Every few weeks I sit down with a founder who has the same question written at the top of their notepad. They have got to the point where marketing cannot stay as a job that somebody does on a Friday afternoon, and they want to know whether to hire someone or bring in an outside team.
It is a genuinely difficult decision, and most of the advice available is written by people with an obvious interest in one answer. I run a marketing firm, so I will be upfront about my bias. I still turn work away when hiring is clearly the better route, because a client who outsources for the wrong reason tends to leave within a year and both of us have wasted our time.
What follows is the comparison I actually walk clients through. It covers what each model costs, what you get for the money, and the risks that only show up eighteen months later.
What outsourced marketing means
Outsourced marketing is simply the decision to buy marketing capability rather than employ it. You agree a scope of work with an external provider and pay a monthly fee for it.
In practice it takes three shapes:
Single channel. You keep marketing in-house but hand one specialist area to someone else, usually because it needs skills nobody internally has. Search, paid media and email tend to be the first things to go out.
Project based. A defined piece of work with a start and an end. A website rebuild, a rebrand, a campaign for a new service line.
An outsourced marketing department. The external team covers the whole function, from strategy through to delivery and reporting. This is what most people mean when they talk about outsourced marketing services, and it is the model that competes directly with hiring.
The relevant point for the decision is what the provider absorbs on your behalf. They carry the cost of recruiting, the cost of software licences, the cost of training, and the cost of someone being off sick or on holiday. Those costs do not disappear. They are folded into the fee, spread across their client base.
What an in-house marketing team looks like
In-house marketing means the people doing the work are on your payroll. At the smaller end that is usually one person, and the whole thing lives or dies on who you hire.
The genuine advantages are real and I would not talk anyone out of them. An employee sits in your meetings, hears your sales calls, learns your market and builds relationships across the business. They are available immediately rather than at the next scheduled call. Over time they build knowledge about your customers that no external team will match.
The difficulty is that marketing is not one skill. A competent marketing manager might be strong on content and campaign management, reasonable on email, and completely out of their depth on technical search or paid media analytics. You have bought one point on a very wide map.
Outsourced marketing vs in-house: the short version
| Outsourced marketing | In-house team | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to start | Two to four weeks | Two to four months |
| Breadth of skills | Several specialists | One or two skill sets |
| Cost flexibility | Adjustable with notice | Fixed until you restructure |
| Business knowledge | Builds over months | Deep and immediate |
| Availability | Agreed hours and response times | Daily, in the building |
| Continuity risk | Provider covers absence | One person leaving stops the work |
| Who sets strategy | Usually the provider | Whoever you hired, or nobody |
| Best suited to | Firms needing breadth on a contained budget | Firms with constant internal coordination |
Neither column is the winner. The right answer depends on your budget, the work you need doing, and whether anyone in your business is capable of directing a marketer.
The real cost of hiring an in-house marketer
This is where most comparisons go wrong, because people put a salary against a retainer and stop there.
The average marketing manager salary in the UK sits at roughly £44,500, with a typical range of £37,000 to £53,000 according to Glassdoor data. In London the figure climbs considerably, with several recruiters quoting £50,000 to £80,000.
Take a £45,000 hire and add what the law and the market require on top.
| Cost | Year one | Ongoing (per year) |
|---|---|---|
| Salary | £45,000 | £45,000 |
| Employer National Insurance at 15% above £5,000 | £6,000 | £6,000 |
| Pension at 3% of qualifying earnings | £1,163 | £1,163 |
| Recruitment fee at 18% of salary | £8,100 | Nil |
| Software and licences | £3,600 | £3,600 |
| Laptop and equipment | £1,200 | Nil |
| Training and development | £1,000 | £1,000 |
| Total | £66,063 | £56,763 |
| Monthly equivalent | £5,505 | £4,730 |
A few notes on those figures. Employer National Insurance rose to 15% on earnings above a £5,000 secondary threshold in April 2025, and both the rate and the threshold are frozen. Pension auto-enrolment requires a minimum 3% employer contribution on qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270. Recruitment agencies typically charge between 15% and 25% of first year salary for a permanent placement, so 18% is a middle assumption rather than a worst case.
Then there is the capacity question, which nobody puts in a spreadsheet. Statutory holiday is 5.6 weeks, capped at 28 days for a five day week. Take that off 260 working days and add typical sickness absence, and you are buying roughly 227 working days. Your £4,730 a month is really closer to £5,400 a month of actual working time.
The costs that only appear if it goes wrong
Hiring carries risk that a retainer does not, and the numbers are uncomfortable.
