MARKETING MANAGEMENT: SHOULD YOU OUTSOURCE OR HIRE IN-HOUSE?
When most brands say “we need help with our marketing”, what they’re really talking about is marketing management: the strategy, systems, and support that keep your marketing efforts running from idea to execution.
But if there’s one misconception that keeps far too many brands and business owners stuck, it’s the notion that marketing can be managed by just one person. In reality, marketing management is the umbrella that covers everything from brand positioning and launch calendars to social media content creation, email campaign building, analytic reporting, and more — and try to find a single person who can do all of that (and do it well) is the marketing equivalent of chasing a unicorn. Unless your brand is operating on a very small scale, with a limited presence across only one or two platforms, hiring a single person to carry out all of the tasks associated with making your marketing happen will only get you so far — and even then, it’s usually a temporary fix, not a sustainable approach for a scaling brand.
But when you take a deeper look at what it actually takes to execute these moving parts with excellence, your “roles to hire” list can get really long, really fast: a marketing manager, social media expert, copywriter, graphic designer, strategist, and probably a project manager to keep everyone in sync. While you may not need all of these roles right off the bat, they are more or less what make up a fully-functioning “marketing ecosystem” — and if you’re planning to expand your brand’s digital presence or maintain momentum over time, these are the seats you’ll eventually need filled to make that happen.
So the real question becomes: Should you build a marketing team in-house, or outsource to an agency that’s already built that ecosystem for you?
Both routes come with their own benefits and drawbacks, and the right choice depends on your brand’s current needs, long-term goals, and the level of internal capacity & budget you’re working with.
Let’s unpack the core differences between hiring in-house versus outsourcing your marketing management, break down the typical costs associated with each, and offer guidance on how to make the decision that best supports your brand’s next chapter. Whether you’re prepping for a launch, aiming to scale sustainably, or just tired of wearing the “marketing manager” hat on top of your actual role — read on to learn how to delegate the marketing arm of your business with long-term strategy and growth in mind!
Core Differences: Hiring In-House vs. Outsourcing Your Marketing Management
Choosing between building an internal marketing team and outsourcing to a marketing agency comes down to three key considerations: efficiency & expertise, control & cultural fit, and cost.
Efficiency, Expertise & Bandwidth
When evaluating how to structure your marketing management support, efficiency and expertise are often the first considerations to hit the table. After all, it’s not just about who is doing the work; it’s about how quickly, consistently, and effectively that work is getting done. Pair that with the reality of limited time, budget, and capacity, and bandwidth becomes a non-negotiable part of the equation. This is where the core differences between hiring in-house and outsourcing to an agency really start to show.
Hiring In-House
Bringing marketing in-house comes with the promise of deep brand familiarity and direct alignment. An internal team member can essentially “live & breathe your brand”, allowing for quick pivots, on-the-fly adjustments, and messaging that resonates deeply with your vision and culture. Having a team from within ensures smoother collaboration across roles and departments, minimizing communication gaps and friction.
However, managing marketing in-house often means you or someone on your leadership team becomes the de facto project manager, responsible for managing and coordinating your copywriter, designer, strategist, and other roles within your marketing team across different platforms and campaigns. That management load can be heavy, especially if marketing isn’t your primary area of expertise — and while you can hire a marketing manager and/or project manager to help close this gap, they would still need to be managed from an executive level to ensure that the marketing department is operating in alignment with your business goals.
Onboarding new team members, even highly qualified ones, also tends to be a slow process. Between ramp-up time, tool training, and brand immersion, it can take months before someone’s delivering consistently effective output. And when you’re hiring multiple roles at once (or sequentially), that timeline can multiply.
Even after you’ve built the right team, turnover is a constant risk. When someone leaves, their knowledge and workflow systems go with them, often disrupting campaign momentum, content pipelines, and strategic consistency. Replacing them means repeating the hiring and onboarding cycle all over again, often at the expense of speed and results.
Outsourcing to a Marketing Agency
Outsourcing your marketing management to an agency gives you immediate access to a fully built team of specialists: strategists, designers, copywriters, social media experts, and project managers — all without needing to assemble or manage that team yourself. Instead of hiring, onboarding, and coordinating multiple people, you’re tapping into a system that’s already up and running.
Agencies are designed for agility. Because their team members are already trained and working within streamlined processes, the ramp-up time is significantly shorter, meaning faster results, less friction, and a much lighter lift on your end. You’re not managing individual contributors; you’re collaborating with a partner who’s responsible for delivering outcomes and proactively steering your marketing efforts. And while agencies aren’t immune to team changes, those transitions are managed internally, so you won’t be the one scrambling to backfill a role or bring someone new up to speed. If someone shifts roles or leaves, there’s usually infrastructure in place to fill that gap quickly and seamlessly, with minimal disruption to your account. The continuity and consistency stay intact, because the responsibility of maintaining workflow and results doesn’t fall on your shoulders.
Perhaps most importantly, agencies can scale with your needs. Whether you’re launching a new offer, expanding to new platforms, or simply increasing your content output, you don’t have to worry about hiring more hands, your agency partner already has the bandwidth and expertise to meet the moment.
That said, it’s important to keep in mind that not every agency handles every aspect of marketing. Some may focus solely on organic (non-paid) marketing, while others may specialize in paid media or other niche services, for example. Many full-service agencies will collaborate with trusted partners to fill any gaps — often through white-label support you wouldn’t even know is outsourced. But it’s still worth clarifying what’s included, what’s not, and how those gaps (if any) would be addressed. A transparent agency will tell you if something falls outside their scope, and whether or not they’re the right fit to support your brand as a whole.
Control, Brand Deep-Dive, & Cultural Fit
While efficiency and expertise are major deciding factors, many brand leaders also weigh how much control they’ll retain, how deeply their marketing partner will understand their brand, and how well that partner aligns with internal culture and communication style. These are often the more intangible (but equally important) elements that shape a successful marketing relationship.
