Most small businesses have the opposite problem: no team, and a plan that nobody turns into pages, posts and emails. Brainito writes the strategy every month from your audit and your numbers, then does the work, for a fraction of one day of a fractional CMO's time.
Free to start. Paid actions use credits; most businesses spend $20 to $500 a month.
- A strategy rewritten every month from live data
- Execution included: site, SEO, social, email, reporting
- Plans from $20 a month. Most businesses spend $20 to $500 a month
- Honest about when a real fractional CMO is worth it
Strategy without execution is a document. Most small businesses have enough documents.
A fractional CMO costs $3,000 to $8,000 a month for two to eight days of senior time. The deliverable is direction: positioning, channel priorities, a plan, a review of what the team did. The team, the freelancers, the agency and the $800 to $2,000 tool stack are all extra, which is why the real monthly bill for a fractional CMO engagement usually lands between $6,000 and $15,000 once someone is doing the work.
Brainito's monthly strategy covers what the first few days of that engagement produce for a business under about $5,000 a month in ad spend: what to fix, which channels to run, what to publish, where the budget goes, written from a 77-factor audit of your site and the numbers from your analytics and ads. The same workspace then builds the site, runs SEO, social and email, and reports on all of it. The person who owns the number is you or someone already on the team.
That said, a fractional CMO is the right call in three situations: you already have people doing the work and they need a senior voice to direct them, you are launching something where positioning decides the outcome, or you have a board or investors who need a named marketing leader in the room. In those cases, hire one and give them Brainito so their days go on judgment rather than on audits and reports.
- A strategy from two days a month of senior timeA strategy rewritten every month from the audit and the numbers
- Execution handed to a team you still have to hireSite, SEO, social, email and reporting in the same workspace
- $3,000 to $8,000 before anyone does anything$20 to $500 a month including the doing
- A quarterly review of what the team got doneA weekly audit of what moved and what did not
What marketing leadership costs now
Typical US figures for a small business. Ad spend sits on top of every row.
| Option | Typical monthly cost | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Fractional CMO | $3,000 to $8,000 | Two to eight days a month of senior strategy and oversight. Execution, freelancers and tools are extra. |
| Fractional CMO plus execution | $6,000 to $15,000 | The CMO's days plus the freelancers or agency doing the work, plus the tool stack. The realistic all-in figure. |
| Full-time marketing director | $12,000 to $20,000 | One salary fully loaded, plus tools and a budget for contractors, for a business that can keep them busy. |
| Marketing consultant, project | $2,000 to $10,000 per project | A plan or a positioning piece, delivered once. Nobody revisits it when the numbers change. |
| Brainito AI marketing manager | $20 to $500 | Monthly strategy, weekly audit, website builder, SEO, social, email, analytics, team chat, tasks, contacts and 300+ tools. Dashboards free, credits only for work that runs. |
Fractional and full-time ranges are what small businesses report paying in 2026 and vary by market and seniority. The Brainito figure is what businesses on the platform typically spend. The $500 AI Marketer plan is 20,000 credits a month with a dedicated human marketing manager.
What is included
The strategy a fractional CMO would write, and the eleven things their plan would ask someone to do.
Monthly marketing strategy
Positioning, channel priorities, this month's pages, posts and budget, written from the audit and your numbers, rewritten every month, broken into tasks with owners.
Weekly marketing audit
77 factors across SEO, speed, conversion, content and AI visibility, re-run every week, so the strategy is built on what is true now.
Website builder
A real site from a brief, previewed at brainito.com/your-domain, edited by clicking, published to your own GitHub and Vercel.
SEO management
On-page fixes per page, a technical audit, directories and citations, keyword clusters for your business type, and whether AI assistants cite you.
Social media management
Drafts, designs from the brand kit, approval on the post, scheduling across the networks you use.
Email automation
Campaigns, follow-up sequences and segments from the same contact list the site feeds.
Analytics and ads reporting
Google Ads, Meta, organic, email and referrals on one page, refreshed hourly, so the monthly review is a page rather than a deck.
Team chat
Talk to your team, a freelancer or a fractional CMO inside the workspace, next to the work.
Task management
Every plan item and audit fix on one board with categories, dates and history, so direction becomes work.
Contacts, a mini CRM
Leads from the site, email subscribers and customers in one list, segmented for email and follow-up.
300+ marketing tools
Keyword research across fifteen platforms, meta tags, schema, UTM links, headline tests and more, most of them free.
The first thirty days without a fractional CMO
Day 1: audit
Run the free audit. It is the discovery phase a fractional CMO bills the first month for.
Week 1: strategy
Generate the plan, correct what it gets wrong about your business, assign the tasks to whoever is doing the work.
Weeks 2 to 3: execute
Fix or rebuild the site, schedule the posts, start the email sequence, connect analytics and ads.
Week 4: review
Read the weekly audit and the channel overview. The next month's strategy writes itself from them.
Goes with
- AI marketing agencyThe whole agency loop, priced like software.
- How much does a marketing agency cost?Freelancer to fractional CMO, with what sits behind each.
- Small business marketing agencyFor businesses under about $5,000 a month in ad spend.
- DIY marketing planWhat goes into the monthly strategy.
- Hire a marketerWhen you want a person from us as well.
- PricingCredits, plans from $20 a month.
Get this month's strategy before you book a fractional CMO.
Run the free audit, generate the plan, and compare it with what a day of senior time would have told you.