The CIPD puts the average cost per hire at £3,000 to £5,000 for non-management roles and £5,000 to £15,000 for senior and management positions. The Recruitment and Employment Confederation has estimated that a poor hire at manager level costs a business around £132,000 once lost productivity, management time and the effect on the rest of the team are counted.
This is not a rare event. CIPD research in 2024 found that 41% of UK employers had made at least one hiring decision in the previous twelve months that they later regretted.
There is a timing cost too. LinkedIn data put the average UK time to fill at 42 days, and that is before a notice period. Add a three month notice period and you are five to six months from deciding to hire to having anyone produce work.
How much outsourced marketing costs in the UK
Retainers vary widely, and the variation is mostly explained by scope and the seniority of the people involved rather than by the size or location of the provider.
| Scope | Typical UK monthly fee | What it usually covers |
|---|---|---|
| Single channel | £1,250 to £3,500 | One area such as email, search or paid media, with reporting |
| Multi-channel | £3,000 to £6,000 | Two or three channels, content production, monthly reporting |
| Full outsourced department | £3,500 to £16,750 | Strategy, delivery across channels, content, reporting, senior direction |
Most small and mid-sized firms land between £1,500 and £4,000 a month. B2B work generally sits 20% to 35% higher than the equivalent consumer work, because the sales cycles are longer, the content has to do more, and the advertising is more expensive per click.
Two things to check before you compare any two quotes. First, whether media spend and software licences sit inside or on top of the fee, because that difference alone can be £1,000 a month. Second, who is actually doing the work. A £2,000 retainer delivered by a junior is worse value than a £3,500 retainer that includes real senior time.
Cost is only one of six things worth comparing
If the decision came down to money it would be easy. It does not, and the other five factors are usually what determines whether the arrangement works.
Breadth of skills for the same budget
At £4,700 a month you can employ one mid-level marketer. The same budget with an external team typically buys you a share of a strategist, a writer, a designer, a paid media specialist and someone who understands analytics.
That matters more than it used to. Marketing has fragmented into genuinely separate disciplines, and the person who writes a good case study is rarely the person who can diagnose why your conversion tracking is broken.
Where the in-house hire wins is depth on your specific business. Breadth against depth is the honest trade, and which one you need depends on how much of your marketing problem is technical.
Speed to start
An external team can usually begin within two to four weeks. Hiring takes two to four months before anyone starts, and then another two to three months before they are productive.
If you have a commercial reason to move now, that gap of five or six months is the single biggest argument for outsourcing, regardless of cost.
Control and accountability
This is the one people get backwards. The instinct is that an employee gives you more control, and in terms of day to day direction that is true.
Accountability is a different matter. With an employee, if the work does not produce results, your options are training, performance management or dismissal, and all of them are slow. With a provider, you have a contract, an agreed scope, a reporting rhythm and a notice period.
The catch is that this only holds if the contract is specific. A retainer that says "ongoing marketing support" gives you nothing to hold anyone to. Insist on named deliverables and named metrics.
Continuity and key person risk
Marketing has the worst staff retention of any UK industry. The Vestd Employee Retention Report, which analysed 398,006 employees across 1,400 UK companies, found average tenure in marketing of 2.8 years, the lowest of any sector studied.
If your entire marketing function is one employee, you should expect to repeat the hiring process roughly every three years, with a gap of several months each time. During that gap the work stops, and often the knowledge leaves with them.
External teams have their own turnover, but the provider absorbs it. Someone else picks the work up.
Scalability
Retainers can be adjusted with notice. You can add a channel for a launch and drop it afterwards, or pause during a quiet quarter.
Employment does not flex that way. If your revenue falls, the salary is still due, and reducing headcount is slow, expensive and damaging to morale.
For firms with seasonal or lumpy demand, this is often the deciding factor.
Who sets the strategy
The question I ask most often is: who in your business will tell this person what to do?
If the answer is nobody, hiring a marketing executive will not work. They will be capable of executing but not of deciding, and within six months you will have a busy marketer producing activity that nobody can connect to revenue.
That single question resolves more of these conversations than any cost comparison.
When hiring in-house is the right call
I would recommend hiring when most of these are true:
- You can commit £70,000 or more a year to marketing, which is roughly where a proper hire stops being a stretch.
- The work needs daily contact with your sales team, your consultants or your customers.
- Someone senior in the business can set direction and review work properly.
- Your marketing is more about volume and coordination than technical specialism.
- You are confident enough in the next two years of trading to take on a fixed cost.
Firms that run frequent events, produce a high volume of proposals, or need constant sales support usually get more from an employee than from a retainer.
When outsourcing your marketing is the right call
Outsourcing tends to be the better answer when:
- Your budget sits between £1,500 and £5,000 a month, where a hire buys too little.
