Fractional & Embedded Marketing Leadership

Marketing leadership for products that are hard to explain.

For twenty years I've built and run marketing functions for B2B companies—from early-stage to $35M in revenue—turning technical products into clear positioning, packaging, and pipeline.

About

I'm Mike Yost. Through my practice, Yost Creative Solutions, I step in as the marketing lead inside a growing company—the way a full-time director would, without the cost or permanence of the hire.

That means I own the whole function: how the company is positioned, how the story gets told, how demand gets built, and the systems underneath that turn attention into pipeline. It isn't an agency handing you a strategy deck, and it isn't a freelancer clearing tickets. I run marketing from the inside, accountable for the outcome.

I've done this across industrial and infrastructure supply, B2B software, healthcare-adjacent businesses, professional services, trade associations, and enterprise IT—the kind of markets where the product is genuinely complex and the buyer needs a reason to care.

How an engagement works

The Model

Embedded, not advisory. I work as your marketing director—in your tools, your meetings, and your calendar. You get senior leadership accountable for results, not a vendor delivering artifacts.

The Scope

Positioning and messaging, brand and creative direction, demand generation and content, and the technical stack underneath it: SEO, analytics, and AI-assisted workflows. Broad on purpose, because the function has to hold together.

The Rhythm

Most engagements run several quarters at a fixed weekly cadence. Enough presence to actually lead the function, structured so you're paying for the work and not an agency's overhead.

Selected results

0 → 1 Built marketing departments from the ground up for multiple companies—brand and creative direction, full collateral systems, the martech stack, and hiring and training the teams that run them.

2× / 3× Roughly doubled site traffic and tripled online membership sign-ups for a 140-member global trade association—the sign-up jump came from replacing phone-and-paper enrollment with self-serve registration and an events calendar for its quarterly conferences.

~$10K/mo Cut about $10K a month in wasted ad spend while roughly doubling click-through for a global B2B services company—rebuilt targeting, creative, and keyword strategy from the ground up.

2× speed Rebuilt a B2B site around technical SEO and Core Web Vitals—roughly doubling page speed and earning first-page Google rankings, many at #1, across most product categories—all feeding a gated funnel of white papers and case studies.

Client names withheld. Every number here has a story and the receipts behind it—ask me about any of them.

The range

Companies from early-stage to $35M in revenue, with teams from two people to a couple hundred. Marketing budgets up to $500K a year.

Industrial & Infrastructure Supply/B2B SaaS/Healthcare-Adjacent/Professional Services/Trade Associations/Enterprise IT & Services

Get in touch

If someone sent you here, they already vouched for the work.

The best way to reach me is directly. Tell me what you're building and where marketing is stuck, and I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right person for it.

contact@michaelyost.com