Hand your marketing to one team instead of hiring a department. Search, content, LinkedIn, email, website and paid, planned and delivered together by a fractional CMO and the specialists behind them.
One team for every channel, instead of five suppliers who never speak.
Led by a CMO who sets the plan and presents to your board each month.
Recruitment only so nobody has to be taught how your market bills.
You own everything every account, domain and analytics property stays yours.
The Definition
Digital marketing outsourcing means paying an external team to plan and run your marketing instead of hiring people to do it in house. You buy the outcome and the expertise, rather than the salaries, the software and the management time that come with building a department of your own.
It is sold in three shapes, and the one you need depends on whether the gap is capacity, expertise or leadership.
Limivex runs the second and the third. Hand over the whole function and you get an outsourced marketing department: the leadership, the delivery and the board reporting, for less than it costs to build one yourself. Most firms start narrower and widen the scope once the first channel is working.
The Case for It
Almost every firm we speak to reached the same point: marketing mattered enough to need doing properly, but not obviously enough to justify building a department for it.
Marketing now needs search, content, design, email, social and analytics. Hiring all of that is impossible for most recruitment firms, so one generalist ends up doing six jobs badly. Outsourcing buys the whole bench for less than a single senior hire costs.
A marketing hire takes three months to find, a month to notice, and another quarter to get productive. An outsourced team already has the process, the tooling and the templates, so work ships in the first few weeks.
Push harder when you are opening a desk or launching a sector, ease off when the focus moves. Changing the shape of a retainer takes a conversation, where changing the shape of a payroll takes a redundancy process.
In most recruitment firms marketing lands on a founder who is already billing. Handing it over returns that time to the desk, which is almost always where a director earns the most.
Where to Start
Execution outsources well because the deliverable is easy to define and easy to check. Anything that depends on knowing your market intimately, pricing, positioning and who you refuse to work with, should stay with you and be briefed in.
The clearest thing to hand over. It needs tooling, technical knowledge and months of consistency, and almost nobody hires a specialist for it. Rankings are also easy to hold a supplier to.
Recruitment SEOWriting is the first thing to slip when a desk gets busy, and the first thing a buyer notices is missing. Outsource content marketing and the schedule survives your busiest quarter.
Content marketingOutsourcing social media marketing works as long as the voice stays yours. We write from interviews with your consultants and publish under their names, so nothing reads like an agency wrote it.
LinkedIn marketingSequences, newsletters and campaign copy, plus the deliverability and list hygiene work nobody in house ever gets round to. High leverage, because the list is already yours.
Email marketingA project rather than a routine, so it suits an outside team well. The value is in a site built to convert enquiries rather than one that simply looks current.
Website designWorth outsourcing for the account management, but insist on running it in an ad account you own. Suppliers who keep the account keep the data when they leave.
PPC advertisingThe Comparison
Hiring wins once you are big enough to keep specialists busy and manage them well. Below that, one person carries six disciplines and the firm quietly accepts that most of them are being done badly. Here is the honest comparison.
Hiring in house
One marketer on the payroll
Outsourcing the work
A team on a monthly retainer
Annual cost
£45,000 to £60,000 salary, plus national insurance, pension, software and a desk
A fixed monthly fee with the tooling, the seniority and the whole skill set inside it
Skills you get
Whatever that one person happens to be good at
Search, content, design, email, social and analytics, each done by a specialist
Time to first output
Three to six months to hire, onboard and get productive
Work shipping within weeks
When someone leaves
The knowledge walks out and you start the hiring process again
The team absorbs it and the programme carries on
Changing the shape of it
A hiring round, or a redundancy process
A conversation and a revised scope
Who sets the strategy
A marketing manager, usually without board level experience
A fractional CMO who has run marketing functions before
What it suits
Firms large enough to keep a specialist fully occupied and well managed
Firms that need the output of a department without the headcount to justify one
Hiring in house
One marketer on the payroll
Outsourcing the work
A team on a monthly retainer
Budget
UK agencies charge roughly £75 to £250 an hour, but almost nobody buys marketing by the hour any more. Retainers are the norm, and the honest answer is that the number depends on how many channels you want running and whether you need someone senior setting the direction.
For context, a marketing manager in the UK costs around £45,000 to £60,000 before national insurance, pension, software and the management time to keep them pointed at the right work. That is the number outsourcing is competing with, not the retainer on its own.
