Should You Hire a Marketing Person or Use an Agency?

Hiring someone in-house is a legitimate answer, and for some shops it is the right one. But most owners weighing it up are comparing a salary against a retainer, and that comparison misses the two things that actually decide it.

The first is whether one person can do the job at all. The second is whether your shop generates enough marketing work to keep them busy.

The job is four jobs

Running paid acquisition for a specialty auto shop means doing four fairly different things, and they rarely live in the same person.

Somebody has to buy media — structure campaigns, manage budgets, read delivery data, and know why a campaign stalls. Somebody has to make creative, which for this trade means shooting and cutting footage of actual work in an actual bay. Somebody has to build and maintain the systems: forms, tracking, follow-up, the plumbing that carries a lead from click to phone call. And somebody has to read the numbers every week and decide what changes.

A marketing coordinator at the salary a local shop can justify will be genuinely good at one of those, competent at a second, and learning the other two on your budget. That is not a criticism of the hire. It is what one junior person is.

The owners who get burned by in-house are usually the ones who hired for creative — because that is the visible part — and then discovered nobody in the building knew why the cost per lead had tripled.

What it actually costs, counted properly

Salary data for Florida marketing roles varies enormously by source, which is worth knowing before you anchor on a number. ZipRecruiter puts the state average for a marketing specialist at around $45,600, while Indeed's figure drawn from several hundred postings is closer to $60,800, and ERI's survey data for Tampa lands above $74,000. Salary.com puts a junior Marketing Specialist I at roughly $50,500.

Call it somewhere between forty-five and sixty-five thousand for someone junior enough that a shop can justify it.

Then add the parts that do not appear in the job posting. Employer-side FICA runs 7.65% on top of wages. There is federal unemployment tax and Florida reemployment tax. There is workers' compensation. There is whatever you offer for health coverage, which for a small business is rarely cheap. There is paid time off, during which the campaigns still need managing.

And there is software, because the person needs tools. Design, scheduling, call tracking, whatever CRM you land on.

Your bookkeeper can price all of that exactly for your situation in about twenty minutes, and it is worth asking them to before you compare anything. The fully loaded number is meaningfully higher than the salary line, and most owners running this comparison in their head use the salary line.

Does your shop have forty hours of marketing a week?

This is the question almost nobody asks, and it decides more than the cost does.

A shop running two ad platforms with a steady lead flow generates real work — but not, in most cases, five full days of it. Campaign management for an account that size is a few focused hours a week once it is built, plus creative production, plus reporting.

So you fill the rest. The marketing hire starts answering the phone, chasing invoices, doing the social posts, helping at the front counter. Six months in you have a part-time marketer and a full-time employee, and the acquisition work is the part getting squeezed, because the phone rings and the campaign does not.

If you genuinely have enough volume to fill the week with marketing, that changes the answer, and we would tell you so.

The ramp is paid for out of your ad budget

Someone learning Meta's platform learns it by spending money and seeing what happens. That is how everyone learns it, including us.

The difference is whose money. An agency arrives having already made those mistakes on other accounts. A new hire makes them on yours, and the tuition shows up as spend that produced nothing.

That cost is real and it is temporary, which makes it easy to wave away. It is worth putting a number on it before you do.

One person is a single point of failure

The hire learns your market, builds the accounts, understands what works, and then takes another job.

Now you are hiring again, and everything that person knew about your account left with them. Worse, if the access sits in their name rather than the business's, you may have a genuinely painful week ahead. Whatever you decide, put the ad accounts, the domain, and the Google Business Profile in the business's name from day one — that applies to an agency exactly as much as to an employee.

Where in-house genuinely wins

We would rather be useful than win the argument, so here is the honest case for hiring.

You have enough volume to fill the role. Multiple locations, or a shop doing enough that marketing is a real function rather than a task. At that point an agency retainer starts looking like the expensive option.

You want somebody physically present. This one is real and we said the same thing when we wrote about local agencies. The ads that work for this trade are built from your own vehicles and your own bay. A person on site with a camera every week produces a library nobody remote can match.

You want the knowledge to stay. An agency leaves and takes its understanding of your account with it. An employee, while they stay, builds something that lives in the business.

You'd hire senior. If the budget stretches to someone who has actually run paid acquisition before rather than a coordinator learning it, most of the objections above evaporate. That is a different, more expensive hire, and it is a good one.

The answer most shops land on

For what it is worth, the setup we see working most often for shops in this trade is neither of the two options as posed.

It is a part-time local person — often someone already on the team with a decent eye — whose job is capturing footage of the work. A few hours a week, on site, filming installs and finished cars. That solves the one problem a remote agency genuinely cannot solve.

And then the technical half done by someone who does it across many accounts: campaign structure, budget management, tracking, follow-up systems, and reading the data.

That splits the work along the line where it naturally divides. The part that needs to be in your building stays in your building. The part that gets better with repetition goes to whoever has the repetitions.

If you are weighing this up, work out your fully loaded cost for a hire first, then compare it to that split. The arithmetic usually makes the decision for you, and occasionally it makes it in favor of hiring, in which case you should hire.

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