Why hiring in-house isn't always the best way to get your marketing sorted

Last time we talked about working out what your business actually needs from marketing before you go anywhere near a job title. Once you've done that, most people jump straight to the next decision as if it only has two answers, hire someone or get an agency in.

It's worth slowing down on that, because the assumption underneath it is usually the thing worth questioning, not the decision itself.

Hiring works, when the role actually fits

There's nothing wrong with hiring internally. If there's enough consistent work to keep someone properly busy, and the role is genuinely one broad job rather than several specialisms wearing the same title, it can work really well. They're around, they pick things up just from being there, they can react the moment something changes without anyone needing to catch them up.

The trouble starts when the job quietly needs more than one person can be good at. A generalist marketer, a developer, someone who actually understands SEO properly, maybe someone creative too. That's not one role, however tidy the job spec tries to make it look. Most businesses find this out the expensive way, usually a year or two in.

The bit people get wrong about going external

A lot of the hesitation around external support isn't really about the work, it's about what people assume the relationship will feel like. Slow replies, a ticket system between you and anyone who actually knows what's going on, someone who feels like a supplier rather than someone who's actually bothered whether things go well for you.

That's a fair assumption to have, because plenty of external setups genuinely are like that. But it's not a law of physics, it's just the most common version people have run into, and it's worth separating "external support" from "that specific, slightly impersonal version of it" before writing the whole idea off.

The businesses that get the most out of working with someone outside their walls tend to be the ones where the relationship doesn't feel external at all. Where you can just pick up the phone, or send a message, and get an actual answer from someone who already knows the context, rather than starting again from scratch every time.

And it's rarely just one type of work anyway

The other thing worth sitting with is that a business's digital needs rarely stay in one lane for long. What starts as "we need help with the website" has a habit of turning into questions about how bookings work, how staff use certain tools day to day, how clients actually interact with the business online, long before anyone's thinking about hiring for it.

That's usually where the "one internal hire" plan quietly falls apart. Not because the person isn't good, but because the need was never really one job to begin with.

Hybrid still has its place

None of this rules out having someone internal either. Plenty of businesses already have a marketing person or a small team, and bringing in outside support doesn't have to mean replacing them. It usually just means covering the parts that were never realistic to expect one person to be brilliant at, while they keep the relationships and the day to day running.

That's a genuinely sensible setup for a lot of businesses. It's just not the only one worth considering, and it's easy to reach for it by default simply because it feels like the safer middle ground.

Worth actually comparing

Before deciding, it's worth properly comparing what you'd get either way, not just the headline cost. One salary buys you one person's time and whatever mix of skills they happen to have. The right external setup can offer a wider spread of expertise, closer involvement than the stereotype suggests, and the flexibility to cover things that were never going to fit neatly into a single job description anyway.

Hiring is one route. It's just not automatically the safest or most complete one, and it's worth actually weighing that up before the job ad goes live, rather than after.