Hire a marketer, sign an agency or bring in a fractional CMO? First decide who owns the number.

What you are really buying

Marketing for a small business is three jobs that usually get bundled together. Direction: who the customer is, what you're offering them, which channels, how much to spend. Doing: the ads, the content, the emails, the landing pages, the weekly changes. Owning the number: someone who looks at enquiries, cost per customer and revenue every week, and is answerable when they slip.

Each option below covers a different mix of those three. Most bad marketing hires happen because an owner bought one of them and assumed they were getting all three.

Option 1: a full-time marketing hire

Right when you have a proven offer, a channel that already works, and enough work to fill a week, every week. A good in-house marketer learns your customers better than any outsider, and they're in the room when the product, the pricing or the schedule changes.

Wrong when you need direction more than hands. One person rarely covers strategy, paid ads, design, copy, email and analytics to a decent standard, and small businesses tend to hire a generalist and then expect a specialist in each. The cost is also more than the salary: payroll taxes, benefits, the software they'll need, the months it takes them to get up to speed, and your time managing them. If you don't know what good marketing looks like, it's hard to manage someone doing it, and hard to tell in month four whether it's working.

A freelancer on a 1099 is the lighter version. Good for a defined job like a site rebuild or a run of content. Weak as a substitute for someone who owns results.

Option 2: a marketing agency

Right when the business behind the marketing already works: enquiries get answered fast, the website converts, the offer is clear, and you need more of the right people to see it. A good agency brings specialists you couldn't hire one by one, plus what it has learned on other accounts.

Wrong when the leak sits somewhere the agency doesn't look. Agencies are paid to deliver traffic and leads, and most stop at the form. If those leads wait a day for a reply, you'll pay more every month for the same disappointing sales, and both sides will blame the other. Watch for the familiar pattern too: senior people in the pitch, junior people on the account, and a monthly report full of impressions and clicks rather than enquiries and customers.

Fractional CMO vs agency

A fractional CMO is a senior marketer for a few days a month. They set direction, build the plan, hire and manage the agencies or freelancers, and sit in the meetings that decide the budget. Compared with an agency, you get judgment without a channel to sell. Compared with a full-time CMO, you get it without the full-time commitment.

The catch: a fractional CMO directs, they don't usually do. You still need someone to run the ads, write the emails and build the pages, which means a fractional CMO plus an agency plus a freelancer. Three suppliers to coordinate. That works in a business with an operations person to hold it together. In a smaller business, the person holding it together is the owner, which is the problem you were trying to solve.

Option 4: an outsourced marketing department

One partner that covers direction, doing and owning the number, and also looks at what happens to leads after they arrive: the website they land on, the follow-up, the CRM, the sales process. This is how we run marketing and ads at Asteroid, so read this section knowing that.

Right when the problems cross functions, when you've tried an agency and can't say what came back, or when you'd rather not manage three suppliers. Wrong when you have a single, clean problem, a strong team around it, and you only need a specialist pair of hands. In that case, hire the specialist.

How to choose in fifteen minutes

Answer these honestly, in order:

1. Do leads get a reply within the hour today? If not, fix that before you hire anyone to bring in more. Here's how to build the follow-up.
2. Do you know what it costs to win a customer? If not, you need direction and tracking before you need more hands.
3. Is there a full week of marketing work, every week? If yes, an in-house hire starts to make sense. If no, outsource it.
4. Who in the business can judge whether marketing is working? If the honest answer is nobody, don't hire someone you can't manage. Get direction first, from a fractional CMO or a partner who reports in plain numbers.
5. How many suppliers are you already coordinating? If it's more than two, adding another rarely helps.

Whatever you choose, keep these in your name

• Your ad accounts, such as Google Ads and Meta Business Manager, owned by your business, with the agency added as a partner. Not the other way round.
• Your Google Analytics property, Google Tag Manager container and Google Business Profile.
• Your domain, your website hosting login and your email marketing account.
• Your CRM and every contact in it.
• The creative you paid for: images, video and copy.

If you leave a supplier and lose your ad history, your tracking and your customer list on the way out, you start again from nothing. Ask about ownership before you sign, not after.

Where to start

If you're not sure which of the three jobs is missing, find out before you hire. The revenue leakage and operations audit follows a lead from the first ad to the invoice and shows where the money goes, so you know whether the problem is marketing at all. Which agency do you actually need? covers the wider choice, including coaches and consultants. If you'd like to talk it through, tell us what's going on. We'll say plainly whether the answer is a hire, an agency or an engagement with us.