A communications director decides. A marketing team decides, makes, ships and reports. Some organisations do not need one senior head to steer the marketing from above. They need the marketing actually run: the strategy set, the work made, the spend held to account, every month, by people who do this for a living. An Outsourced Marketing Team gives you the whole function on retainer, without building or carrying the department yourself.
A&C runs your marketing function for you. Not advice from the sidelines and not a stack of deliverables sent over for someone in-house to make sense of. The strategy, the content, the performance media, the design and the reporting, all owned and delivered by a team built to do exactly that.
This is the difference between hiring a head and running the function. A director decides where the marketing should go; a team decides, then makes the work, ships it, and reports on what it returned. You are not buying steering you still have to act on. You are buying the whole thing done.
You get the thinking and the getting it done in one place. Someone sets the strategy, someone makes the work, someone buys the media, someone holds the design to a standard, and someone shows you whether it brought customers in. That is a marketing department's worth of distinct roles, covered by a team you do not have to recruit, manage or keep busy between campaigns.
The point is not cheaper marketing. It is marketing that is genuinely run, by people senior enough to spend a real budget well. Strategy with nobody to execute it is just a PDF. We have written about that, and it is the gap this engagement closes.
This is for the SME that has reached the point where marketing has to work properly, and one person can no longer make it.
The usual instinct is to hire a marketing manager. On paper it looks like the answer. In practice you are asking one salary to be a department. Done well, marketing needs a strategist to decide where to play, someone to make the content, a media buyer to spend the budget where it earns its keep, a designer to keep the work to a standard, and someone to read the analytics and report honestly on what came back. One person is rarely strong at more than two of those, so they end up drowning in the doing with no room left for the thinking. We have set out why that hire so often goes wrong here.
Now do the sums on building the real thing in-house. A manager, plus the specialists they cannot be, plus the design, plus the analytics, each a separate salary loaded with tax, pension and tools, and the media budget still sitting on top. That is a department, and a department costs far more than ten thousand a month to staff, and stands up slowly, one hire at a time. The Outsourced Marketing Team gives you that function's output from the first month, for a fraction of carrying the headcount, and none of the recruiting, managing or keeping people busy between campaigns.
So the honest comparison is not a team against a manager. It is a team's worth of roles, run for you on retainer, against a department you would have to build and carry yourself. It suits the founder or leadership team that knows marketing matters to growth, has a budget worth spending well, and would rather have the whole function run by people who have done it before than construct a department from a standing start. It fits an NGO or foundation in the same position just as well, where the job is reaching supporters and funders rather than customers, and the outreach has outgrown whoever has been holding it together.
We work on retainer, from £10,000 a month with a six-month minimum. That covers the team and the discipline; media spend sits on top and goes to the channels, not to us. Marketing run well is not a one-off, and judgement and spend discipline compound over time, so a short engagement would not do either of us justice. It can also be shaped around a single campaign or a defined project where that fits better than the standing function.
Every engagement starts with discovery. We learn the business, the customer and where the marketing is actually leaking value before we spend a pound of it. Discovery usually turns up the same things: money going into channels nobody can show a return on, a message that has drifted from what the company now sells, activity that is busy but not bought. Often the most useful decision in the first month is what to stop. If we are not the right fit, we will tell you plainly and early.
From there the work can take whatever shape serves the business best.
The team is the constant, and behind it sits the rest of A&C, brought in as the work demands. You are never relying on one person's bandwidth, and you are never left holding the parts of marketing nobody got to.
You get your marketing run, properly. The strategy is set by someone who has set one before. The work gets made and shipped, on a cadence, rather than waiting on a single overstretched hire. And the money you spend is held to account, with the numbers put in front of you so you can see what it bought.
That last part is the one most in-house setups quietly skip. Spend without accountability is how marketing budgets disappear, and knowing whether yours is working is a discipline in itself. We have written about how to tell, and bringing that discipline to your spend is part of what you are paying for.
You also get the whole of A&C behind the team. When the work calls for brand, design, advertising or technical delivery, it comes from the same place rather than sending you off to find another supplier. From £10,000 a month you have a marketing function that runs, not a department you have to build, staff and keep busy.
Some organisations do not need the whole function run. They need one senior head to own the thinking: where the brand is going, what the message should be, where the budget goes and what to stop. The execution they already have or can manage; what they lack is someone of director calibre to steer it.
For them we run the Fractional Communications Director. It gives you a senior partner at your table on retainer, setting the strategy and making the call when it matters, without putting a director on the payroll. It is steering rather than a standing team, and it is the right engagement when the work can get done once someone senior decides what the work should be.
If you are not sure which fits, that is exactly what the first conversation is for.
No pitch decks, no pressure. Just an honest conversation about where your marketing is now and whether having the whole function run for you is the right next step. We respond within one working day.
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