Our own retainers are fixed monthly fees scoped against the programme, so the invoice does not move when a month runs long.
Due Diligence
Most of the risk in outsourcing is picking the wrong partner rather than the model itself. These are the signals worth checking, including the ones that would rule us out.
The Scope
You are buying a marketing function rather than a list of tasks, so the scope covers the thinking as well as the doing. Everything below is included in the retainer.
How It Works
We go through what you already have: the website, the rankings, the enquiry history, the CRM and whatever marketing has been tried before. You get the findings whether or not you go on to hire us.
A written plan covering the sectors worth pursuing, the channels that suit them, the budget split and the numbers we will be judged on. Agreed with you before anyone starts producing.
We take on the accounts, tooling and access, set up tracking that actually attributes enquiries, and agree who on your side signs off what. This is the fortnight that decides how smoothly the rest runs.
The team ships every week across the agreed channels, with a standing call so you always know what is in flight. Nothing goes out under your name without your approval.
A monthly read out written for directors rather than marketers: what was produced, what it returned, what we are changing and what we recommend spending next.
Who We Build It For
Every one of these firms reached the same decision point from a different direction. What they share is needing the output of a marketing department without the headcount to justify building one.
Marketing usually sits with a director who is already billing, so it happens in bursts. We take the whole thing off them and run it to a schedule, so the pipeline stops depending on who had a quiet week.
Outsourced marketing for recruitment agencies
Small teams, senior buyers and no appetite for a marketing hire who does not understand the market. An outsourced function gives you board level marketing thinking without adding to headcount.
Outsourced marketing for executive search firms
Bids, case studies, thought leadership and a website that survives procurement scrutiny. More marketing work than one person can carry, and not enough to justify a department.
Outsourced marketing for RPO providers
Multiple branches and two audiences to feed, all needing local content and campaigns at once. Outsourcing keeps every location supported without a marketer in each one.
Outsourced marketing for staffing agencies
A handful of partners and no interior marketing resource at all. We become the function, so the firm has a presence without anyone losing billing time to build it.
Outsourced marketing for headhuntersOur Clients
Specialist recruiters, executive search firms and staffing businesses across the UK, the US and the Middle East. Most handed us one channel first and moved us onto the whole function.
Clear Recruitment, Meyrick Consulting, Adastrum Consulting, Quay Group, SmartChoice International, Nicholas Alexander.
Our Work
Three firms that handed us the marketing function rather than a single channel. Each case study sets out what they had before, what we took on and what it produced.
Data Centre and Energy Infrastructure recruitment
Clear had no senior marketing leader and a website that no longer matched the firm. So we became the function: a fractional CMO owning the plan, with the team shipping a custom website, an automated jobs feed off LinkedIn, a two sided portal, an ongoing SEO and blog programme, and a weekly LinkedIn cadence. The first inbound lead arrived within a week of launch, after a long quiet stretch on the old WordPress site.
UHNW recruitment
An exclusive members portal launched in 2025 opened the partnership. Quay then handed us the marketing function to lead. Today we own the strategy and run the work: an ongoing content programme, a weekly LinkedIn cadence across all four divisions, and a ground-up rebuild of the main Quay Group website, now in build.
IT and Workspace Solutions
We stepped in as QICO's fractional CMO and the team behind it: a 50-page strategy, a new brand, a website built to convert, and the demand programme to run it. Organic traffic rose by 2,600% in the first three months, and lead conversions by 40%.
Why Firms Choose Us
Every client we have hires people for a living, so we already know how a retained mandate differs from a contingent one and why that changes the marketing. Nobody spends the first quarter learning your business.
Most outsourcing gives you people who execute a brief you have to write. Ours comes with a fractional CMO who writes the brief, argues for the budget and answers to your board for the result.
Accounts, domains, analytics, creative files and the strategy document are all yours from day one. Leaving us should cost you a notice period, not your marketing history.
What Clients Say
26+
Finalised Projects
98%
Client satisfaction rate
18
Brand Transformations
01 / 04
“Limivex now controls our entire sales and marketing activity across Europe and the US, and I'm having calls every week with my ideal clients.”
Outsourcing FAQ
Or, email us at info@limivex.co.uk
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