Part-time head of marketing · UK
Hire a part-time head of marketing for the plan
A part-time head of marketing is a senior marketer who owns the plan, the budget and the results on a fixed share of the week, employed part-time or engaged on a day rate.
Give us the brief on a 15-minute call and we come back with a shortlist of three to five, each with day rate or pay, availability and IR35 position.
- Shortlist of 3–5
- Day rate or pay, availability and IR35 on each
- Set days, every week
- Employed or day rate
How a brief runswhat we undertake
- 01Brief30-MINUTE SCOPING CALLDay 0
- 02Shortlist of 3–5VETTED · RATE BENCHMARK · IR35After the brief
- 03InterviewsYOU MEET THE SHORTLISTYour diary
- 04Scoped startFIRST-MONTH OUTCOMES AGREEDYou set the date
- 05Fractional, interim and permanentIR35 POSITION SET OUTOn every brief
Shortlist3–5
15 minutes · video or phone
Book 15 minutes to scope the role
Tell us the situation, the days and the start date. We come back with part-time head of marketing candidates, their day rates and availability.
- 0115 minutes, video or phone
- 02We scope the days and the pattern
- 03A shortlist of 3–5 after the call
- 04Fractional, interim, part-time and permanent briefs
Pick a day that suits · live availability
On the board · last 3 months
Part-time head of marketing and marketing director roles on the board
No Part-time head of marketing and marketing director roles on the board right now.
We only show real vacancies from the last three months, read from the Fractional Quest pipeline — we never pad the board. New roles appear here as the pipeline finds them.
Looking? Build your repo once on Fractional Quest and every role on the board is read against it.
Sign up now →01/ definition
What a part-time head of marketing actually owns
The job is to turn marketing from a list of activities into a plan with a number attached.
A part-time head of marketing decides where the budget goes, who does the work, what gets measured and what stops.
The days are fixed, so agencies, freelancers and the in-house team know when decisions get made.
DIAGNOSE
Finds out what is working
Channels, spend, attribution, the website, the CRM and the sales handover. Most first months uncover spend nobody can tie to a result and a channel nobody has tried properly.
Finds out what is working. Channels, spend, attribution, the website, the CRM and the sales handover. Most first months uncover spend nobody can tie to a result and a channel nobody has tried properly.
Writes a plan with targets. Positioning, the target customer, the two or three channels worth backing, a budget by quarter and the measures the board will see.
Directs the people who do the work. Briefs and manages agencies and freelancers, sets priorities for an in-house team and signs off the work that goes out under the brand.
Reports results the board can trust. Leads, pipeline, cost per acquisition and revenue influenced, reported the same way every month and agreed with sales.
Leaves a function that can run without them. Hires or develops the marketing executive or manager below, documents the process and hands over cleanly if the role grows into a full-time seat.
02/ scope
Where the part-time role draws its line
Set the boundary before the first day.
A part-time head of marketing who spends the days making assets has stopped leading.
- The marketing plan and its targets
- The marketing budget and channel mix
- Brand positioning and messaging
- Agency and freelancer selection and briefs
- Marketing reporting to the board
- The marketing-to-sales handover
- Compliance of campaigns with advertising and privacy rules
- Content writing and design (to the team or agencies)
- Paid media buying (to a specialist or agency)
- Social posting and community management
- Website build and maintenance
- Event logistics
03/ which model
Part-time, fractional or full-time?
Set the days the marketing seat needs and for how long.
A fixed two or three days is part-time; a senior marketer on a flexible share of the week alongside other clients is a fractional marketing director; four or five days for a fixed term is an interim.
Fractional Quest, our parent company, runs all of these searches.
The model that fits · head of marketing
Part-time
A fixed slice of the week on a set pattern — the same days each week, often on a part-time contract or a day-rate arrangement.
Book a call about a part-time head of marketing →Our framing, not a measured rule: the lines between the four models blur, and many briefs could run two ways.
04/ alternatives
A part-time marketing lead against the alternatives
Each option buys something different: leadership, capacity or specialist skill.
