MaaS: Is Outsourcing Your Marketing Function Worth It?

Marketing as a Service, or MaaS, is a model where a company outsources its marketing function, either in full or in part, to an external provider who operates as an embedded team rather than a traditional agency. Instead of hiring a retainer agency to execute specific deliverables, you bring in a provider who takes ownership of strategy, execution, and performance across the marketing function. It is closer to outsourcing a department than buying a service.

The model has grown in visibility as businesses look for ways to access senior marketing capability without the overhead of building a full in-house team. Whether it delivers on that promise depends almost entirely on how the engagement is structured and what the business actually needs.

The terminology around this model is loose. Some providers call it fractional marketing, others call it outsourced CMO, others use MaaS specifically. The label matters less than the underlying question: are you getting someone who owns the outcome, or someone who completes the brief? Those are very different things, and most businesses do not ask the question clearly enough before signing.

What Does Marketing as a Service Actually Include?

There is no standard definition of MaaS, which is part of the problem. Providers package it differently depending on their strengths, and buyers often do not interrogate the scope carefully enough. At its broadest, a MaaS engagement might cover strategy development, campaign planning, content production, paid media management, SEO, CRM, analytics, and reporting. At its narrowest, it might be a fractional CMO sitting in one day a week to run a team of junior freelancers.

What distinguishes MaaS from a conventional agency relationship is the degree of ownership. A traditional agency takes a brief and executes against it. A MaaS provider, in theory, takes responsibility for the marketing function itself. They are not waiting for direction. They are providing it. That shift in accountability is significant, and it is what most buyers are actually paying for.

In practice, I have seen this blurred in both directions. I have worked with clients who hired a MaaS provider expecting strategic leadership and got a very expensive content production house. I have also seen the reverse, where a business hired what they thought was an agency to execute a defined plan and found themselves with a provider who wanted to rewrite their entire go-to-market approach before touching a single deliverable. Neither is inherently wrong, but the mismatch is expensive.

If you are evaluating MaaS providers, the most useful question to ask is simple: what do you hold yourself accountable for? The answer tells you everything about how they operate.

Who Is MaaS Actually Built For?

The honest answer is that MaaS works well in a narrower set of circumstances than the market suggests. It is genuinely useful for companies in a few specific situations.

The first is a growth-stage business that needs senior marketing capability immediately but cannot afford to hire a full team. Bringing in an experienced operator who can set strategy, build the function, and execute in parallel is a legitimate use case. The economics often stack up better than hiring a CMO plus a team, particularly when the business does not yet know exactly what it needs.

The second is a business going through a transition, a rebrand, a new product launch, an acquisition, or a market entry, where the internal team does not have the bandwidth or the specific expertise to manage it. A MaaS provider can absorb the spike without the business committing to permanent headcount. If you are thinking about how to structure your go-to-market approach during a period like this, the broader Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub covers the strategic frameworks worth understanding before you start scoping any external engagement.

The third is a business where the marketing function has underperformed and leadership wants an external perspective to diagnose the problem and rebuild. This is closer to a turnaround engagement than a standard outsourcing arrangement, and it requires a provider with genuine commercial experience, not just marketing craft.

Where MaaS tends to underperform is in mature businesses with a functioning marketing team that simply wants to extend capacity. In that scenario, a well-structured agency retainer or a specialist freelancer is usually more efficient. You are paying a premium for strategic ownership that you do not actually need.

The Commercial Model Behind MaaS

MaaS is typically priced as a monthly retainer, sometimes tiered by scope or headcount equivalent. The appeal to buyers is predictability: one line on the P&L, no recruitment costs, no employment risk, no benefits overhead. The appeal to providers is recurring revenue with a longer engagement horizon than project work.

The tension in the model is that predictable pricing and outcome-based accountability are genuinely difficult to reconcile. If a provider charges a fixed monthly fee regardless of results, the incentive structure is not aligned with the client’s interests. The provider is incentivised to retain the engagement, not to drive the business outcome that would make the engagement unnecessary.

