Outsourced marketing, hiring or an agency: which does a B2B business actually need?

If your business needs more from its marketing, there are three main routes. You can employ a marketer, use specialist suppliers such as agencies and freelancers, or bring in an experienced marketer from outside on a part-time or monthly basis. Each works well in the right situation. The deciding question is usually whether anyone in the business has the time and marketing experience to decide what the marketing should do, and make it happen.

In short: hire when there’s enough work for a full-time person, ideally with some senior direction. Use specialists for specific jobs, as long as someone can brief them properly. Bring in an outside senior marketer when you need someone experienced to set the direction, and check how much of the work they’ll do themselves.

A note before going further: I run Claywheel, which provides the kind of outside senior marketing described below. I’ve also spent most of my career client-side, as an in-house marketer in B2B businesses and as the person briefing agencies and freelancers. This is what I’d tell a friend, including when you shouldn’t hire someone like me.

The three options at a glance

What does it cost to employ a marketer?

The National Careers Service puts a marketing manager’s salary at £30,000 for someone starting out and £65,000 for someone experienced. Salary isn’t the whole cost, though. For 2026/27, employer National Insurance is 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year, and the minimum employer pension contribution is 3% of earnings between £6,240 and £50,270.

On a £45,000 salary, for example, that adds about £6,000 in National Insurance and £1,160 in minimum pension, so roughly £52,000 a year before recruitment, equipment and training. An experienced marketing manager on £65,000 comes to about £75,000 a year on the same basis.

Smaller employers may be able to offset some National Insurance through the Employment Allowance, currently up to £10,500. It applies to an employer’s total National Insurance bill, so if your business hasn’t used all of it, the extra cost of a new hire may be lower.

There’s also time. Recruiting can take months once you include the new person’s notice period, and they’ll need a while to learn the business. An employee also comes with the usual commitments of employment, such as holiday, sick pay and someone to manage them.

What to watch for when hiring your first marketer

If the business has never had a marketer, it’s hard to know what to look for. Advice from someone who’s done the job helps a lot. Without it, the advert often gets pieced together from other adverts, or written by someone in another department, and it ends up as a list of deliverables.

Plenty of people can tick off that list. But marketing is more than the deliverables. It’s the thinking behind them: understanding the business commercially, coming up with ideas and deciding what’s worth doing. The best hires can come in, understand what the business is trying to achieve, look honestly at what’s working and use marketing to help get there.

Once they start, a new marketer is often left to get on with it, and after a settling-in period the role gradually collects jobs that aren’t really marketing. Marketing can easily become the place where jobs nobody else owns end up, even though it should be helping the business win customers, keep them and grow.

None of that makes hiring a mistake. The right marketing manager, given time and support, can be a great hire. If budget means starting with someone more junior, that can work well too, as long as an experienced person is setting the priorities. Everybody has to start somewhere.

When is hiring the right answer?

Hiring makes more sense than outsourcing when:

• There’s enough work for a full-time person. If the business needs several days of marketing every week, employing someone will usually cost less than buying the same time from outside.
• The needs are fairly simple. If the work is mostly day-to-day content and campaigns, senior outside time may be more than the job needs. A capable junior who learns on the job can give better value.
• You want someone in the building. An employee picks up things an outsider never will, like the conversation in the corridor or the customer who rang yesterday.

A combination often works well: a junior or mid-level hire doing the daily work, with an experienced marketer from outside setting the direction a few days a month.

What do agencies and freelancers do well, and where do they fall down?

Specialists such as copywriters, designers, web developers, and SEO and paid ads experts are usually very good at their craft. When I sat on the other side of the desk briefing them, the best were excellent, but it took a lot of time to find the right ones for each job.

Some agencies offer real strategic thinking, and the best are well worth their fee. Most specialists, quite rightly, focus on their own discipline. Copywriters think about the words and designers about how it looks. That’s their job. Without someone to give them direction and bounce ideas around with, though, they’ll naturally work their own way. I’ve had plenty of first drafts come back full of assumptions because nobody had taken the time to understand how the business actually sells.

Some web agencies start with the design and expect the copy to fit it afterwards. The page looks good and says the wrong things. The better ones start with what the page needs to say.

Briefing goes wrong on both sides. In BetterBriefs research published by the IPA in 2022, 73% of UK agencies said the briefs they received weren’t good enough, and only 6% were clear on the strategic direction. UK marketers estimated that 26% of their budgets were wasted on poor briefs and misdirected work.

Specialists do their best work when someone in the business sets the direction, briefs them properly and is around to answer questions as the work develops.

When does an outside senior marketer make sense?

An experienced marketer working part-time or month to month, sometimes called a fractional marketing director, can set the direction that specialists need. How much practical work they do varies. Some mainly advise and manage other suppliers, while others, like me, do much of the work themselves. Both can work well, so ask how much hands-on work is included before you agree a fee.

It suits businesses that need senior judgement, but not five days a week of it. There’s no reliable published day rate specifically for part-time marketing directors. As a broad guide, the Institute of Interim Management’s 2026 survey puts senior interim executives across all functions at just over £1,000 a day in the private sector.

The limit is time. An outside marketer won’t be in the building every day, so they need to make a real effort to get to know the business and its people. It also needs someone inside the business who’s prepared to make decisions and get involved. If the expectation is that an outsider will arrive and sort everything out without any input, it’s unlikely to work.

How should you decide?

• Hire when there’s enough work, or the work is simple enough that a junior learning on the job gives better value. It works best with some senior direction.
• Use specialists for specific jobs, as long as someone in the business can set the direction and brief them properly.
• Bring in an outside senior marketer when nobody has the time or experience to set the direction and you don’t need a full-time senior salary. Check how much of the work itself is included.

What should you expect in the first month?

Early in my career, when I was a junior marketer, my boss brought in a marketing agency. They never once picked up the phone to me, the person already doing the marketing. They handed me tasks and talked a lot, and I still couldn’t tell you what they did.

Whoever you bring in, whether it’s an agency, a freelancer or someone like me, this is what to expect in the first month:

1. They find out what the business wants to achieve, how it currently wins customers and what’s already working before recommending what to do next.
2. They get to know your team, including whoever does the marketing now and the people dealing with customers every day. Your people are the business, and a good outside marketer takes the time to know them as well as their work.
3. They explain how they work, so you know what to expect and when.
4. They share a rough plan and timeline and agree what you’ll measure, while being honest that it will change as they learn more.
5. They agree how and how often you’ll talk.
6. They do what they said they’d do, and tell you when something needs to change.

If those things aren’t happening by the end of the first month, raise it then, not six months later.

Sources

• National Careers Service: Marketing manager
• GOV.UK: Rates and thresholds for employers 2026 to 2027
• GOV.UK: Workplace pensions: what you, your employer and the government pay
• IPA: New better briefing best practice guide (July 2022)
• Institute of Interim Management: Interim Management Survey 2026