Before you hire...
will it be enough?
You have budget for one more hire. Your roadmap needs a designer, a web developer, an automation specialist, a copywriter, a social media manager, a CRM administrator, a paid media specialist, and someone to coordinate all of it. This is how you build the marketing team you wish you had.
That team already exists. We run these programs for some of the largest brands in the world, and we happen to sit in the Highway 50 backyard: Folsom, El Dorado Hills, and Rancho Cordova.
Schedule a consultationBefore you post that job...
Ask yourself: do you really need a HubSpot administrator?
Or do you actually need:
Most companies do not need another employee. They need experienced capability on demand.
The first 90 days
Momentum you can report, not an onboarding project.
You have probably been burned by the agency that spends a quarter getting oriented. Here is the cadence we hold ourselves to:
Weeks 1 and 2
We absorb the plan
Your roadmap, brand standards, systems, and sales process, learned well enough to execute without hand-holding. The first quick wins get picked in the same conversations.
Weeks 3 and 4
First work ships
The first campaigns, pages, and automation fixes go live. You see deliverables on the calendar, not status meetings about getting oriented.
Months 2 and 3
The backlog becomes a schedule
Your roadmap runs as a managed production calendar, with a reporting cadence your executive team can follow and a backlog that visibly shrinks.
Every month after that runs the same way: priorities set by you, production run by us, and a status you can repeat to your executive team without translating it first.
"He's your problem-solving, digital marketing secret weapon. If you've ever built an automated email system from scratch, you know that unexpected problems can pop up at every turn. What I thought was going to be a long and difficult build became a quick and easy project."
"The combination of best practice support and technical build-out provided by Tactical Marketing has been very valuable. Without this support, and the development we have done with Tactical Marketing, it would have been easy to fail."
Our consulting approach
We build to your strategy, not around it.
You do not need another agency handing you a strategy deck. You need a team that can absorb yours quickly and start building. The first weeks of the engagement are spent learning your business well enough to execute without hand-holding, starting here:
Your marketing roadmap
The campaigns and programs you have already committed to, and what each one needs in order to ship.
Brand and creative standards
Voice, design system, and approval expectations, so the first deliverables look like your team made them.
Customer journey
How your buyers research, compare, and decide, so campaigns and content meet them where they actually are.
Sales process
How deals really move from first conversation to signature, so automation, routing, and scoring match reality.
Systems and data
Your platforms, integrations, and CRM records: what works, what is held together with duct tape, and what the data can be trusted for.
Production bottlenecks
Where work stalls today: approvals, handoffs, or missing skill sets, so the backlog starts moving in the first month.
From there the build runs against your priorities, not a service menu, and the people doing the work are the ones who sat in the planning conversation. Where the review shows the portal was never stood up correctly in the first place, that repair work is a discipline of its own; our approach to it is documented on the HubSpot implementation page.
Free download
Read the process before you talk to anyone.
The Complete Marketing Process guide documents how we plan, build, and report, so you can pressure-test our approach on your own time.
Get the guideThe engagement
The fractional marketing operations retainer.
This is the specialist team behind your leadership: the roles your roadmap calls for and the coordination of them, under one monthly number. Every stream of work is accountable to a result you can show your executive team. When HubSpot is your platform, we run Marketing Hub as the operating system underneath all of it.
Campaign Management & Production
Campaigns ship on schedule, built to your brief.
- Campaign management
- Email campaigns
- Landing pages
- Design and ad creative
- Copywriting and ad copy
- Social media posts
- Web development support
Marketing Automation
Your systems do what everyone believes they do.
- Lifecycle automation
- Workflow builds
- Lead routing
- Lead scoring
- Platform administration
Data & CRM
Records you can segment and reporting your executives use.
- CRM administration
- Data hygiene
- Dashboards and reporting
- Attribution
Paid Media & Demand
Budget spent against the plan, not on autopilot.
- Paid media strategy
- Ad campaign management
- Landing page testing
- Budget pacing
Behind all of it sits coordination: planning, assignments, quality control, and deadlines, so the managing does not land on you. CRM development, SEO consulting, and deeper technical work round out the bench where your roadmap calls for them.
"The automated Certificate program that the Tactical MA team and I worked on earlier this year wrapped up a few weeks ago and generated over $10 million in deposits."
