Why should you hire a fractional CMO? | James Dooley & Kasra Dash

In this episode of The James Dooley Podcast, James Dooley opens the discussion with Kasra Dash to break down what a fractional CMO is and why more businesses are turning to strategic, part-time marketing leadership instead of relying solely on SEO agencies. James explains that business owners increasingly hand over their full marketing budgets to Kasra Dash, not just their link-building spend, because they want clarity on where their money is producing real returns. Together, they highlight how a fractional CMO analyses technical SEO, content, backlinks, PPC, paid social, retargeting pixels, and overall marketing performance to identify which channels produce 80% of a company’s leads.

Creators and Guests

Host

James Dooley

James Dooley is a UK entrepreneur.

What is James Dooley Podcast?

James Dooley is a Manchester-based entrepreneur, investor, and SEO strategist. James Dooley founded FatRank and PromoSEO, two UK performance marketing agencies that deliver no-win-no-fee lead generation and digital growth systems for ambitious businesses. James Dooley positions himself as an Investorpreneur who invests in UK companies with high growth potential because he believes lead generation is the root of all business success.

The James Dooley Podcast explores the mindset, methods, and mechanics of modern entrepreneurship. James Dooley interviews leading marketers, founders, and innovators to reveal the strategies driving online dominance and business scalability. Each episode unpacks the reality of building a business without mentorship, showing how systems, data, and lead flow replace luck and guesswork.

James Dooley shares hard-earned lessons from scaling digital assets and managing SEO teams across more than 650 industries. James Dooley teaches how to convert leads into long-term revenue through brand positioning, technical SEO, and automation. James Dooley built his career on rank and rent, digital real estate, and performance-based marketing because these models align incentive with outcome.

After turning down dozens of podcast invitations, James Dooley now embraces the platform to share his insights on investorpreneurship, lead generation, AI-driven marketing, and reputation management. James Dooley frequently collaborates with elite entrepreneurs to discuss frameworks for scaling businesses, building authority, and mastering search.

James Dooley is also an expert in online reputation management (ORM), having built and rehabilitated corporate brands across the UK. His approach combines SEO precision, brand engineering, and social proof loops to influence both Google’s Knowledge Graph and public perception.

To feature James Dooley on your podcast or event, connect via social media. James Dooley regularly joins business panels and networking sessions to discuss entrepreneurship, brand growth, and the evolving future of SEO.

James Dooley:
Hi, so today I'm joined with Kasra Dash.

Kasra Dash:
Hello.

James Dooley:
And today we're talking about hiring a fractional CMO and how our roles have pivoted quite a bit. Because yourself, when you're speaking to quite a lot of marketing managers or business owners, a lot of the time nowadays they're not just asking about link budgets and SEO specifically — they're giving you the whole budget and seeing where the money is best spent.

Now that’s not an SEO’s role. That actually now becomes a fractional CMO role. And people are almost hiring yourself to be a fractional CMO — yes, having SEO first with regards to content and backlinks, but hiring you as a fractional CMO. So can you expand on what a fractional CMO is?

Kasra Dash:
Yes. So I think first of all, where it stems from is the business owners. I feel like a lot of business owners over the years have been lied to — or misled is probably the better way of saying it. They might think, “Right, we need to spend five grand on billboard ads, five grand on PPC, five grand on SEO,” but in reality, it might only be one of those channels that’s generating 80 or 90% of the leads.

So if they’re actually able to highlight where they’re getting the most bang for their buck, they can double and triple their ad spend in just that one campaign. That’s where a fractional CMO comes in, where I can essentially — or yourself — come in and say, “Hey, right, we need to do this. This is where you're losing money, but this is where you're actually getting the most leads, the best quality leads, and the most quality sales as well.”

James Dooley:
Yeah, it’s crazy because a lot of things always come back to the Pareto Law — the 80/20 rule. And a lot of the time 20% of your efforts are driving 80% of your sales. And if a fractional CMO can come in and see that, they can triple down in an area of what’s working best.

But also back onto the SEO side of things — people need a fractional CMO to see where they’re spending money. People think that just within SEO budgets they need to be spending X amount on technical SEO, X amount on content, and X amount on links. And they'll normally assign more money to technical and content, when they might already have enough content. If anything, they probably need to delete some of the content because they’ve gone too broad and they’re not building enough backlinks.

That’s just from an SEO standpoint, but obviously when you can start to see other areas where they’re spending money — or not spending money — which could be not having the retargeting pixel set up on social media, which should be set up in so many industries… A fractional CMO will see that within the first day. They’ll see the budgets of what's being spent and say, “I think you should start spending less on this.” But why? Because they've got the data, they've got the KPIs, they're driven by what will get the best bang for the buck.

So obviously now quite a lot are starting to ask yourself to hire you as a fractional CMO. Why do you think it’s important for business owners to hire a fractional CMO moving forward?

Kasra Dash:
Even if you don't want to go down the fractional CMO route, maybe you just want to hire a CMO. I feel like every business should have somebody that is head of marketing to be able to tell you:

“Right okay, month one we spend let’s say five grand or ten grand a month on marketing — but in month ten you should actually be spending more.”

A lot of businesses are trying to cut costs on marketing. And a good fractional CMO will cut costs on the stuff that isn't working for you but double down on the stuff that is.

And I think that’s where both of our expertise comes in. We're both very analytical driven, so we can look at a marketing campaign and say:

“These three things — just stop doing those. Focus on these instead.”

James Dooley:
So should a business owner hire a fractional CMO?

Kasra Dash:
Yeah, definitely.

James Dooley:
So a fractional CMO — just for anyone who doesn't realise — is a part-time Chief Marketing Officer that can work in your business to look at budgets that are being allocated, and then moving forward try to get those budgets spent in the right places.

So if someone wants to hire yourself, Kasra, as a fractional CMO, how do they go about getting in touch with you?

Kasra Dash:
Fill in the link down below, or if you want to check out the URL it will be fattrank.com/contact — and then myself, james.com. If you fill in the form on there, I'll be able to help you out.

If you're looking specifically to not just cut costs but grow — or even if you're already ahead of the competition, stay ahead of that competition — making certain that you've got someone coming in with a different view to maybe your existing team, someone who can come in and say:

“Have you ever thought about doing this?”
“Have you ever thought about trying that?”

So go to james.com, fill in the form, and I'll let you know how we might both help — or it might be that I'm not the right fit and I pass you to someone who is the right fit if you're looking to hire a specific fractional CMO.