Be clear which you are short of.
→ Part-time when you need direction more than hours; full-time when you need both.
05/ decision
When to hire a part-time marketing lead
Four situations account for most part-time senior marketing hires.
Which sounds like you?
Several agencies, a few freelancers and a monthly bill, but no single owner and no number the board believes. A part-time head of marketing consolidates, measures and cuts what does not work.
- → Multiple agencies with no single brief
- → No agreed marketing metrics
- → Spend rising faster than leads
A capable junior marketer is doing their best with no one senior to set priorities or review the work. Two days a week of leadership changes what they produce.
- → Junior team with no senior lead
- → Founder signing off every post
- → Activity without a plan
A defined push that needs senior marketing judgement for a year or so, without committing to a full-time salary before the results are in.
- → New product or market entry
- → Rebrand on the roadmap
- → Board asking for a growth plan
A departure is a chance to ask whether the seat needs five days. Many businesses find that a part-time leader directing an agency or a small team covers the brief.
- → Resignation in the marketing seat
- → Strong agency relationships in place
- → Budget pressure on senior salaries
06/ tax and IR35
How a part-time head of marketing is engaged
General position under UK rules, with the HMRC source for each point. Not tax advice — check your own case with your accountant.
01 · DEDUCTIBLE
Fees are a business expense
Fees, like a salary, are deductible against profits when incurred wholly and exclusively for the trade (HMRC BIM37000), with corporation tax at the 25% main rate.
02 · WHO DECIDES
Status turns on how the work runs
Medium and large clients make the off-payroll status determination themselves; for a small private-sector client, the executive’s own company does (HMRC off-payroll guidance).
03 · WHAT HMRC LOOKS AT
Substitution, control, mutuality
Whether a substitute could genuinely be sent, who decides how the work is done, and whether either side must offer or accept further work. HMRC’s CEST tool walks through the same questions.
04 · ON THE PAYROLL
A part-time employee is an employee
Hired on a part-time contract, the executive has the same rights as a comparable full-time worker, pro rata (gov.uk part-time worker rights), and you pay employer NI on their salary.
07/ guide
Hiring part-time marketing leadership: what to get right
A part-time head of marketing is a leadership hire, not a capacity hire.
If what you need is more content, more campaigns or more social posts, a freelancer or an agency is the cheaper answer.
You need a head of marketing when nobody is deciding which of those things to do, or measuring whether they worked.
Decide employed or day-rate early.
A part-time employee on a two or three-day contract gets pay, holiday and benefits pro rata, and must not be treated less favourably than a comparable full-time employee because of the shorter week (GOV.UK: part-time worker rights).
A head of marketing engaged on a day rate through their own company is also common; if your company is medium or large, you make the IR35 status determination (HMRC: off-payroll working).
Write the brief around one or two outcomes.
“Grow the brand” is not a brief.
“Build a plan that doubles qualified inbound leads within the budget we have, and hire the marketing manager who will run it day to day” is.
The outcome tells you whether you need a demand-generation specialist, a brand builder or someone who can do both.
Match the candidate to your stage and model.
A head of marketing from a business-to-business software company and one from a consumer brand have different instincts about channels, budgets and timescales.
Ask for evidence from a business like yours: the plan they wrote, the budget they ran and what changed in the numbers.
Fix the days around decisions.
Weekly priorities with the team, the monthly report and the sales meeting should fall on the days the head of marketing is in.
Agencies should know which days their work gets reviewed.
There is no published UK day-rate band for a part-time or fractional head of marketing that we can cite, so this page shows no rate table or calculator.
The nearest published figures are for the CMO seat on the part-time CMO page; a head of marketing usually sits below that seat.
On a call we can say what the candidates on your shortlist are asking, and the part-time recruitment agency page explains how we run the search.
10.1/ how to hire
How to hire a part-time head of marketing step by step
Hiring a part-time head of marketing runs in five steps.
