In-house marketing or an agency? Here is the honest math.

Every growing business hits this fork. You’re spending enough on marketing that hiring somebody starts to look cheaper, or you’re doing it yourself at night and you’re tired.

The answer isn’t the same for everybody, and most articles about this are written by agencies who already know which way they want you to go. So let’s do the math instead.

What a marketing hire really costs

A competent marketing coordinator in the Philadelphia suburbs runs $55,000 to $70,000. A marketing manager who can actually set direction runs $85,000 to $110,000. Then add roughly thirty percent for payroll taxes, benefits, and equipment.

The part nobody mentions about hiring

Marketing isn’t one job. It’s writing, design, web development, paid ads, SEO, email, video, and analytics. Nobody is good at all eight. When you hire one person, you get one person’s two or three strengths and you go without the rest.

That’s the real trade. An in-house hire gives you all their hours and some of the skills. An agency gives you all the skills and some of the hours.

When hiring in-house is the right call

• You need somebody in the building. Retail, restaurants, and events run on daily decisions that are painful to hand off.
• Your product is complicated. If it takes six months to understand what you sell, an agency will always be a step behind.
• You have steady, high-volume work. Posting daily, running a busy email calendar, and managing a big content operation all favor a full-time person.
• You already have direction. If you know exactly what needs doing, you’re buying hands, and hands are cheaper in-house.

When an agency is the right call

• You need several skills at once. A rebrand plus a website plus local SEO would take three hires or one agency.
• The work is uneven. Seasonal businesses waste a full-time salary in the slow half of the year.
• You don’t know what’s wrong. Diagnosis is a different skill than execution, and it’s the thing agencies see across dozens of businesses.
• You want to be able to stop. Ending a retainer is a conversation. Ending an employment is a much harder day.

The hybrid that usually wins

The setup we see work best for local businesses between one and ten million in revenue is one internal person who owns marketing, paired with an agency that handles the specialist work. The internal person knows the business, answers fast, and keeps things moving. The agency brings the parts that would take three more hires.

That’s roughly $70,000 for the coordinator plus $2,000 a month for the agency. Call it $95,000. Compare that to $130,000 for a single marketing manager who can only do part of the list.

How to decide this week

Write down every marketing task your business needs done in a month. Be specific. Not “social media” but “write and schedule twelve posts, respond to comments, run one paid campaign.”

Then mark each one as either something you need done constantly or something you need done well. If most of your list is constant, hire. If most of it is occasional but has to be right, get an agency. If it’s genuinely both, you’ve found your answer and it’s the hybrid.

Common questions