I ran agencies for a long time, and I understand the commercial pressure from the provider side. Margin depends on utilisation. Utilisation depends on scope. Scope creep is the enemy of profitability. That structural tension does not disappear in a MaaS model. It just gets dressed differently.

The better MaaS arrangements I have seen incorporate performance-linked elements: a base retainer that covers the cost of the team, with upside tied to pipeline generated, revenue influenced, or specific milestones hit. This is not universal, and many providers resist it, which itself tells you something about their confidence in their own output.

BCG’s work on go-to-market pricing strategy makes a point that applies here: pricing structure signals value perception. If a MaaS provider cannot articulate the commercial value they expect to create, they are selling a cost model, not a growth model. Those are different products.

Why MaaS Fails More Often Than It Should

The failure modes are consistent enough that they are worth naming directly.

The first is misaligned expectations at the point of sale. A business hires a MaaS provider expecting them to fix a growth problem. The provider scopes an engagement around marketing activity. When growth does not materialise, both sides are frustrated for different reasons. The business feels let down. The provider points to the deliverables they completed. Both are right and both are wrong.

The second is a provider who lacks genuine commercial experience. Marketing craft and commercial judgment are not the same thing. I have met exceptional marketers who could not read a P&L or hold a conversation about margin contribution. In a MaaS engagement, where the provider is supposed to be making decisions that affect the business, that gap is a real problem.

The third, and the one I think is most underappreciated, is that MaaS cannot fix a business problem that sits outside marketing. I spent years in agency leadership watching clients spend significant sums on marketing for products that were not competitive, at price points that did not make sense, sold by a team that was not equipped to close. Marketing is often a blunt instrument used to prop up companies with more fundamental issues. A MaaS provider who does not have the standing or the courage to name that problem is just burning the client’s budget more efficiently.

Vidyard’s research on why go-to-market feels harder than it used to points to something relevant here: the problem is rarely just marketing execution. It is usually a combination of market conditions, internal alignment, and the quality of the product or offer itself. MaaS providers who scope their engagement as if marketing is the only variable are setting themselves up to underdeliver.

How to Scope a MaaS Engagement That Actually Works

If you are seriously considering MaaS, the scoping conversation is where most of the value is won or lost. A few things worth getting clear before you sign anything.

Start with the outcome, not the deliverables. What does success look like in 12 months? Not “we will have a content programme” or “we will have a refreshed brand.” What commercial outcome are you trying to achieve? More pipeline, higher conversion, better retention, market entry, faster revenue per customer. The MaaS provider should be able to map their engagement directly to that outcome. If they cannot, the scope is wrong.

Be explicit about what sits inside and outside the engagement. MaaS providers often have a core capability and a set of partners or subcontractors for everything else. That is not inherently a problem, but you need to know who is actually doing the work, what the quality control looks like, and where accountability sits when something goes wrong. I have seen MaaS arrangements where the senior operator who sold the engagement was barely involved in day-to-day delivery. That is not MaaS. That is a staffing model with a premium price tag.

Agree on the reporting cadence and the metrics before you start. Not vanity metrics. Revenue-connected metrics. Pipeline generated, cost per qualified opportunity, customer acquisition cost, retention rates. The market penetration frameworks from Semrush are a useful reference point for thinking about which growth metrics actually matter depending on your stage and market position.

Finally, agree on how the engagement ends. A good MaaS provider should be building capability, not dependency. If the model is structured so that the client cannot function without the provider after 18 months, that is a commercial interest, not a client interest. The best engagements I have seen are the ones where the provider is explicit about what they are building toward, whether that is a handover to an in-house team, a transition to a lighter retainer, or a specific milestone that marks the end of the intensive phase.

MaaS vs. Fractional CMO vs. Traditional Agency: What Is the Actual Difference?

These three models are often conflated, and the confusion is understandable because the boundaries are genuinely blurry. But there are meaningful differences worth understanding.

