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 lacked consistency, 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 primarily on new customer acquisition, with limited structural focus on retention, repeat treatments, and lifecycle communication.
• Technical and compliance constraints
  • Website and booking systems showed functional and conversion-related limitations and 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.