Faceland — Fractional Marketing Leadership & System Stabilisation

Active Mandate · Fractional Marketing Executive · Healthcare / Regulated Clinical Services · Europe · 2025–Ongoing

This project documents my work as a Fractional Marketing Executive supporting Faceland during a period of leadership transition and international growth.

The mandate focuses on stabilising marketing operations, rebuilding trust in data and reporting, and establishing the foundations for scalable, compliant growth across multiple clinic markets.

Context

• Company: Faceland Holding BV
• Industry: Healthcare / Medical Aesthetics (Clinic-based services)
• Geography: Netherlands (HQ), Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy
• Timeframe: Engagement started 2025; ongoing
• Role & mandate: Fractional Marketing Executive, responsible for interim leadership, international performance marketing direction, and the development of marketing intelligence and retention infrastructure

Starting point

At the start of the engagement, Faceland was operating in a high-growth, high-complexity environment with several structural challenges.

Key challenges included:

• Leadership transition
  • A change in senior marketing leadership created a temporary gap in direction, ownership, and decision-making, requiring interim stabilisation and continuity.
• Data and reporting limitations
  • Marketing reporting consistency could be improved, forward-looking insight, and usability for day-to-day decision-making
  • Data ownership and access were fragmented across systems and external partners
• Acquisition-heavy growth model
  • Growth relied on customer acquisition, with opportunities to focus on retention, repeat treatments, and lifecycle communication.
• Technical and compliance constraints
  • Website and booking systems showed functional and conversion-related opportunities
  • Regulatory requirements around consent, cookies, and healthcare advertising required prioritisation and clarification

The overarching constraint was time: stability, clarity, and momentum were required while preparing for a permanent CMO to step in.

Scope of responsibility

Responsible for

• Interim leadership & strategic continuity
  • Providing senior marketing leadership during the transition period
  • Acting as a sparring partner to executive leadership and country teams
• Performance marketing direction
  • Defining scalable, compliant growth approaches across paid channels
  • Aligning international performance efforts with clinic-level realities
• Marketing intelligence & reporting foundations
  • Supporting the design of a marketing BI framework
  • Shifting reporting from manual snapshots toward structured, decision-ready insights
• Customer lifecycle & retention strategy
  • Defining requirements for a modern CRM and retention setup
  • Supporting the move toward legally compliant, treatment-aware customer communication
• Website & conversion prioritisation
  • Identifying and prioritising technical and UX improvements impacting conversion and trust
  • Supporting SEO, tracking, and CRO-related initiatives
• Product and treatment launches
  • Supporting go-to-market preparation for new clinical treatments within regulatory boundaries

Explicitly not responsible for

• Day-to-day execution of all development tasks
• Full HR ownership or direct management of external data vendors

Collaboration model

Worked closely with:

• Executive leadership and finance
• Country managers and local clinic stakeholders
• Internal marketing teams across multiple disciplines
• Selected external partners across data, CRM, and media

Key decisions & initiatives

Shift toward retention and system maturity

A central strategic decision was to rebalance growth:

• from short-term acquisition pressure
• toward retention, lifecycle value, and data reliability

This included:

• prioritising CRM and data foundations
• delaying purely tactical campaign optimisations in favour of structural clarity

Local trust and compliance focus

Given the clinical and regulated context:

• Local clinic visibility and trust signals were prioritised
• Legal clarity around consent, claims, and communication became a first-order concern

What was reinforced or initiated

Reinforced

• Data-led decision-making
• Cross-country alignment through shared metrics and reporting logic

Initiated

• Retention-focused data views and cohort thinking
• Structured preparation for new treatment launches
• Tooling and process improvements to support compliant scaling

Outcomes (current state)

• Marketing operations were stabilised during a leadership transition
• Executive leadership gained clearer visibility into performance drivers and constraints
• A structured action plan was handed over to the incoming CMO
• Foundations for retention-led growth and improved customer lifecycle management were established

From an organisational perspective:

• Decision-making shifted from reactive to structured
• Weekly performance discussions became more forward-looking and data-informed

Lessons learned

What I would repeat

• Addressing data and reporting foundations immediately to restore confidence and momentum

What I would do differently

• Escalating technical dependencies earlier where data access or system clarity blocked progress

What others can learn

In regulated, multi-clinic healthcare environments, sustainable growth rarely comes from acquisition alone.

Retention, compliance, and trustworthy data infrastructure are often the true leverage points.

Frequently Asked Questions

1. What is the primary value of a Fractional Executive during a leadership transition? Stability and continuity. When a CMO or senior leader departs, there is a risk of strategic drift and team anxiety. I step in to provide immediate senior leadership, ensuring that international growth doesn't stall while the board searches for a permanent successor. I don't just "keep the lights on"; I stabilize the operations so the incoming CMO inherits a high-performing engine rather than a list of problems.

2. How do you handle marketing compliance in a regulated healthcare environment like the EU? Compliance is a non-negotiable foundation, not an afterthought. In clinical services, this means balancing aggressive performance marketing with strict adherence to healthcare advertising laws and GDPR. My approach is to build "compliance-by-design" into the data and CRM infrastructure, ensuring that patient consent and communication are both legally sound and commercially effective.

3. Why prioritize data and reporting foundations over tactical campaign optimization? Tactical optimization is useless if it’s based on fragmented or unreliable data. By rebuilding the BI (Business Intelligence) framework first, we restore executive confidence in the numbers. Once the data ownership is centralized and the reporting is decision-ready, every dollar spent on performance marketing becomes significantly more efficient and measurable.

4. How does the "Acquisition vs. Retention" balance shift in a clinical growth model? In high-growth clinic groups, the cost of acquisition (CAC) is often high. Sustainable profitability is found in the "Lifetime Value" (LTV)—getting patients to return for follow-up treatments and long-term care. My focus at Faceland was to shift the strategy toward retention-led growth, implementing CRM and lifecycle communication that treats the patient relationship as a long-term asset.

5. How do you collaborate with existing internal teams and external vendors in an interim role? I act as a "translator" and a "sparring partner." I align the internal team’s specialized skills with the executive board's financial goals. For external vendors, I provide the clear mandate and accountability they often lack during leadership gaps. The goal is to remove technical and political blockers so everyone can return to high-velocity execution.