Nobody hires three marketers. They hire one and hope.
Every comparison of this decision is published by an agency that profits from the answer. So here is the arithmetic with the sources named, including the part where hiring is the right call and we are not.
The offer letter is not the cost.
A functional marketing department is three people at minimum: one owning strategy, one on content and search, one on paid media. Below is what that costs before a single dollar reaches an ad platform.
SOURCED · base salary range and the three-role minimum per Digital Osmos (2026) and Sproutbox (2026). Employer load multiple per the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Bars drawn to a common scale. Our figure is ours. The rest belongs to somebody we named.
HONEST · those two numbers do not buy the same thing. Three employees give you full-time attention and knowledge that stays in the building. We do not. What we give you is the function, working, in month one, without a hiring cycle.
Almost nobody hires the department. They hire the generalist.
And this is where the decision quietly goes wrong, because the job description asks one person to be six people, and the salary says it out loud.
One marketing generalist. $70,000 to $100,000, plus load.
Expected to cover the full stack. In practice they are strong in one discipline, competent in a second, and guessing in the rest, which is not a criticism of them. It is arithmetic.
The function, not the headcount.
Six disciplines, each done by someone who does it constantly, governed by one strategy and one measurement standard. That is what a department is for, and it is what a firm is for.
The generalist's hardest problem is not skill. It is that when a campaign underperforms, nobody in the building can tell them whether the strategy was wrong, the execution was weak, or the tracking was lying. We have found that third one more often than the first two.
Four situations where you should hire, and we will tell you so.
Every other page you will read on this question was written by somebody selling the outsourced answer. So was this one. Here is where that answer is wrong.
When the knowledge has to live in the building.
- Marketing is the product. Media companies, community-led consumer brands, anything where the marketing itself is the competitive edge. That capability belongs to you, not to a vendor.
- A regulated industry needs review on every communication. Healthcare, financial services, legal. The oversight has to be internal and immediate, and an outside firm adds a step you cannot afford.
- Your marketing spend is already large enough to justify the headcount. Past a certain volume the cost-to-output ratio flips and dedicated people are simply cheaper. We will run that number with you honestly.
- You want to own the institutional knowledge permanently. A real and legitimate goal. Hire, and hire well, and take the three to six months. The knowledge compounds inside the company and it never leaves.
We are not an alternative to your marketer. We are the person above them.
The most common shape we see is a capable in-house person with nobody senior to answer to, deciding channel strategy alone, on their second year of experience, while the founder hopes it works out.
Our Advisory engagement exists for exactly that. We diagnose, set the strategy, review the work, verify the tracking, and hold the direction on a cadence. Your person executes and gets better fast, because for the first time somebody senior is reading their work. It is $5,000 a month and it is the cheapest way to make an existing hire pay for themselves.
The questions the arithmetic raises.
What does an in-house team really cost?+
Is one good generalist enough to start?+
Are you just cheaper than hiring?+
What if I want to build in-house eventually?+
Can you work with the marketer I already have?+
Run the numbers with someone who will argue against themselves.
Twenty-five minutes. Bring the job description you were about to post. We will tell you whether the role is right, whether one person can carry it, and whether you should hire instead of hiring us. Sometimes the answer is hire.