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There comes a point in business when marketing can’t keep being the job that belongs to whoever happens to have five spare minutes, a vague sense of guilt and access to Canva.
Maybe you’re still doing some of it yourself, someone in admin posts on social media when they can and your web developer makes changes when you ask. There might be another person looking after Google Ads, someone designed a brochure six months ago, and you’ve got a list somewhere of marketing things you really should get around to.
The list is probably called “Marketing”. It may also be called “Things to do when everything else is under control”, which is a charming fantasy.
Technically, you’re doing marketing, but the bigger question is whether anyone is actually responsible for it.
Because as a business becomes more established, marketing generally needs more than a collection of separate activities being nudged along by whoever happens to notice them.
Someone needs to know what the business is trying to achieve, decide what marketing should support those goals, work out what needs to happen next and then make sure it happens.
That’s usually when the question changes from, “What marketing should we be doing?” to, “Who should be looking after this?”
And there are three fairly obvious options: a marketing consultant, a marketing agency or an in-house marketer.
They can all work. The right choice depends on what you actually need someone to take responsibility for.
When a marketing consultant makes sense
Marketing consultant is a fairly broad term, which doesn’t make this particularly helpful when you’re trying to choose one.
It’s a bit like saying someone works in “healthcare” and expecting that to tell you whether they’re going to remove your appendix or check your blood pressure.
Some consultants work almost entirely at a strategic level. They’ll develop the strategy, recommend what needs to happen and leave implementation to you or your team.
Others, like me (aka Starfish Marketing), can take a much more hands on role. That can include developing the marketing strategy, planning activity, writing content, managing social media, updating website content, improving search visibility, developing campaigns, coordinating suppliers and keeping everything moving.
For an established business, that model can work well when you need experienced marketing input and someone to take ownership, but you don’t have enough work to justify employing a senior marketer full time.
You also get direct access to the person doing the thinking. There aren’t layers between you and the person making recommendations about your business.
The important part of choosing a marketing consultant is understanding what the consultant actually does.
If you want marketing off your plate, hiring someone who only gives you a list of recommendations could leave you with a very lovely list and exactly the same problem you started with.
And that’s that you still have to do it all.
And if you already had the time, energy and enthusiasm to do it, you probably wouldn’t be looking for help.
Before engaging a consultant, ask:
- who will develop the plan
- who will complete the work
- what they’ll manage directly
- what will need to be outsourced and
- who will coordinate those other suppliers.
Those answers matter much more than the word “consultant”.
When a marketing agency makes sense
An agency gives you access to a team, which can be useful when your marketing requires several specialist skills or a larger volume of work.
You might need graphic design, paid advertising, video, website development, search marketing, copywriting and campaign management happening at the same time. An agency can have those skills available within the one business.
This can suit larger businesses, businesses running frequent campaigns or businesses with enough marketing activity to keep several specialists busy.
It can also provide additional capacity when things ramp up, which is useful when your marketing suddenly needs to do more than quietly tick along in the background.
The trade off is that you need to understand how the agency works.
The person who sells the work mightn’t be the person who manages your account. The person managing your account mightn’t be the person creating the work. Depending on the agency, you may have direct access to specialists or everything may flow through an account manager.
Neither approach is inherently wrong. You just need to know what you’re buying.
You don’t want to discover three months in that the impressive senior strategist you met at the first meeting has vanished into the agency equivalent of Narnia.
For an established business that values a close working relationship, ask:
- who your actual contact will be
- how involved senior marketers remain once you become a client and
- how much they’ll understand about the broader business rather than the individual task they’re completing.
Marketing works much better when the people doing it understand what’s happening beyond this month’s content calendar.
When an in-house marketer makes sense
There’s plenty to like about having someone inside your business.
They’re close to the team, customers, services and day to day activity. They hear what clients are asking, know what’s happening operationally, and they can usually get information quickly, which means marketing gets someone’s dedicated attention.
They’re also there when someone says, “We should probably tell people about this,” rather than hearing about it six weeks later when the opportunity has wandered off.
For businesses with enough ongoing marketing work, that access can be extremely valuable.
Where businesses can come unstuck is expecting one employee to cover the entire marketing profession.
