Hiring a Marketing Person vs Hiring a Studio

Somewhere around month three of running a small business, the same question shows up. Marketing is not happening the way it should, and something has to change. Do you hire someone full-time, or do you bring in a studio to handle it? We get asked this a lot, partly because we are the studio in that sentence, so take that for what it's worth. But we have also watched enough businesses make both choices to know the honest answer is: it depends on what you already have in place.

A marketing hire's salary is the smallest number on the page. Add payroll taxes, a laptop, subscriptions to a design tool, a scheduling tool, maybe a stock photo library, and you are already 20 to 30 percent over the base number before anyone has posted a single thing. Then add the part nobody puts in a spreadsheet: your time. Someone has to manage this person. Someone has to review their work, catch the mistakes, explain the brand voice for the fifth time, and cover for them when they are sick or on leave.

None of this makes hiring a bad idea. It just means the sticker price is not the real price. A $2,500 a month marketing coordinator is closer to $3,500 once you count tools and your own oversight hours. That is worth knowing before you compare it to a studio quote and conclude the studio is expensive.

Marketing job posts tend to list everything: social media, email, some design, a bit of video, basic copywriting, maybe ad management. Read that list again. That is five or six distinct skills, each of which takes years to get properly good at. You will find candidates who are competent at two or three of them. You will rarely find someone who is genuinely strong at all of them, and if you do, they usually do not stay in a generalist role for long, because someone eventually pays them properly to specialize.

This is not a knock on marketing coordinators. It is a structural fact about skill development. A studio works around this by splitting the work across people who are each good at one or two things, then coordinating them. You are not paying for one person to be mediocre at six jobs. You are paying for six competencies without needing six full salaries.

A small studio, done right, gives you access to a team without the overhead of managing one. When we work with a client, they get a strategist thinking about what to say, a designer thinking about how it looks, a writer thinking about the words, and someone thinking about video and editing. If one person is out sick, the work does not stop, because it was never resting on one person to begin with.

The tradeoff is real, though. A studio does not live inside your business the way an employee does. They will not overhear the hallway conversation about the product launch that changes everything. You have to be deliberate about keeping them in the loop, sharing context, and treating the relationship as a partnership rather than a vending machine you put briefs into.

Take a small retail business doing about $600,000 a year in revenue. A marketing coordinator hire at $3,000 a month, fully loaded, spends most of their week on social posts and email, and maybe manages a handful of paid ads if they have the skill for it. Video, if it happens at all, is shot on a phone with no real editing plan behind it. That is a perfectly fine setup if the owner already has a strong sense of brand and strategy and just needs hands.

The same business working with a small studio at $2,500 to $4,000 a month, depending on scope, gets a content calendar built around actual sales cycles, a designer keeping visuals consistent across the website and social, a writer who understands the brand voice well enough to draft emails without four rounds of edits, and someone who can turn raw footage into something worth posting. The studio is not automatically cheaper. It is usually broader for a similar spend, because the cost is shared across more output and more clients.

There are real situations where hiring in-house is the smarter move. If your business needs someone physically present, answering customer DMs in real time, showing up at events with a camera, or embedded deeply enough in operations to catch product details that never make it into a brief, a full-time person earns their keep in ways a studio cannot replicate.

In-house also wins once you already know what works. If you have run marketing through a studio for a year, you know your voice, your content calendar rhythm, and which channels actually bring customers. At that point, hiring someone to execute a known playbook is far less risky than hiring someone to invent the playbook from scratch while also executing it.

The most common mistake is hiring one junior marketing person and expecting them to be a strategist, designer, copywriter, and video editor at once, then feeling disappointed eighteen months later when the output looks amateurish and inconsistent. This is not usually the person's fault. It is a mismatch between the job description and what one human can reasonably do well.

The second most common mistake is the opposite: hiring a large agency for a small business that needed something much simpler, ending up buried in reporting decks and account managers instead of actual work getting made. This is where a small studio sits in the middle, close enough to feel like a team you know, small enough not to drown you in process.

Whichever way you go, the thing that actually determines whether marketing works is not the org chart. It is whether the people doing the work understand your customer and can move quickly without twelve rounds of approval. An in-house hire earns that trust through proximity. A studio earns it through a track record and a working rhythm you build together over the first few months. Neither is automatic. Both take deliberate effort from your side too.