What a marketing function actually costs to run in-house

The question arrives in the same shape every time. We are paying an agency this much a month, a marketing manager costs about the same, would we not be better off hiring somebody.

It is a reasonable question and the comparison underneath it is almost always wrong, because it compares one salary against a whole function.

What does the in-house version actually require?

Run the list of what has to happen for marketing to work in a small business: research and positioning, a website that converts, paid media across at least two platforms, search visibility, content, email, a CRM that routes enquiries, reporting somebody trusts, and increasingly automation and AI on top of all of it.

There is no one person who is good at all of that. There are people who are good at three of them and competent at two more, which is a strong hire, and there are people who claim all nine, which is a warning.

So the honest in-house comparison is not one salary. It is one salary plus the tools, plus the freelancers for whatever that person cannot do, plus the management time of whoever briefs them, plus the gap while they learn your business, plus the risk that when they leave the knowledge leaves with them.

A mid-level marketing salary, South AfricaR25 000 to R45 000

Tools, platforms and subscriptionsR3 000 to R9 000

Specialists for what one person cannot coverR5 000 to R20 000

Specialist management, done for youR6 500 to R10 500

Salary ranges here are indicative rather than surveyed, and they move a great deal by city and sector. The bottom row is my own published rate. What matters here is that the top three rows together are the honest comparison, and most businesses only ever run the first one.

What does in-house genuinely buy you?

Attention, context and availability, and these are not small.

Somebody in the building learns your customers in a way an outside supplier takes months to approach. They are in the room when a decision is made rather than being told about it afterwards. They can be redirected on a Tuesday without a scope conversation.

For a business past a certain size, that is decisive, and the answer to this question becomes obviously in-house. The mistake is assuming that size is smaller than it is.

What does outside genuinely buy you?

Seniority you could not otherwise afford, and the absence of a hiring risk.

A small business hiring at R30,000 a month is buying someone with a few years of experience who will be learning several of these disciplines on your budget. The same business buying delivery is buying whatever that person already knows how to do, without a probation period, and with the ability to stop.

The trade is that they are not in the room, and they are not yours. Anyone who tells you that trade does not exist is selling.

Where is the actual line?

In my experience it sits at the point where marketing generates enough repeated operational work to fill a person's week without requiring them to be senior.

If the work is mostly deciding what to do, an outside senior person is better value. If the work is mostly doing a known thing repeatedly, in-house is better value, and you should hire for the doing rather than the deciding.

Most small businesses that hire too early get this backwards. They hire a junior to decide, and then wonder why the decisions are cautious.

What about the hybrid everybody actually ends up with?

It is usually correct, and it is worth designing rather than drifting into.

One person in the business who owns the relationship with customers and the content that comes from it, plus outside delivery for the technical channels that reward specialisation. That arrangement works because the parts that need context are held by someone with context, and the parts that need practice are held by someone who does them every day.

The version of this that fails is the one where nobody in the business owns anything, and the agency is expected to also supply the judgement about what the business should be. That is not an agency problem. It is an ownership problem, and it shows up the same way with a hire.

How do you decide this month?

Work out what a customer is worth to you, and what you need marketing to produce this year in customer numbers rather than in activity. If that number is small enough to be reached by doing three things well, buy those three things. If it requires a machine running continuously, you are building a function and should plan for a function.

The comparison in freelancer, agency or fractional covers the buy side of that decision, and what management should cost has my own numbers in it.