Strategy
Marketing Manager or Marketing Agency? The £55,000 Question
At some point every growing business has this conversation: "we need someone doing our marketing properly". The instinctive answer is to hire. The job ad practically writes itself: one marketing manager, mid-thirties salary, owns everything from strategy to social media.
We run an outsourced marketing department, so you know which side of this we sit on. But we will make the honest case for both, because there genuinely are businesses that should hire, and we tell them so on discovery calls.
The true cost of hiring, and the true cost of an agency
Salary is only the visible part of a hire. Here is what one mid-weight marketing manager actually costs in most of the UK in 2026.
- Salary: £35,000 to £45,000 outside London
- Employer National Insurance and pension: roughly £5,000 to £7,000
- Software: design tools, scheduling, email platform, SEO tools. £2,000 to £4,000 a year
- Recruitment: a typical agency fee is 15 to 20 percent of salary, so £5,000 to £9,000
- Ramp time: three to six months before anyone is fully productive in a new role
Realistic first-year total: £50,000 to £60,000. And crucially, that buys you one person's skill set. A brilliant copywriter who finds paid ads a chore. A data person whose design work looks like data. Nobody is senior at everything, and pretending otherwise is how "we hired a marketer" turns into "we pay someone to post on Instagram".
A full-service retainer at £1,500 to £3,950 a month costs £18,000 to £47,400 a year and buys slices of a strategist, a designer, a copywriter and an ads specialist, with no recruitment fee, no ramp time, and no sick cover problem. That comparison is the entire reason our studio exists.
Where the in-house hire genuinely wins
Being fair to the other side, an employee has advantages no agency fully matches.
- Proximity. They are in the room. They hear the sales calls, see the product, catch the culture. That context makes certain content much easier.
- Total focus. Your business is their only client.
- Speed on small things. "Can you grab a photo of the new van" is a thirty-second job for an employee.
- Institutional knowledge. A good marketer who stays three years builds a depth of context that compounds.
If your business has enough daily marketing work to genuinely fill a diary five days a week, is turning over several million, or lives and dies on content that needs someone physically present, hire. We mean it.
Where the agency wins
- Breadth without headcount. Strategy, brand, copy, design, paid ads, SEO and analytics are different crafts. A retainer gives you all of them at once.
- No single point of failure. Holidays, sickness and resignations are the agency's problem to manage, not yours. Nobody hands in their notice on your whole marketing function.
- Pattern recognition. An agency sees what works across dozens of businesses and brings it to yours. One marketer sees one business.
- Elastic scale. Launch month needs triple the output? A retainer flexes. An employee cannot become three people.
- Cost. As above. The maths is not close for most SMEs under £3m turnover.
The test we give people: write down the ten marketing tasks your business needs done every month. If eight of them are the same discipline, hire that specialist. If they span five disciplines, one hire cannot cover them and a team costs £150,000+ in salaries. That is the agency case in one paragraph.
The hybrid most growing businesses land on
The setups we see work best are rarely all-or-nothing. A common pattern: the business has one in-house coordinator, often someone who grew into the role, who owns the day-to-day. Photos, replying to comments, feeding sales intel back. The agency wraps strategy, design, campaigns and the technical channels around them.
The coordinator makes the agency sharper, because context flows in weekly. The agency makes the coordinator credible, because the work looks and performs like a big-team operation. Neither could do it alone, and together they still cost less than one senior hire.
Whichever way you lean, go in with real numbers. Our breakdown of what a marketing agency costs in Wales covers the retainer side in detail, and every plan we run is published openly on our pricing page, month to month with 30 days notice. If the answer for your business is genuinely "hire someone", we will tell you that on the call.