# AI Growth Marketing Team: your fractional marketing team on retainer
One strategist, an AI agent layer trained on your business, and a six-month minimum. Pages ship from month one. You own the agents at the end.
## Who the retainer is for
A strategy that nobody executes is a well-formatted opinion. Most teams that finish a strategic engagement hit the same wall: the plan calls for forty pages, the team has capacity for four, and hiring the missing capacity takes two quarters. The gap between blueprint and published page is where organic programs quietly die.
The retainer closes that gap. Marketing as a service, in the literal sense: a defined production cadence, a fixed monthly fee, and a deliverables list you can audit. It fits three situations.
### You’ve completed the Strategy Sprint.
The strategy, semantic core, and page templates exist. Now they need hands: 4–8 pages a month, optimization, reporting. The retainer is the execution arm of the Strategy Sprint.
### You need a fractional marketing team, not a fractional opinion.
A solo advisor sets direction; execution still stalls without production capacity. Here one strategist directs and an agent team produces, in parallel.
### You want the capability, not the dependency.
Every cycle compounds inside a system that transfers to your account at engagement end. A tech or SaaS team that intends to bring marketing in-house eventually starts here.
## What the retainer covers
### Monthly
- 4–8 new pages produced: new builds or full rewrites, drafted by agents from your templates, dossier, and semantic targets, reviewed by the strategist before you see them
- 2–4 existing pages optimized against current SERP patterns
- Weekly sync call with the strategist
- Slack channel access between calls
- Monthly performance report: positions, clicks, conversions, and qualitative findings against the baselines set in the Sprint
### Quarterly
- Semantic core refresh: SEMrush re-collection, GSC export, re-clustering, updated priorities
- SERP re-analysis for the top three clusters
- Strategy adjustment based on what the data shows, documented in the strategy file
## Commercial terms
### Fixed monthly fee, quoted at discovery.
Two volume bands: up to four pages a month with optimization, or up to eight with optimization and conversion experiments. The fee does not change mid-term without a new scope agreement.
### Monthly invoicing, net-14.
One Statement of Work for the full term, signed before month 1.
### Six-month minimum.
Not a retention device: search runs on its own clock. Indexing, ranking, and signal accumulation take months regardless of who does the work, and the term includes two quarterly strategy checkpoints. Six months is the shortest window in which movement is measurable and the transfer is clean.
### Runs in your environment.
The agents are configured in your own Claude Code workspace, under your accounts and API keys, with budget limits set at onboarding. Model usage stays on your subscription: no pass-through billing, no markup.
### Prerequisite.
A completed Strategy Sprint, by us or as a verified audit of equivalent work.
### Pilot terms.
The first clients work at reduced terms in exchange for a publishable case study. Ask during discovery.
## Yours at retainer end
- Everything the Sprint produced: dossier, competitive analysis, semantic core, SERP analyses, templates, strategy document
- Six months of configured, production-tested agents: content production, optimization, reporting
- All published content and the full optimization log
- Measured baselines and six monthly reports: the evidence of what works in your category
- The instruction set and automation scripts, under your accounts, re-runnable with your API keys
## Questions teams ask before committing to a fractional marketing team
**Can I start the retainer without the Strategy Sprint?**
No. The retainer executes a strategy; without one, production has no targets. Marketing as a service only works when the service has a documented plan behind it. If you’ve done equivalent strategic work elsewhere, we audit it at discovery; if it holds, it stands in for the Sprint.
**What determines the monthly fee?**
Production volume. The lower band covers up to four pages a month plus optimization; the upper band covers up to eight, plus conversion experiments. Both are fixed monthly fees, quoted at discovery and defined in the Statement of Work. The fee maps to the deliverables list, line by line.
**What if my priorities shift mid-retainer?**
The quarterly checkpoint exists for exactly this: semantic core refresh, SERP re-analysis, and a documented strategy adjustment. Smaller shifts surface at the weekly sync and re-route the next production cycle. What doesn’t change mid-term is the cadence and the fee; the targets within them can.
**Do I approve content before it publishes?**
Yes, if you want to. Every page passes strategist review before it reaches you, and your approval workflow is set in month one: full review, spot-check, or publish-and-notify. Most clients move from full review to spot-check within two months, once the first batches prove the system’s accuracy.
**What happens if I cancel before six months?**
The six-month minimum is a fixed commitment in the Statement of Work, because organic search runs on its own clock: indexing, ranking, and signal accumulation take months regardless of who does the work, and the term includes two quarterly checkpoints that course-correct against real data. Early termination terms are defined in the MSA, and whatever has been built to that point transfers to you; nothing is held back. The minimum protects the result, not our revenue: the engagement is designed to end cleanly, with you owning everything.
**How does this compare to hiring an in-house content marketer?**
On output, one hire produces a fraction of the cadence: 4–8 SERP-justified pages a month requires research, drafting, and optimization running in parallel, which is a team’s workload. On cost, a loaded mid-senior salary exceeds the retainer. On risk, the hire leaves with the knowledge; the retainer ends with the system staying. The honest trade-off: an employee covers ad hoc work outside the defined scope. The retainer doesn’t.
**What happens after the transfer? Can my team run it alone?**
That is the design goal. The handover session, the instruction set, and the documentation exist so your team can operate and extend the system. If they need a specific new capability or deeper training later, the Automation Advisory covers it as a fixed-scope project.
## Ready to start with the AI Growth Marketing Team?
A 30-minute discovery call: we check the prerequisite, scope the production volume, and quote the fee. No obligation.
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Source: https://thehine.ai/services/ai-growth-marketing-team
Last updated: 2026-06-10