Cost of Hiring In-house vs Cost of Outsourced Marketing

The decision of whether to outsource your marketing or keep it in-house can be a difficult decision to make. So we’re here to help you make it. At the end of the day, one of, if not the biggest, deciding factors is the price. How much will it cost to keep your company’s marketing with an in-house team versus an outsourced agency? We’re breaking it down for you below! 

In-house Marketing

Don’t get us wrong, we recognize the various benefits of in-house marketing. You maintain 100% of the control and have a closer look into what’s going on on a regular basis. You also have the luxury of a more specific understanding of your audience and team members that are fully devoted to you and only you. But you have to consider that each of those luxuries comes at a cost. 

When hiring an in-house marketing team, there are required costs that you may not initially consider. They may include the following: 

Training

Bringing someone into your organization means that they have to learn how things are done. Whether it be learning your CRM, setting up their internal accounts, or just learning the ins and outs of their position, it takes time. True employee onboarding often takes an average of three months. Three months of training before your new hire is fully up and running means three full month’s salary without full return … Based on average marketing salaries, you’re looking at around $50K per year in payroll costs, or $12,500 for those first three months.

Salary

As implied above, your team’s salary plays the most significant role in the cost of your in-house marketing team. While we previously quoted an annual salary of $50K for the sake of our example, the national average for a marketing position ranges from $42-83K annually with the average salary settling around $65K. 

Another thing to keep in mind, this salary is for ONE person. Should you decide you need multiple specialists to perform various tasks within specialized fields, you can double, triple, etc. that salary. It sure is starting to add up fast … 

Benefits

You can’t forget the benefits you’re paying to your employees. Providing affordable benefits to employees is a requirement for businesses. Yet another cost associated with hiring an in-house marketing team. 

In the private industry as of September 2020, it’s predicted that employee benefits cost companies the equivalent of $10.72 per hour per employee. The cost of benefits accounted for 29.8% of employer costs. 

Overall there are various costs associated with in-house marketing teams. Based on our estimated calculations above, you’re looking at an investment of around $90K, give or take, to start building your in-house marketing team. As previously mentioned, this is only an estimate for a single employee, rather than a full team of specialists. 

Outsourced Marketing

Outsourced marketing may seem a bit intimidating to some companies. To most business owners, your business is your baby. It can be difficult to relinquish a level of control and place the responsibility of your company’s marketing into the hands of an agency that you might not have a long-lasting relationship with yet. Have no fear, we’re the best babysitters on the block and we’ll take good care of your business as if it were our own. 

While in-house marketing provides the luxury of keeping a closer managing eye on the nitty-gritty of your marketing strategy, outsourcing your marketing certainly doesn’t restrict your visibility and input entirely. At Digital Storyteller, we start all partnerships with a Brand Storytelling Session. We devote an hour and a half long session to understanding you, your business, your goals, and your brand.

After the session, we put our creative minds together and produce a customized proposal laying out the details of what we understand your brand to be and the strategy that we have in mind for you. If you like it, amazing! If you want to tweak some things, awesome! And if you decide it’s not for you, still cool! We’ll try not to let our feelings get hurt. 

Outsourced marketing doesn’t have to mean that you lose your voice or say in what’s going on. Our goal is to understand your business to the extent that we speak through your mouthpiece as if it were you personally executing the strategy all along (basically we want to be the Wizard of Oz hiding behind the curtain). A successful outsourced marketing partnership is exactly that: a partnership.  

So what are you getting out of an outsourced marketing team? Well, we speak for ourselves of course, but our team includes content specialists, including experts in search engine optimization and CRM integration, social media specialists, web and graphic designers, and straight-up kick a** humans that are at the ready to surprise and delight you with everything we’ve got. 

So let’s put some dollars behind it … Our average client price per month is $5K, so $60K for the year. As of today, our team consists of 6 full-time dedicated professional marketers. When compared with the number crunching we did above, you’re saving a serious chunk of change. 

Based on each client’s individual needs, pricing does vary accordingly. The addition of a full site build, custom logo and graphic development, significant email workflows, etc. will increase the cost of outsourced services above an average monthly rate. However, when comparing these services to an in-house team, you’re still likely to experience additional costs for similar services. 

So we’ve laid it all out for you. As can be expected, there is a significant financial difference between marketing options. At the end of the day, there’s no right or wrong answer. What’s right for your company might not be the right fit for another.

Outsourcing your marketing may be a great fit for a small business startup that’s trying to get its feet on the ground and is pointing its focus on the business side of its operations. On the other hand, a huge corporation might have the available funding to hire a full marketing team and take advantage of the dedication of an in-house team. 

Whatever is the right move for your business, we’re supportive of identifying the right marketing for you. If you decide that outsourcing your marketing strategy is the fitting move for your company, we’ll be sitting by the phone anxiously awaiting your call (or better yet, check out the link below to schedule a Brand Storytelling Session and get started).