A fractional CMO is an individual, typically a senior operator, who works part-time across one or more businesses. They provide strategic leadership but usually do not bring an execution team. They are a thinking resource, not a doing resource. The value is in the judgment, the experience, and the ability to set direction. The limitation is that without an execution layer, the strategy does not move.

A traditional agency takes a brief and executes against it. The accountability sits with the client for the strategy and with the agency for the execution. The agency is a production resource, not a strategic partner, in most cases. There are exceptions, and the best agency relationships I have been part of involved genuine strategic collaboration. But the default model is brief in, work out.

MaaS, at its best, combines both: strategic ownership and execution capability in a single engagement. The provider sets the strategy, builds the plan, and delivers the work. The client gets a functioning marketing operation without building one from scratch. The risk is that the provider is better at selling this model than delivering it. The market has filled with providers who offer the language of MaaS but the operating model of a traditional retainer agency.

When I was scaling a performance marketing agency from a team of 20 to over 100 people, one of the things I learned is that the model you sell and the model you can actually deliver are not always the same thing at different stages of growth. That gap is worth probing with any MaaS provider you are seriously evaluating.

The Growth Loop Problem MaaS Providers Rarely Talk About

One of the things I have become more interested in over the years is the difference between marketing that captures existing demand and marketing that creates new demand. Early in my career I was heavily focused on lower-funnel performance. I believed, as most performance marketers do, that the channel was driving the result. It took me a long time to accept that a significant portion of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. The customer was already in market. We just intercepted them.

MaaS providers, particularly those with a performance marketing background, tend to optimise for the bottom of the funnel. It is where the attribution is clearest, the results are most visible, and the client is easiest to satisfy in the short term. But it is not where sustainable growth comes from. Sustainable growth requires reaching new audiences, building familiarity over time, and creating the conditions where demand develops before the customer is ready to buy.

Hotjar’s work on growth loops is a useful frame here. A growth loop is a system where the output of one stage becomes the input of the next. Most MaaS engagements are not structured as loops. They are structured as funnels, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. That is a meaningful limitation if the goal is compounding growth rather than linear return.

The better MaaS providers think about this. They ask how the marketing activity they are running today builds the asset base, the audience, the brand familiarity, that makes next year’s marketing more efficient. That is a different conversation from “here is what we will deliver this month.” It is also a harder conversation to have, which is probably why it happens less often than it should.

There is more on this kind of compounding, system-level thinking across the broader growth strategy content on The Marketing Juice, if you want to work through the frameworks before you commit to any external engagement model.

What Good MaaS Actually Looks Like in Practice

The best MaaS engagements I have seen share a few characteristics that are worth naming, because they are not always obvious from the outside.

The provider has a point of view and is willing to defend it. They do not simply validate the client’s existing thinking. When I judged the Effie Awards, one of the things that separated the entries that worked from the ones that did not was clarity of strategic conviction. The campaigns that performed had a clear, defensible idea at their centre, and the teams behind them had been willing to hold that idea under pressure. The same applies to MaaS. A provider who agrees with everything you say is not providing strategic value. They are providing compliance.

The provider has genuine commercial experience, not just marketing experience. They understand margin, they understand what growth actually costs, and they can have a conversation about return on investment that goes beyond cost per click. Vidyard’s Future Revenue Report makes the point that the gap between pipeline potential and actual revenue capture is often a strategic problem, not an execution problem. A MaaS provider who only operates at the execution level cannot close that gap.

The engagement is structured around a defined outcome with a clear end state. Not an open-ended retainer that runs until someone cancels. A good MaaS engagement has a shape: here is what we are building, here is what it looks like when it is working, here is how we will know when the intensive phase is complete. That kind of clarity is harder to sell and harder to deliver, but it is what distinguishes a genuine operating partner from a managed services business that has rebranded itself.

For companies thinking about creator-led go-to-market approaches as part of a broader MaaS scope, Later’s resource on going to market with creators is worth reviewing. It is a specific execution lever, but it illustrates how channel strategy should connect to a broader commercial plan, not sit alongside it as a separate workstream.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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