What Each Option Is Best For
There is no one-size-fits-all answer. A growing business can make the wrong hire by choosing the wrong type of help too early, too late, or for the wrong reason.
That’s why it helps to understand these options and their relative scope.
Doing Marketing Yourself
DIY marketing can make sense when the business is still early, the budget is limited, or if you’d like to understand the basics before hiring help.
This stage can be valuable because it teaches you what your customers respond to, what questions they ask, which platforms matter, and what kind of messaging feels natural for your brand.
If you’re still figuring out your offer, your audience, your pricing, or your positioning, doing some marketing yourself can help you learn before you spend money outsourcing.
But DIY marketing has its limits.
At some point, the business owner becomes overwhelmed. Now, marketing gets pushed aside as operations, sales, customer service, staffing, and day-to-day work take priority.
This is when things get tricky. When you get to a point where you’re pushing marketing aside, it can cause a lot of damage to your marketing funnel, and with the digital age upon us, that can cost you in more ways than one.
That is why DIY may be enough when you are learning, but it isn’t enough when the business needs consistency, analysis, and growth.
Hiring a Freelancer
A freelancer can be a good option when you know exactly what you need done, down to the details.
For example, you may need someone to design social media graphics, write blog posts, manage ads, improve SEO, build email campaigns, SMS, or help with your website.
Freelancers are often useful for task-based support. They can help you execute faster without committing to a full-time employee or larger agency engagement.
But not all freelancers take responsibility for strategies and funnels.
That means the business still needs to develop the strategy: knowing what to ask for, how to judge the work, and how the task fits into the bigger marketing picture.
Knowing this with a freelancer is what will save you the most money, but going to a freelancer without this can get costly.
So, a freelancer may be the right choice when you have a clear direction and need help getting pieces of the work done.
But if the bigger problem is unclear strategy, inconsistent messaging, weak positioning, poor tracking, or disconnected marketing efforts, hiring one freelancer may not solve the full issue.
Hiring an Employee
Hiring an employee can make sense if the business thinks it’s best to keep everything in-house.
An employee can help with day-to-day consistency. Managing things like content calendars, coordinating campaigns with, tracking basic performance, and keeping marketing moving.
This can be especially helpful if your marketing needs work done every day.
Still, it’s important to keep in mind that marketing needs multiple hands. One employee usually can’t handle it all, and if you aren’t native to marketing, you may be under the impression that they can — that’s a mistake many small businesses make.
Marketing is a broad discipline that encompasses strategy, content, design, paid ads, SEO, analytics, email, social media, website updates, customer research, automation, and reporting.
It’s rare for one person to be strong in every area. So hiring an employee may solve the consistency problem, but it may not solve every strategy or execution problem.
This option works best when the business needs someone dedicated to marketing internally, has a clear sense of what role that person should own, and plans to expand their team to help the employee with their marketing workload.
💡Some growing businesses find a middle ground. They hire an in-house marketing employee, who then sources an external agency for assistance.
Working With an Agency
An agency may make sense when the business needs more than one marketing skill at the same time.
For example, the business may need strategy, content, ads, analytics, campaign planning, website guidance, email & SMS support, SEO, reporting, and creative direction working together.
This is usually where an agency becomes more useful than a single freelancer or a couple of employees.
An agency can help connect the moving pieces. It can look at how your channels work together, your lead funnels, campaigns, and results, and what needs to change before the business spends more time or money.
But not every business needs an agency right away.
If the business is still very early, has no clear offer, no budget, no customer understanding, or no capacity to act on recommendations, it may need to do more foundational work before partnering with an agency because that work needs to be done first, no matter who you work with.
An agency is usually most useful when the business has reached a point where marketing needs to become more structured, more consistent, and more accountable.
How to Know Which Option Fits
The easiest way to choose is to look at what problem you’re trying to solve.
- If your main problem is getting a specific task done, a freelancer may be enough.
- If your main problem is internal overload and weak consistency, an employee or two may help.
- If your main problems are structure, strategy, growth, measurement, or managing multiple channels, an agency may be a better fit.
So, ask yourself:
- Do I need help completing specific tasks? A freelancer may be the right fit.
- Do I need someone managing marketing consistently inside the business? An employee may make sense.
- Do I need structure and multiple pieces working together? An agency may be the better option.
And remember, there is no shame in starting with DIY. In fact, learning the basics can make you a better decision-maker later — strengthening your marketing as a whole.
So, the question should no longer be:
“Who should handle my marketing?”
It should become:
“What level of marketing support does my business need to grow from here?”
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