For many companies, whether to outsource or hire a marketing and PR resource in-house comes down to risk, cost and capability.
If you have no existing marketing and PR resource, the decision is rarely between “doing marketing properly” and “not doing it properly”. More often, it is between hiring one person and asking them to cover everything, or buying in a broader capability from day one.
A single in-house marketer can absolutely be the right answer for some businesses, but for many owner-led companies, outsourcing is the more practical first step — it lowers execution risk, brings broader experience, and avoids adding an employment commitment before the business is sure what it actually needs.
Assessing the financial implications
The first thing to strip away is the idea that someone on a £30,000 salary will cost a business £30,000 a year, or £2,500 a month.
They will not.
Salary is only part of the cost of employing someone. In the 2025/26 tax year, employers generally pay secondary Class 1 National Insurance at 15% on earnings above £5,000, and for eligible staff they may also need to pay minimum workplace pension contributions of 3% on qualifying earnings between £6,240 and £50,270. Most full-time workers are also entitled to 5.6 weeks’ paid annual leave or 28 days including bank holidays.
Using those statutory minimums only, a less experienced marketer on a £30,000 salary costs about £34,463 a year in base payroll once employer National Insurance and minimum pension contributions are added. A mid-level marketer on £50,000 costs about £58,063 on the same basis.
And that is before you buy a laptop, phone, marketing and PR software tools, pay for training, and sometimes recruitment agency fees. Once those are included, a realistic first-year cost can move to roughly £38,000 to £44,000 for the junior hire and £62,000 to £73,000 for the mid-level hire, depending on how you recruit and what tools they need.
The wider figures are modelled estimates rather than statutory amounts, but they reflect what employing someone usually means in practice.
Junior vs mid-level hires
The issue isn’t whether a less experienced hire is talented or not, it’s that marketing is not one discipline. It spans strategy, messaging, campaign planning, content, PR, email, paid media, social, design, SEO, website updates, reporting, CRM and sales enablement. No single person, at any level, covers all of it equally well.
A junior hire will almost always have gaps, and without a senior marketer in the business to provide direction, they can become busy without being especially productive. That’s not a reflection on the individual, it’s the reality of dropping one person into a function that isn’t yet established. A mid-level hire may be stronger strategically, but the breadth problem remains. The risk in either case is ending up with one employee who can do some of the job but not all of it, while still carrying the fixed cost and management burden of employment.
It’s also worth bearing in mind that any new hire takes time to get up to speed, something that is that’s true at every level. ACAS and CIPD both make the point that induction is not the same as probation: a proper induction involves structured training, regular feedback, role clarity and support from more experienced colleagues. In an company with no senior marketer already in place, that internal support structure simply doesn’t exist.
Recruitment risk — considering the new rules
The employment risk side also matters more now than it did a few years ago. Since 6 April 2026, Statutory Sick Pay has been payable from day one of sickness absence, the three waiting days have been removed, and the lower earnings limit for eligibility has gone. From the same date, Paternity Leave and Unpaid Parental Leave became day-one rights, and Bereaved Partner’s Paternity Leave also came into force in qualifying cases, with up to 52 weeks of leave but no statutory right to pay.
Looking ahead, the government’s current plan is that from 1 January 2027 the qualifying period for ordinary unfair dismissal will reduce from two years to six months, and the cap on compensatory awards will be removed. Further changes are planned for October 2026, including third-party harassment liability and a strengthened duty on employers to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment.
For a company, that does not mean “do not hire anyone”. It means the downside of a poor hire is more serious.
A few plausible scenarios illustrate the point. You hire a marketer, but after four months it becomes clear the role isn’t working. They need more direction than the business can provide, or their skills don’t match what the job turned out to require. At that stage they may still be in probation, but the process still needs to be managed carefully. Or you hire someone on a fixed-term basis thinking it is lower risk, but by 2027 the non-renewal of a fixed-term contract will still count as a dismissal for unfair dismissal purposes once the qualifying period is met. Or a new starter joins and soon takes sickness absence or a family-leave entitlement, which is entirely legitimate, but it leaves a small business without the resource it thought it had secured. None of these scenarios are unusual; they are normal features of employment. They simply weigh more heavily in an company where one person represents the whole marketing function.
Outsourcing — for and against
A strong outsourced marketing and PR partner gives you access to a more experienced team, so you are not relying on one person’s skill set or learning curve. They can start quickly, set priorities, identify the highest-value activity, and build a plan around commercial goals. They should also cover a wider range of services, either in-house or through trusted specialists: strategy, PR, content, design, digital, campaign planning, reporting and web support. You buy a ready-made function, with a set of tools that support their work, rather than trying to build one from scratch.
Outsourcing is also usually a lower financial commitment. Agency or consultant arrangements normally sit on commercial contracts with shorter notice periods and without the same employment-law exposure as taking on a permanent employee. That flexibility matters for companies because marketing priorities change. A business may need website work and positioning first, then PR support, then lead generation, then content and case studies.
An outsourced partner can flex with that more easily than a single employee whose background may lean heavily toward one area. The same partner may also already hold subscriptions to tools that would otherwise sit on your own P&L: design platforms (such as CANVA), SEO software (like MOZ), PR & media databases (including Roxhill), scheduling tools (e.g. Hootsuite) and analytics packages (such as Google Analytics).
There is a management efficiency argument too. A good outsourced team needs a clear brief, access to decision-makers and regular review points, but not the same day-to-day supervision as a new internal employee. Their remit is narrower and more output-focused. For a founder or MD who is already stretched, that can be a significant advantage.
That said, outsourcing has its limits. You won’t have someone available full-time, immersed in the day-to-day of the business. If marketing is genuinely central to your model and you need that constant presence, an internal hire can make sense — provided the role is well-defined and the support structure is in place to make them effective. A strong in-house marketer who is properly set up can build close working relationships with sales and leadership and create real long-term continuity.
A useful model for many companies is to start outsourced, use that period to build the strategy, processes and measurement framework, and then bring in an internal hire once you know exactly what you need. At that point, the outsourced team often continues in a supporting role, covering the breadth that one person can’t.
So what should a company with no marketing resource do?
In most cases, outsource first, hire later if needed is the safer route.
That approach lets the business answer some important questions before it adds headcount: what channels matter most, what level of support is really needed, how much work is ongoing rather than project-based, and whether the eventual in-house hire should be a generalist coordinator, a content marketer, a digital specialist or a senior marketing manager. Outsourcing can also create the plan, assets, process and measurement framework that make a later hire much more likely to succeed — whatever level that hire comes in at.
A reasonable rule of thumb: if you need broad capability, quick traction and lower risk, outsource. If you already know your strategy, have enough budget for a capable hire, and can properly support and manage that person from day one, hiring in-house becomes more attractive.
To help further, here is a useful decision tree:
For many companies, the mistake is not outsourcing. The mistake is hiring before the function is ready to support someone, and expecting one person to cover ground that genuinely needs a broader team behind it.