Hiring In-House
When you hire internally, you maintain a higher degree of day-to-day control. An in-house team is fully embedded in your brand’s environment, sitting in on internal meetings, soaking up company culture, and operating with real-time visibility into what’s happening across departments. This proximity can translate into a more intuitive grasp of your voice, values, and internal decision-making processes. They’re more likely to pick up on nuanced shifts in direction or tone simply by being in the room where those conversations are happening.
There’s also a certain convenience to being able to walk down the hall (or send a Slack message across the digital “office”) for quick input or spontaneous brainstorming. When it comes to cultural fit and brand immersion, hiring in-house can feel like the most “natural” approach, especially for founders who are highly collaborative or want more direct involvement in the creative process.
Outsourcing to a Marketing Agency
Agencies may not physically sit inside your business, but the good ones make it their mission to operate as if they do. A strong agency partner will invest deeply in onboarding, brand voice development, and collaborative strategy, in turn building a working relationship that’s grounded in trust and aligned goals. Rather than being “outsiders”, they position themselves as an extension of your internal team, with dedicated account managers or strategists acting as consistent points of contact.
While some founders worry that outsourcing means sacrificing control, the opposite is often true. Agencies come with systems that allow for visibility and feedback without requiring your constant input. You stay in the loop with big-picture direction, while the day-to-day execution happens without your oversight. This balance often allows founders to feel more supported, not less — especially when the agency takes initiative, proactively brings ideas to the table, and builds strategy in tandem with your goals.
Cultural fit can absolutely exist in an agency relationship — it just comes down to choosing a partner whose values, communication style, and creative approach feel aligned with yours. When that alignment is in place, many brands find they get the best of both worlds: a team that feels like a true partner, without the overhead or logistical weight of managing more people internally.
Cost
This is often where the difference between hiring in-house and outsourcing becomes clearest — and yet, it’s also where misconceptions tend to run deepest. Many business owners balk at the price of a monthly marketing retainer with an agency, assuming it’s the more expensive option. But when you compare that against the true cost of hiring and managing the equivalent roles in-house — marketing manager, copywriter, designer, strategist, social media lead, and more — the numbers tell a different story.
Hiring In-House
Hiring a full in-house marketing team can quickly become one of the most expensive investments your business makes — not necessarily because the roles aren’t valuable, but because the true cost of those roles adds up far beyond base salaries.
A mid-level marketing manager alone can run you anywhere from $80K–$150K/year, and that doesn’t include the cost of adding a copywriter, designer, social media manager, and strategist — all of which are typically necessary to fully execute a holistic marketing strategy across platforms. When all is said and done, a lean-but-effective in-house team often requires $300K–$500K annually in salaries alone.
Then there are the added expenses: benefits, taxes, paid time off, professional development, recruiting fees, onboarding, and software costs (for things like project management, content creation, and analytics tools). These can tack on another 20–30% to your payroll budget, and that’s not factoring in the time spent managing those team members internally.
And if one team member leaves? You’re not just paying to backfill their role. You’re also paying in the form of lost momentum, slower timelines, and internal capacity that gets tied up in rehiring and retraining.
Hiring in-house may give you more direct control, but it often requires a larger financial commitment, longer ramp-up periods, and a significant management lift to keep everything running smoothly.
Outsourcing to a Marketing Agency
Outsourcing your marketing to an agency is often far more cost-effective — not only because it’s “cheaper”, but because you’re paying for a built-in system that’s already working.
Rather than assembling a full team of salaried employees, you’re paying a flat monthly rate (or retainer) that covers the work of multiple specialists: graphic designers, strategists, copywriters, project managers, and more. Most full-service agency retainers range from $3,000 – $10,000/month, depending on the size of your business, the platforms you’ll be marketing on, and the level of support you need. Many brands or business owners see that aggregated price tag and write agencies off as “too expensive”, but that investment is giving you access to all of the role-specific expertise needed to carry out your marketing efforts effectively in one bundle. The cost of working with a marketing agency adds up to approximately $36K–$120K/year — which is often half (or even a third) of what you’d spend building that team internally.
What’s more, you’re not covering benefits, software, recruitment, or training. Agencies handle their own internal systems, team development, and hiring, which means you’re never footing the bill for things like time off, team turnover, or tool subscriptions. You get consistent support without having to manage the day-to-day logistics of a team.
There’s also the flexibility factor: you can scale up or down more easily with an agency, adjusting your retainer or project scope based on your evolving needs — something that’s much harder (and more expensive) to do with a fixed in-house team.
For brands that want high-quality work, faster execution, and predictable pricing without the overhead of building it all in-house, agencies often offer a better return on investment and a clearer path to growth.
Making the Right Call For Your Brand’s Marketing Needs
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer when it comes to marketing management, but there is a smarter, more strategic way forward based on your brand’s stage, goals, and capacity. If you’re building a lean team with limited platforms and a strong desire for hands-on involvement, hiring in-house might serve you well (as long as you’re realistic about the roles, management, and budget required). But if you’re looking to scale with less friction, streamline your marketing efforts, and access a depth of expertise without the overhead, outsourcing to a trusted agency can give you the momentum you’ve been missing.
At the end of the day, marketing shouldn’t be a bottleneck — it should be a growth engine. And whether that growth is powered by an internal team or a strategic agency partner, the most important thing is that your brand is supported in a way that’s sustainable, scalable, and actually moves the needle.
Ready to offload the marketing chaos and partner with a team that gets it? From strategy to execution, Sonder Social handles the moving marketing parts so you can stay focused on what you do best.
Click here to learn more about our marketing management services and how we can support your brand’s next chapter!
