A healthcare AI company, competing for category terms against two of the largest technology companies in the world. A 120-day campaign: zero to 38 page-one rankings, 30 demo requests, six qualified opportunities, two signed three-year contracts.
Expert marketing strategy, implementation and automations at your fingertips. Without the overhead, the payroll, or the full-time salary.
Traffic that never becomes a conversation is a vanity metric. So here is one month of a real engagement, start to finish: what it cost, what came in, and what closed. Sales cycles in this category run long and every deal goes through a committee, which makes the month below unusually clean to read. This is a multi-year relationship, not a project.
One of those closed contracts came in through a paid campaign. The other came in through an organic product search. That is not a guess, it is what the call tracking and conversion tracking recorded, down to the term and the campaign that produced each one.
So the recommendation wrote itself: split the budget evenly between organic search development and Google Ads, and keep both instrumented. That is not a hedge. Both channels have already produced for this client, paid at the 2023 launch and organic this year, which is why the split is a decision rather than a guess. Two closes is still a small sample, which is exactly why the tracking stays on. As volume builds the split stops being a judgment call and becomes arithmetic, and A/B testing has enough underneath it to mean something.
That instrumentation is installed during the audit and it stays yours. Every lead from that point forward is attributable to a keyword, a campaign, or a page, which is the difference between a marketing budget you defend with a story and one you defend with a report.
Thirty-eight page-one positions in 120 days is the recorded result. This is the projection built on top of it: the search demand sitting behind those positions, priced at what Google charges to buy the same clicks. It is how the client decides what the campaign is worth continuing.
| Positions won | Monthly searches | Cost per click | Projected value |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category head term | 4,400 | $4.56 | $20,064/mo |
| Primary service term | 1,900 | $9.06 | $17,214/mo |
| Product terms (3) | 950 | $4.86–$24.38 | $8,411/mo |
| Exact-match terms (3) | 90 | $17.77–$26.55 | $2,126/mo |
| Total | 7,340 | — | $47,815/mo |
This is a projection, and it should be read as one. It prices the full search demand behind the positions won, at Google's own rates. It is not revenue and it is not money banked: a page-one position captures a share of the searches behind it, not all of them, and that share moves with position. What it does size honestly is the market this client now competes in without paying per click, and how far a category's CPCs can range. Your volume and your CPCs will be different, which is what the Marketing Audit & Roadmap measures before month one. Nothing here says stop running ads. If the math works, double up.
That's the job. An agency retainer sells you a fixed bucket of deliverables and then you spend the year negotiating to change it. This sells you the senior judgment that decides what belongs in the bucket in the first place. It is the decisions, not the hands. When you want the work delivered as well as decided, you add a Growth or a la carte package, and most clients who run both do exactly that.
Delivery is $250 an hour. Advice across the whole business is $350. Every price here is hours times one of those two numbers, and the hours are printed next to the work.
The seat produces a recommendation and the reasoning behind it. What happens next is your call, and there are three doors. None of them is assumed, and none of them is bundled in without you agreeing to it.
You already have people, or an agency you like. We hand over the spec and hold them to it. Reviewing their work is part of the hours you already bought.
A Growth package if it is ongoing, or a la carte if it is a defined piece of work. Either way you get a written scope with the hours and the price on it before anything starts.
You want the capability in house rather than rented. We teach whoever you have, on your accounts, using your real campaigns, until they can run it without us.
There are three ways to get senior marketing decisions made in your business. Two of them are expensive in different ways.
A Growth retainer is a box of work we run. This is the seat that decides what should be in the box. It does not run your channels. It sets the direction and the budget and holds whoever executes accountable, whether that is your team, another agency, or us under a separate package. On Growth the advice covers what we run. Here it covers the business, which is why it runs under a mutual NDA and at the advisory rate.
| How you get it | What it costs | What you actually get |
|---|---|---|
| Full-Time Marketing Director Salaried employee |
$140K–$220K/yr plus benefits, payroll tax, equipment, ramp time |
One person's forty hours a week, whether or not you have forty hours of senior work |
| Nobody Senior Owner runs marketing between everything else |
$0 in payroll paid for in budget spent on the wrong things |
Vendors with nobody grading them, ad spend with nobody cutting it, and positions your competitors take instead |
| Internal Profits Fractional CMO Executive partner, 3-month initial term |
$66K/yr at 16 hrs a month $5,500/mo, no benefits, no ramp |
The same decisions, made by someone who has made them before, at the number of hours your business actually has work for |
Every tier is the same person making the same calibre of decisions. The difference is how many hours a month you get and how often we sit down. Three-month initial term, then it renews. You will know by month two whether having me in the seat is worth it, because unlike a campaign, judgment has no data lag.
Nobody makes good decisions about a business they haven't measured. Before the retainer starts, we sign an NDA and I spend roughly fifteen hours getting fully caught up on your market, your numbers and your competition. You keep everything produced here whether or not we continue.
Fractional doesn't mean occasional. Here's the shape of the work inside an engagement.
Fractional CMO engagements earn their cost where the decisions are complicated and the clicks are expensive: long sales cycles, multiple products, real competitors, and a number at the top that someone has to answer for.
Most agencies keep the accounts in their own name so leaving is expensive. It works until the client leaves anyway, and then it shows up in the reviews. We do it the other way, and it is written into the agreement.
Ad spend is billed to you by Google directly, on your card, in your account. We never front it and never mark it up.
No charge for any of it.
| CMO Essential | CMO Executive ⭐ | CMO Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly Investment | $5,500 | $8,500 | $12,500 |
| Executive Hours | 16 hrs | 24 hrs | 36 hrs |
| Meeting Cadence | Monthly | Bi-weekly | Weekly |
| Initial Term | 3 months, then renews | 3 months, then renews | 3 months, then renews |
| Marketing Audit & Roadmap | First month’s hours | First month’s hours | First month’s hours |
| Vendor Management | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| KPI Dashboards & Call Tracking | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Budget Planning | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Team Leadership | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Marketing Hiring Assistance | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Board Presentations | — | ✓ | ✓ |
| Marketing Dept. Buildout | — | — | ✓ |
| M&A Marketing Diligence | — | — | ✓ |
Call and we'll be into your actual numbers inside ten minutes: what the positions in your market are worth, what you're currently buying, and whether there's enough gap to be worth doing. If there isn't, I'll tell you on that call.
Call to book an appointment 866-TRACK-SALES Mon–Fri · 9am–5pm MST · You reach Patrick directly