The hiring math
One hire buys one skill set.
Run the math on the req you were about to post. A specialist salary buys one discipline: the designer cannot build automation, the automation specialist cannot write ad copy, and neither wants to own paid media. Whichever way you choose, the other backlogs stay open, plus you inherit a recruiting cycle, a ramp, and a single point of failure when they leave.
The retainer converts that same budget line into a coordinated specialist team: every discipline your roadmap requires, applied in whatever mix the month calls for, coordinated by us and directed by you. We do not replace your leadership or become your marketing department. You own the strategy; we are the execution capacity behind it, so you can do the job you were actually hired to do.
Your current team
Your team gets better. Nobody gets replaced.
Most of the marketing leaders we work with already have a small team, and every person on it is wearing more hats than the job description listed. The generalist running email is also the de facto designer. The coordinator became the CRM admin by default. Everyone is busy, and the roadmap still is not moving.
The retainer takes the hats they never asked to wear. Your people keep the work they are good at and closest to; we cover the specialist roles you have not been able to hire and coordinate the production schedule around everyone. In practice, a three-person team backed by the retainer operates like the ten-person department your roadmap was written for.
We make your team bigger without making it larger.
"I highly recommend Tactical MA. I personally have been working with them for over four years, and their knowledge, guidance, and creative resources have helped to elevate our email marketing program. We consider Tactical MA an extension of our own internal CRM team!"
"With two weeks left to kick off an event I was hosting, I needed a way to track my registrants and provide them event details in a way that stood out. My goal was 30 registrants. I contacted Phil at Tactical Marketing who scheduled a scoping call the following day. We met at 9am and by 5pm that same day I had a beautiful landing page with registration form delivered to me. The final registration count was 31 registrants. I would recommend Tactical to any business requiring expertise and efficiency in their marketing efforts."
Pricing, stated plainly
Typical engagement. Twelve months.
That is a typical number, not a quote: scope moves it in either direction. It sits near the fully loaded cost of a single mid-level specialist, and the difference is what it buys: a coordinated team covering every discipline your roadmap requires, instead of one person covering one. It is on the page because the marketing leaders this engagement fits prefer to know it before the first conversation.
Schedule a consultationThe local advantage
Close enough to be in the room.
Most consulting relationships happen entirely over video calls. Ours does not have to. We are based on the Highway 50 corridor, which means quarterly planning happens in your conference room, automation strategy gets whiteboarded in person, and when a launch matters we can sit with your team while it ships.
That proximity matters more here than the usual local-SEO gesture. Folsom's semiconductor and enterprise software companies run procurement cycles that reward a consultant who can be in the room with sales leadership. Rancho Cordova's financial services and insurance operations carry compliance questions that go faster face to face. And the wealth management and advisory firms around El Dorado Hills tend to prefer working relationships built the same way they build their own: in person, over time.
The work itself is the same discipline we bring to every engagement. The difference is that when the conversation needs a whiteboard, we bring one.
More on how we work in each city:
Why Tactical MA
We work for marketing leaders, not around them.
Plenty of firms can execute marketing tasks. The difference that shows up in your pipeline comes from the order in which decisions get made, and from a team that treats your strategy as the brief rather than a suggestion. Four principles run through every engagement:
Strategy before software
We work out what the business needs from marketing before we touch a setting. The platform serves the plan, never the reverse.
Business process before automation
Automating a broken process just produces mistakes faster. We fix the process first, then automate what deserves to be automated.
Methodology before tactics
Our engagements run on a documented methodology, so the work is deliberate and repeatable rather than a stream of one-off tasks.
Consulting before execution
We diagnose before we prescribe. Recommendations come from understanding your business, not from a service menu.
Talk it through before you post the req.
A working conversation about your plan, your team, and where the work stalls. You leave with an honest read on what a right-sized team looks like, whether or not we work together.
Frequently asked questions
QWe already have HubSpot. Is this still relevant?+
QWhat if we already have internal marketing staff?+
QWhy not just make the hire?+
QWho manages the work?+
QWhat happens during the consultation?+
QWhy is the engagement twelve months?+
Schedule your consultation
An expert assessment, not a sales pitch.
The consultation is a working conversation about your plan, your team, and where the work stalls. You will leave with an honest read on what a right-sized team would look like, whether or not we work together. We respond to every request within one business day.