Full marketing audit
3-4 week engagement. Channel-by-channel review, technical SEO, paid media, content, social, brand. Output: 30-50 page audit document with prioritized recommendations and a written transition plan if hiring an agency.
Strategy & Consulting
Marketing strategy,
Marketing strategy,
scoped to your business.
Marketing audits, channel modeling, campaign planning, in-house team coaching. For businesses that do not need a full retainer but do need senior marketing brainpower at the table.
What is marketing strategy consulting? Marketing strategy consulting is fixed-scope engagement work where you buy hours of senior marketing thinking instead of an ongoing retainer. At Critical Marketing, we offer four formats: full marketing audits, fractional CMO retainers, in-house team coaching, and project-based planning (RFP responses, campaign launches, rebrand transitions). Best fit when your business has marketing staff who can execute but needs senior strategic direction.
When you should hire us for strategy consulting (and when you should not).
Hire us when:
- You have an in-house marketing person or team that can execute, but the strategic plan is unclear
- You are about to spend significant money on a campaign and want a sanity check first
- You are interviewing agencies and want a neutral third party to evaluate their proposals
- You are launching a new product, market, or vertical and need outside perspective
- You bought a business and need to figure out what its marketing program is actually doing
- You need a board / investor-ready marketing plan
Do not hire us for strategy consulting when:
- You actually need executional capacity. Strategy without execution does nothing. If you do not have in-house staff, hire us for a retainer instead.
- You want validation of a decision you have already made. We will tell you the truth, even when it is not what you want to hear.
- You need someone to "just write a quick strategy doc." That work is fake. Real strategy takes 20-60 hours minimum.
What we do.
Fractional CMO
Monthly retainer. Senior marketing direction on a fixed time block per month. Weekly strategy call. Quarterly written strategy review. Best fit for mid-sized businesses with in-house marketing staff who need senior direction.
In-house team coaching
Hourly engagement. We work alongside your marketing team to upskill specific capabilities (Google Ads, SEO, content production, analytics). The goal is to build internal capability that lasts beyond the engagement.
Project consulting
Fixed-scope project engagements. Campaign launches, market entry, RFP responses, rebrand transitions, M&A marketing integration. Output is a written deliverable with implementation roadmap.
What a strategy engagement actually delivers.
Strategy consulting is the easiest agency offering to fake. Most "strategy" engagements deliver a 60-slide deck of frameworks no one reads, a SWOT exercise, and an invoice. The output that earns the fee is much smaller and much more specific:
- A written diagnosis. What is actually happening in the business right now. Pulled from real data: GA4, GSC, the ad accounts, the CRM, the books. Not a hypothetical scenario.
- A ranked list of the 3-5 highest-leverage moves. Out of everything you could do, the small number that produce most of the result. Usually only one or two of these moves are what you came in expecting.
- The honest disqualifications. The things you should stop doing. The channels you should turn off. The retainer line items that are not pulling weight. The agency relationships that should end. Most strategy decks duck this part. Ours does not.
- A 90-day execution plan with named owners. Not "the marketing team will." Specific people, specific deliverables, specific dates. If we cannot tie a move to a named human who will do it, it does not belong in the plan.
- A measurement framework with baseline numbers. What you will track to know if it is working. Baseline numbers documented at the start so 90 days from now there is no argument about whether the work moved the needle.
Engagement length is typically a 2-4 week sprint to deliver the document, then optional follow-on hours for execution oversight. Hire us for strategy when your team has execution capacity and needs the read on what to do. Hire us for a full retainer when you also need someone to execute it.
Frequently asked questions.
Full retainer: we execute the work end-to-end. Strategy consulting: we tell you what to do; your team executes. Hire consulting when you have execution capacity in-house. Hire retainer when you do not.
Yes. Honest assessment is the foundation. If your current agency is wasting your money, we will say so. If your in-house marketing person is in over their head, we will say so. If your industry is harder than competitors realize, we will say so.
Yes. We have done third-party RFP reviews where we evaluate competing agency proposals on your behalf. We are honest about our own potential conflict of interest.
No. Real strategy work takes minimum 20-30 hours and there is no honest way to compress that. We will recommend a self-service resource if your budget cannot support a real engagement.
Yes, sometimes. About 1 in 3 of our fractional CMO engagements evolves into a full retainer where we execute. The other 2 in 3 stay strategy-only because that is what the business needs.
Get in touch
Let's talk about
Let's talk about
your strategy.
Tell us where the business is today. We respond same-day or next-day during the work week.