- You need several different skills rather than a lot of one skill.
- You need to start now rather than in five months.
- Nobody internally can direct a marketer day to day.
- The work is technical, such as search, paid media or marketing automation.
- Your revenue is uneven and a fixed salary is a risk you would rather not carry.
The strongest case is a firm that knows what it wants commercially but has no marketing capability at all. Hiring one person into that situation asks them to be strategist, writer, designer and analyst at once, and almost nobody is all four.
Pros and cons of outsourcing marketing
| Advantages | Disadvantages | |
|---|---|---|
| Outsourced marketing | Several specialists for one budget, starts quickly, flexible, absorbs absence and turnover, no recruitment risk | Less daily immersion, shared with other clients, depends on your briefing, knowledge can sit outside the business |
| In-house marketing | Deep business knowledge, immediately available, fully dedicated, builds internal capability | Narrow skill set, fixed cost, slow to hire, stops entirely if they leave, needs managing |
The hybrid model most firms end up with
The framing of one against the other is a bit false, and the market has already moved past it.
Data from the ANA shows 82% of organisations now run some form of in-house team, while 92% still work with an external agency, which is higher than the 90% recorded in 2018. Bringing work in-house has not replaced outside help. It has changed what people use it for.
The version I see working most often in firms turning over between £1m and £10m has three parts:
One employed marketer at executive or coordinator level, costing £28,000 to £35,000. They know the business, handle the day to day, and are the internal point of contact.
Senior direction from outside, usually a fractional marketing director or a part-time CMO working a day or two a month. This is the piece most firms skip, and it is the reason so many in-house hires underperform. Someone has to own the strategy and hold the plan together.
Specialist delivery where it is needed, buying in technical skills for search, paid media or design rather than hoping one person covers everything.
That combination gives you internal knowledge, senior thinking and specialist execution, usually for less than the cost of one senior hire. It is the setup I recommend most often, and it is worth reading our guide to what a fractional CMO does if the middle piece is unfamiliar.
How to decide
Work through these five questions honestly.
What can you commit for twelve months? Under £3,000 a month, outsource. Between £3,000 and £6,000, look hard at the hybrid model. Above £6,000, hiring becomes genuinely viable.
Who will direct the work? If nobody can brief and review, you need outside seniority before you need internal capacity.
Is the work continuous or specialist? Continuous coordination favours an employee. Technical channel work favours a specialist team.
How predictable is your revenue? A fixed salary against uneven income is a real risk, and worth pricing.
What happens if this person leaves in eighteen months? If the answer is that marketing stops completely, build in some resilience now.
As a rough benchmark for the first question, the Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey, which covered 401 marketing leaders across North America, the UK and Europe, found marketing budgets averaging 7.8% of company revenue. Smaller firms in growth mode often need to spend more than that, and firms in maintenance mode less, but it is a reasonable starting point if you have nothing else to work from.
What to look for in an outsourced marketing agency
If you decide to outsource, the choice of provider matters more than the decision itself.
Ask who will actually do the work, by name and seniority, and get it in writing. Ask what the reporting looks like and how often you will see it. Ask what happens in month one, because a provider who cannot describe their first thirty days has not thought about it.
Check that the scope names specific deliverables rather than describing an intention. Check the notice period, which should be one to three months and no longer. Confirm in writing that you own the advertising accounts, the analytics, the domain and the content, because recovering these later is genuinely difficult.
Finally, look for relevant experience rather than an impressive client list. Someone who understands how your buyers make decisions will be useful faster than someone with a bigger logo wall.
The mistakes I see most often
Hiring a junior to fix a strategy problem. If you do not know what your marketing should be doing, a £28,000 executive will not tell you. They will do what you ask, competently, and none of it will be connected.
Comparing salary against retainer. As the table above shows, a £45,000 salary is a £66,000 commitment in year one. Compare the true cost or the comparison is meaningless.
Buying activity instead of outcomes. A retainer measured in blog posts and social updates will produce blog posts and social updates. Agree what the work is meant to achieve first.
Switching too early. Most of the value in either model arrives after six to nine months. Firms that change direction every quarter never get past the setup phase, and pay for it twice.
Final thoughts
There is no universally correct answer, and anyone who gives you one is selling something.
What I would say is this. The failure I see most often is not choosing wrongly between the two. It is hiring one person, giving them no direction, and concluding two years later that marketing does not work for your kind of business. It usually did not fail because the model was wrong. It failed because nobody owned the thinking.
Get that part right, and either model can work.
If you would like to talk through which fits your firm, including the honest answer if that is hiring rather than working with us, get in touch and we can go through it properly.