Write a one-page brief with the outcomes for the first year, the budget they will manage and the people and agencies they will direct.
Decide the days and whether the role is employed or on a day rate.
Brief one search partner.
Interview a shortlist of three to five, asking each to critique your current marketing in the first meeting and to show a plan they wrote and the results that followed.
Then agree terms, including the days and reporting line.
Our parent company is a fractional recruitment agency that runs part-time, fractional, interim and permanent marketing searches.
Its part-time head of marketing guide sets out the seat from the hiring side, and its fractional marketing director page covers the flexible, portfolio version of the role.
What to put in the brief
The business model and target customer, current marketing spend and where it goes, the team and agencies in place, the CRM and analytics tools, the days and whether they are fixed, the reporting line and the outcomes for year one.
What to watch for at interview
Candidates who want to start by producing work themselves, who cannot explain how they measured past results, or who propose the same channel mix whatever the business.
A strong candidate asks about your customers and your sales process before your logo.
10.2/ the title question
Part-time marketing director or head of marketing?
Businesses use “marketing director” and “head of marketing” for overlapping seats, and the difference is often about structure rather than skill.
A marketing director is more often a board-level or senior leadership title, with a wider remit that can include product marketing, pricing input or commercial strategy.
A head of marketing more often leads the marketing function and reports to a managing director, CEO or commercial director.
For a part-time hire, choose the title that matches where the person will sit and what they will decide.
If they will attend board meetings and own the growth plan, marketing director is honest.
If they will lead the team and the agencies under someone else’s commercial strategy, head of marketing is.
The board above lists both, and the parent site has part-time marketing director jobs as a separate board.
10.3/ which seat
Head of marketing vs CMO on part of the week
On part of the week, the difference between a head of marketing and a chief marketing officer is mostly about where the work sits.
A CMO is an executive-team role: market strategy, brand architecture, pricing input and the marketing story told to investors.
A head of marketing runs the function that delivers it.
If your board needs a marketing voice in strategy, look at a part-time CMO; if you need the function run well, a head of marketing is the better and usually cheaper fit.
The CMO seat has published bands: Connectd’s 2026 figures put fractional CMO day rates at £750–£1,400.
That is a CMO band, not a head of marketing band, and we do not apply it to this seat.
For the fractional version of the CMO role, see the parent site’s fractional CMO guide.
10.4/ the rules
The rules a marketing lead has to own
A head of marketing signs off what goes out under your name, which makes them responsible in practice for two sets of rules.
Non-broadcast advertising, sales promotions and direct marketing in the UK are covered by the CAP Code, enforced by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA: the CAP Code).
Email, text and phone marketing, and cookies on your website, are covered by the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations, with guidance from the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO: direct marketing and PECR).
Ask candidates how they have handled consent for email lists, claims substantiation and cookie banners.
The answers tell you a lot about how carefully they run a function.
08/ process
How we run the search
What we undertake on every brief, run by Fractional Quest, our parent company.
- 01
Brief
A scoping call on the role, the days a week, the start date and what the part-time head of marketing must have delivered.
DAY 0 - 02
Search
We search and screen against that brief: track record at your stage, in your situation, and references we take ourselves.
SCREENING - 03
Shortlist
Three to five candidates, each with day rate or salary, availability and IR35 position set out.
SHORTLIST OF 3–5 - 04
Start
You interview and choose. The executive you choose contracts with you.
YOU CHOOSE
09/ the family
Marketing leadership across Fractional Quest
Part-Time Quest is part of Fractional Quest.
When the marketing seat is fractional, interim, permanent or at CMO level, these pages cover it.
The parent site’s guide to the part-time head of marketing seat.
Part-time marketing director roles and how to hire one.
A marketing director on a flexible share of the week, alongside other clients.
Part-time, fractional, interim and permanent executive search in one firm.
10/ questions
Questions, answered
For hiring managers, and for executives looking for the role.
Book 15 minutes · shortlist of 3–5
Start with the brief.
Fifteen minutes to scope the seat, the days and the start date.