Hire a marketing team or retain an agency instead
Compare building an in-house marketing team against retaining an agency by counting the disciplines you need and the hours each one actually requires.
Marketing has to happen and nobody owns it
The promoter has been approving posts between customer calls. A website refresh has been pending for a year. Somebody has suggested hiring a marketing manager and somebody else has suggested retaining an agency and both options have a monthly number attached that looks similar on a spreadsheet.
They are not similar purchases. A salary buys one person's full attention and one person's range of skills. A retainer buys part of several people's attention across a wider range. Which is better depends entirely on how many different disciplines your marketing actually requires and how many hours of each you need per month.
What each number leaves out
A salary excludes a great deal. Tool and platform licences. Media spend. Recruitment cost and the weeks the seat stays empty. Statutory contributions and benefits. Workspace and equipment. Training, which matters more in marketing than in most functions because the platforms change constantly. And the management time of whoever the person reports to, which for a small business means the promoter.
A retainer excludes media spend and usually excludes production such as shoots and printing. It also excludes your own internal time, which is the cost buyers most often underestimate. Somebody has to brief, approve, supply product information and make decisions about pricing and positioning. A service fee attracts GST at 18% while employment cost carries statutory contributions instead, so the two numbers are not comparable until both are grossed up. A qualified professional should confirm how each is treated in your organisation's case.
Who should build in-house and who should not
Build in-house when the work is high volume and repeatable and specific to your business. A retail chain producing daily local offers, a manufacturer with deep technical content, a company whose brand voice depends on constant contact with customers. These benefit from somebody present every day who knows the product properly.
Do not retain an agency if there is nobody inside the business who will own the relationship. An external team cannot approve its own creative, cannot decide your pricing and cannot chase your sales staff for lead feedback. Retainers bought without an internal owner produce decks nobody reads and are cancelled after two quarters with both sides frustrated. If the promoter has no hours to give this and no intention of appointing someone then the first purchase is that person and not the agency.
Equally do not hire a single in-house generalist if your requirement spans eight disciplines. Search, paid media, creative production, video, email, CRM, analytics and web development are separate crafts. One person will be adequate at two of them, slow at three and dependent on vendors for the rest, and you will still be managing those vendors yourself.
How to decide with arithmetic rather than instinct
List the disciplines your plan genuinely needs for the next two quarters. Against each one write the hours per month. Be unsentimental. A business publishing four articles a month does not need a full-time content person and a business running two campaigns does not need a full-time performance marketer.
Add the hours. If the total comes to roughly one person's week in one or two disciplines then hire. If it comes to a few hours each across six disciplines then no single hire covers it and buying a function is the cheaper shape. A whole marketing function on one retainer exists precisely for that profile and its rate is published rather than quoted after a call.
The third answer is usually the right one for a growing business. Hire one person whose job is to own marketing and orchestrate rather than to execute everything, then buy the specialist disciplines around them. That person needs enough seniority to brief well and to say no, which means it is not a fresher role.
What tells you it is working
The measure that matters is whether a written quarterly plan survives the quarter and produces outcomes you can trace to revenue. Cost per qualified enquiry including the salary or the fee. Then the slower question of whether anything compounding was built, such as organic search presence or an owned email and WhatsApp audience or a working CRM.
Output volume flatters badly here. Posts published, emails sent, reports delivered. All of it rises with effort and none of it implies effect. Headcount is the other flattering measure. Having a team feels like progress and a team of three juniors with nobody senior to direct them is slower than one capable person with good vendors.
The common mistake
The expensive error is hiring one person and expecting a function. The role is advertised as a marketing manager and the actual expectation is a strategist, a copywriter, a designer, a media buyer, a video editor, a web developer and an analyst. A competent person accepts, works hard, does a reasonable job of the two things they know and improvises the rest. A year later the business concludes marketing is not working when what it bought was a seventh of what it needed.
The mirror image costs just as much. A retainer signed with no internal owner produces activity with no authority behind it. In both cases the failure is structural and both are avoidable by counting the disciplines and the hours before anybody signs anything.
This guide explains how something works. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and rules change. Confirm anything regulatory with a qualified professional before you act on it.