A marketer who’s great at strategy and copywriting may have limited website development skills. Or a talented content creator mightn’t know how to manage paid search campaigns. Or someone who understands digital advertising mightn’t be the person you want writing a 1,500 word article.
That doesn’t make them a bad marketer. Marketing simply covers a very large range of specialist skills. Many in-house marketers are what we call Generalist marketers. They bring a valuable ability to see how those different areas fit together, connect marketing activity to broader business goals and keep the overall plan moving.
But, it’s a bit unreasonable to expect one person to be a strategist, writer, designer, web developer, SEO specialist, advertising manager, photographer, videographer and analytics expert before lunch.
So before employing someone, work out what the role genuinely needs to achieve.
If you need someone managing marketing full time, working closely with your leadership team and coordinating several external specialists, an in-house marketer may make a lot of sense.
If you mainly need experienced marketing management for a day or two each week, outsourcing may give you access to a higher level of experience without creating a full time position.
The question I’d ask first
Before choosing any of the three, I’d ask:
What do you actually want to stop being responsible for?
Not what tasks do you want to outsource, but what do you want to stop carrying around in your head?
If you enjoy setting the direction and you’ve got a capable internal team to deliver it, you might only need strategic advice.
If you need a lot of specialist work delivered at volume, an agency may suit you.
If you want someone who understands your business, works out what marketing needs to happen, coordinates the pieces and gets on with doing a significant amount of it, a hands on marketing consultant may be a better fit.
If you need someone completely embedded in the business because there’s enough work to occupy them most of the week, start thinking about bringing marketing in-house.
There isn’t a prize for choosing one model over another.
Nobody is handing out trophies for having an internal marketing department. There’s no medal for signing with an agency. And no consultant gets extra points because you chose them instead.
There is, however, a fairly noticeable difference between having marketing support and having someone who genuinely takes responsibility for marketing.
When the spare five minutes approach has run its course
You usually know when you’ve reached this point.
Marketing keeps stopping when the business gets busy. Your campaign ideas sit in someone’s notebook for months, website changes wait for you to send the information, social media happens in bursts and different suppliers work without much connection between them.
And you’re still the person remembering all of it.
You’re running the business, managing the team, looking after clients, making decisions and occasionally thinking, “Oh no, we haven’t posted anything for a while.”
That isn’t a marketing strategy, it’s a small panic wearing a social media hat.
If you outsource marketing and still have to remember what needs to happen, come up with the ideas, brief everyone, chase the work and connect all the moving pieces, you haven’t really taken marketing off your plate. You’ve simply just added supplier management to it.
For an established business, marketing deserves an owner. I don’t mean you, the business owner, you’ve already got enough jobs.
I mean someone who can look at the business, understand where it’s going, decide what marketing needs attention and take responsibility for making it happen.
That person could sit inside your business or outside it. The job title matters far less than the ownership.
Ready to get marketing off your plate?
Starfish works with businesses that have reached the point where they’re done with squeezing marketing into whatever time is left over.
You know, the time after the urgent client work, the unexpected staff issue, the supplier problem, the meeting that should have been an email and the email that somehow became a meeting.
I manage ongoing marketing for my clients, which means we agree on what needs to happen, I keep it moving and, most importantly, the work gets done.
If you’re looking at your current approach and thinking it’s probably time someone actually owned this stuff, talk to me about Done For You marketing support.
What is the difference between a marketing consultant, agency and in-house marketer?
A marketing consultant usually provides experienced marketing advice and can also manage implementation, depending on how they work. An agency generally provides access to a team with different specialist skills, while an in-house marketer is employed within the business and manages marketing as part of the internal team. The right option depends on how much marketing you need, the skills required and how much responsibility you want them to take.
When should a business hire a marketing consultant?
A marketing consultant can be a good fit when your business needs experienced marketing management but doesn’t have enough ongoing work to justify employing a senior marketer full time. It’s particularly useful when marketing has become inconsistent, several suppliers need coordinating or the business owner is still carrying responsibility for deciding what needs to happen.
Should I outsource marketing or hire an in-house marketer?
It depends on the amount and type of marketing work your business needs. An in-house marketer can make sense when there’s enough work to occupy someone for much of the week and being embedded within the team is important. Outsourcing can suit a business that needs experienced marketing management and implementation for part of the week, with access to other specialists when required.
