The pattern is familiar. Revenue is climbing, the founder is doing the marketing in the gaps between everything else, and the website, the social accounts and the odd campaign have all started to drift. So you write a job description for a marketing manager, because that is what a business at this size is supposed to do next.
Hold on before you post it.
A marketing manager is a doer. That is the job. You hand them a plan and they run it: schedule the posts, brief the designer, manage the ad budget, keep the calendar moving. If you have a clear strategy and you simply lack the time to execute it, that hire is exactly right and you should make it.
Most growing SMEs are not in that position. The problem they actually have is not too little activity. It is too little direction. Nobody senior is deciding which customers are worth chasing, which message to hold the line on, what to stop spending money on, and how the brand should sound when three different people are writing for it. A doer cannot supply that, because supplying it is not their job.
What the salary actually buys you
Look at what you are committing to. A capable in-house marketing manager in the UK is a real salary, plus employer’s National Insurance, pension, holiday, equipment and the management time it takes to keep them productive. For a growing, scaleup-stage business, that is a serious line on the payroll.
For that money you get one person, at one level of experience, with one set of skills. They will be competent at some of what you need and stretched on the rest. A good campaign manager is rarely also a sharp brand strategist, a disciplined media buyer and a steady hand on the wider communications. So you end up with someone strong on the tactics and short on exactly the judgement that was missing in the first place.
And the judgement is what was missing. The reason the marketing feels scattered is almost never that nobody is busy enough. It is that no one senior is deciding what matters and saying no to the rest.
The honest counterargument
Here is the strongest case for hiring anyway, and it is a good one.
An employee is in the room. They live the business, sit in the meetings, absorb the context that never makes it into a brief, and they are there every day to catch the small things. An outside team, however senior, is one step removed. For some owners that closeness is worth more than the seniority they would get elsewhere, and they are not wrong to weigh it.
The closeness is real. But it only pays off if there is a plan worth executing closely. A junior person embedded in a business with no clear communications strategy does not develop one. They get busy. They fill the calendar, defend the budget they were given, and the drift continues at a higher cost. Proximity without direction buys you faster, more consistent activity in the wrong direction.
So the question is not “in-house or outsourced”. It is “do I need hands, or do I need a head”. If you genuinely have the strategy and only need it run, hire the manager and ignore the rest of this. If what is actually missing is someone to set the direction, a full-time junior salary is an expensive way to avoid answering that.
What to do instead
If the gap is direction, you have two cheaper and faster routes than a permanent hire.
The first is to buy seniority without buying it full-time: a senior communications person on a retained basis who sets the strategy, decides what the brand stands for and where the money goes, and holds the line month on month. You are paying for the judgement at the level you need it, not for forty hours of someone more junior.
The second is to buy the judgement and the execution together, sized to your budget, rather than betting the whole sum on one permanent salary. That suits the SME for whom a full marketing hire would stretch the books but well-spent, well-directed marketing would genuinely move customer acquisition.
Both routes are things we offer at A&C. Fractional Communications Director gives a growing business senior communications leadership on retainer, with our wider team behind it and none of the cost of a full-time director. The Outsourced Marketing Team gives the SME that cannot yet justify a full marketing hire both the direction and the hands, with the spend discipline to match.
Neither is the right answer for every business. If you have the strategy and need the execution, hire the manager. If what you are short of is the seniority to decide, do not solve it with a junior salary. Have a conversation with us first.