Hiring a marketing manager or a marketing agency?

Every now and then, mostly when there is a workload peak, your management suggests hiring an additional marketing manager. Before you “simply” decide to enroll one more employee to the payroll, maybe you should consider these options:

There are several serious flaws in this roadmap, as managers often overlook the high costs of hiring marketing talent internally as well as the loss of flexibility they incur with expanding internal departments.

The Real Costs of Hiring a Marketing Manager

It’s not difficult to find the salary cost of a marketing staff member. According to payscale.com, the average salary for a marketing expert in Belgium is €53,864 per year. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say that it’s €54,000. To get the full cost, you need to add patronal charges, social security contributions, etc. The full salary cost would set you back some €90,720.

But the real costs don’t stop at the salary, you’re also going to pay for:

• recruitment
• hiring
• integration and training
• benefits
• equipment
• rent
• HR/IT support
• business expenses

In fact, the total direct cost of an employee ranges from 1.5 to 3 times the amount of the actual salary.

Let’s assume your management really keeps the finger on the pulse, let’s say that it’s a factor 1.5 here, so €136,080 (€90,720 x 1.5).

How much is that per hour?

Your €136K marketing specialist works 40 hours per week.

That’s 2080 hours per year (52 x 40)

Subtract 296 hours for vacation (20 days) and other forms of leave (compensation for working more than 38 hours per week)

Subtract 45 hours for sick/illness.

Subtract 20 hours for personal days, medical appointments, being late or leaving early.

That leaves you with 1719 hours of actual work in a year.

That calculates to €79.11/hour for your €136K marketing expert salary cost.

Not satisfied by the performance of your marketing expert? At the end of year one, you will pay about €15,000 or more depending on the PERKS.

Costs of Hiring a Marketing Agency

We’re not trying to tell businesses to bypass hiring a marketing manager or director, the point is to show the options available for spending your marketing euros.

At 136K in actual costs for a Marketing manager, that equates to €11.333 a month.

Obviously prices range for marketing agencies and marketing services, but most marketing agencies will be able to deliver multiple services with this kind of budget.

To do this, they will appeal on range of expertise of their teams, which include a large mix of creativity in concept development, design, copy, visuals, technical skills,… They will also rely on the resources of their network, allowing for flexible and fast interventions and support.

Here’s an example:

• €5K on PPC, or Google AdWords to help generate new leads and customers quickly
• €2.5K on SEO and Content Marketing to gain better search engine rankings and get more traffic
• €2K on Email Marketing, to create an email strategy to help capture more leads, and keep prospects and customers engaged
• €1.5K a month on website testing and optimization, to increase website conversion and capture more leads
• €1K a month a referral marketing campaign to stimulate current customers to refer others to your business
• €500 on a blogger outreach program, to help get industry bloggers talking about your brand, and your business.

Also, you don’t pay agencies benefits, pensions, or time off for vacation or sick days.  And when you decide to stop, well, that’s it: no licensing costs, severance payments, no compensations, nada, zip.

Remember that marketing agencies also can work in your offices. Always look for an agency that is flexible, can hold a lot of face-to-face (or virtual) meetings and can openly collaborate with your existing teams and resources.