Questions we answer Outsourcing and external support

Should I hire a marketer or use an agency?

Also asked as whether to outsource marketing or hire in-house. Marketing is strategy plus execution, and they rarely arrive in the same affordable person.

Start from this question

Free · a few minutes · starts from “I think we need another person”

The short answer

Split the question, because marketing is two jobs. If you do not yet know which channels produce customers, buy senior direction part-time and test before committing to a salary. If you already know what works and need volume, in-house execution is usually faster and cheaper. The expensive mistake, and the common one, is hiring one junior marketer with nobody above them to set direction — they will be busy, and it will be very hard to tell whether any of it worked.

Almost every page competing for this question is published by a marketing agency, which makes the balanced-sounding conclusion — keep strategy in-house, outsource execution — worth reading twice, because it also happens to describe a sale.

The prior question is the one that decides it: do you know what marketing is supposed to achieve here, and can you tell whether it did? A business that cannot answer that will burn six months with either route, and will not know which part failed.

Is it really this?

Worth checking before you spend anything. These are the signals that tend to tell the two apart.

Signs it is

You can name the channels that have produced customers, and the problem is doing more of it.
There is somebody who can brief and review the work each week.
The work needs daily product and customer context that an external team would have to be told each time.

Signs it's something else

You cannot say what good would look like in ninety days. Neither route survives that.
The real gap is the offer or the audience rather than the promotion of either.
The requirement is a burst of specialist channel work, not an ongoing function.

What's usually behind it

Flat pipeline, and a sense that marketing is the missing function.
A freelancer or agency relationship that has just ended, leaving nothing behind that anybody can operate.
A founder who has been doing marketing between other things and can no longer.

What people usually get wrong

Hiring a junior marketer as the first marketing hire and expecting strategy from them.
Forgetting that an agency needs managing, and that the managing lands on somebody who already has a job.
Judging either route on activity — posts, campaigns, impressions — because the outcome was never defined.

The options, and when each one fits

In no particular order. Which of these fits depends on your situation, not on the question you typed.

Agency or freelancer
The work is project-shaped, or needs channel skills you have no way to build or judge internally.
In-house marketer
The work needs daily context about the product and the customer, and somebody can direct it.
Part-time senior direction
You need to know what to do before you need somebody to do it at volume. Direction a few days a month is the cheapest form of that.
Neither yet
The offer or the audience is not settled, so any spend is a test of something you have not defined.

When doing nothing is the right call

Writing down what you would expect to be true in ninety days, and how you would know, costs an afternoon. If that cannot be written, it is the finding — and it saves whichever route you would otherwise have picked.

What the diagnostic asks

Whether the need is capacity, a skill nobody has, or both.
Whether the work is a defined project or a continuous function.
Who would direct the work and judge whether it is any good.
Whether a permanent hire is fundable and how soon this matters.

“I don't know” is always an answer. Nothing is assumed on your behalf.

The routes it weighs

Every diagnostic weighs all ten routes. These are the ones that tend to matter for this question — a description of the rules, not a promise about your answer.

Outsource
Hand a defined, ongoing scope of work to an external provider.
Recruit
Recruit a new person for a durable, sizeable need that is central to the team.
Specialist support
Bring in a freelancer, consultant or specialist for a defined piece of work.
Develop
Build the capability in someone already in the team, with time and support.
Do nothing yet
Record the issue, set a revisit date, and decide what would change your mind.

What changes the answer

Knowing which channels work moves this towards in-house execution; not knowing moves it towards buying direction first.
Having nobody who can judge marketing output weakens the case for a junior hire considerably.
Project-shaped work — a site, a rebrand, a launch — fits an agency in a way that continuous work often does not.

Get your own read

A handful of short questions, then the strongest route for your situation, what's also credible, what we still don't know and what would change our view. No account, no setup.