We are an agency, so read this accordingly — but the honest answer is often "hire someone."
The question usually arrives framed as a budget comparison: a marketing manager costs X, an agency costs Y, which is cheaper? That framing produces bad decisions, because the two things do different work.
The better question is what kind of problem you have.
What each one is actually good at
An in-house hire gives you
- Context. They learn your product, customers and internal politics in a way no external partner will.
- Availability. They are in the room when decisions get made.
- Continuity. Institutional knowledge that compounds instead of resetting.
- Execution volume on the things that need doing constantly — posting, responding, coordinating, shipping.
An agency gives you
- Range. A strategist, a designer, a media buyer, an editor and a producer — none of whom you could afford individually.
- Pattern recognition from working across many businesses, which is genuinely hard to get from inside one.
- Capacity on demand. Scale up for a launch, down afterwards, without hiring or firing.
- Speed to competence in a channel you have never run.
The failure mode of in-house is a capable person alone, doing six specialist jobs adequately. The failure mode of an agency is competent work with no one internally who owns the outcome.
The honest cost comparison
A marketing manager in Miami runs roughly $60,000–$95,000 for a mid-level generalist, plus payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, software and management time — realistically 1.25 to 1.4× salary all-in. Call it $85,000–$130,000 a year.
For that money you get one person's time and one person's skill set. They will be good at two of the six things you need.
An agency retainer at $5,000–$15,000 a month is $60,000–$180,000 a year and buys a team's range but not their undivided attention. Detail on what sits inside that fee is here.
Neither number includes media spend, production, or talent fees. Those are separate in both models and are frequently the larger line.
A decision rule that holds up
- Under roughly $1M revenue: usually neither, yet. A founder who understands the customer plus targeted freelance help beats both. Spend on the product and on one channel done properly.
- $1M–$3M: one in-house generalist who can execute, supported by specialists for paid media and production. This is where most businesses over-hire an agency and under-hire internally.
- $3M–$10M: the hybrid. An internal marketing lead who owns strategy and the calendar, with an agency for the specialist channels. Most effective structure at this stage by a wide margin.
- $10M+: a real internal team, with agencies for creative, media, and anything requiring range you cannot justify hiring.
Signs you should hire rather than outsource
- Nobody internally can answer questions your agency asks without a week's delay
- The bottleneck is approvals and coordination, not ideas
- The work is high-frequency and low-specialism — posting, community, email, coordination
- You have tried two agencies and the pattern was the same both times
Signs you should use an agency rather than hire
- You need a channel you have never run, working within a quarter
- The need is a project with an end — a rebrand, a launch, a site
- You cannot yet describe the role well enough to hire for it
- Your requirement spans strategy, design, media and production, and no single hire covers that
The hybrid, done properly
The structure that works most often: one internal person who owns the outcome, and an agency that owns specific deliverables. The internal person is accountable for the number; the agency is accountable for the work.
What breaks it: hiring an internal person and giving them no authority, or engaging an agency with no internal owner. Both produce activity nobody is answerable for.
The bottom line
Hire when the gap is context, coordination and daily execution. Use an agency when the gap is range, specialism or speed. Above a few million in revenue you almost certainly need both, with one internal person accountable for the result.
If you do go the agency route, these are the twelve questions to ask.
Want an honest read on which you need? Let's talk — we have told people to hire instead.