Somewhere around 8 to 12 employees, a lot of owners hit the same thought: "I should hire a marketing person." The phones are busy, you're stretched thin, and marketing keeps falling to the bottom of your list.
Should you hire a marketing person? For most small businesses at that size, my honest answer is not yet. Not because marketing doesn't matter. Because a first marketing hire costs more than most owners expect, and it often doesn't solve the problem they're hiring for.
What does a full-time marketing person really cost?
Start with salary. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics lists the median annual wage for market research analysts and marketing specialists at $78,760 as of May 2025. If you want someone senior enough to set strategy, BLS puts the median for marketing managers at $166,790 for the same period.
Salary is only the start. BLS data for June 2026 shows benefits made up 30 percent of total compensation for private industry workers. That works out to roughly 43 cents in benefits and payroll costs on top of every dollar of wages.
Here's what that looks like stacked up. The salary and benefits come from the BLS figures above. The rest are my rough estimates for a small business, so treat them as illustrative.
| Cost | Full-time marketing specialist (illustrative) |
|---|---|
| Salary | About $78,760 (BLS median, May 2025) |
| Benefits and payroll taxes | About $34,000 (at the BLS 30 percent share) |
| Software and tools | Design, scheduling, SEO, and AI tools, often a few hundred dollars a month |
| Training and ramp-up | Usually a few months before they're fully productive |
| Your management time | Weekly check-ins, approvals, reviews |
| Rough all-in | Well over $110,000 a year |
For a home services company doing $1 million or $2 million a year, that's a real chunk of the budget. And notice none of it is ad spend. That's just the cost of having the person.
The hidden cost: your time
Owners underestimate this one every time. A new hire needs direction. Somebody has to explain your services, your customers, your pricing, and what "good" looks like. Somebody has to approve the posts and check the ads.
That somebody is you. The same person who didn't have time for marketing in the first place.
The trap: you hire a marketer to get marketing off your plate, then spend five hours a week managing them. You traded one job for another.
One person can't be an expert at everything
Here's the bigger problem. Small business marketing is really six or seven jobs wearing one name tag:
- Google Ads. Keywords, bids, negative keywords, conversion tracking.
- SEO and content. Blog posts and service pages that rank.
- Local SEO. Google Business Profile, reviews, directory listings.
- Social media. Planning, writing, design, scheduling.
- Website. Updates, landing pages, speed, forms that actually work.
- Tracking and reporting. Knowing which calls came from where.
- Automation. Follow-up texts, review requests, lead routing.
At a salary a small business can afford, you usually get someone early in their career who's good at one or two of these. Often social media, because that's where many people start. Then the Google Ads account, the thing with the most money flowing through it, gets run by someone learning on your dime.
That's not a knock on the person. It's just a lot to ask of one hire.
And there's a quieter problem. A solo marketer at a small company has nobody to learn from. No senior person reviews their ad account or tells them a blog post misses the point. They learn by trial and error, and you pay for the errors.
What owners are usually hoping a hire will fix
When I ask owners why they want a marketing person, the answers tend to fall into a few buckets. Each one has a cheaper fix than a salary.
- "Nobody posts on social." That's a few hours a quarter if it's batched, not a full-time job.
- "Our ads aren't working." That's a few focused hours a week from someone who knows Google Ads, not 40 hours from someone who doesn't.
- "We need more reviews." That's a process and an automated text, not a person.
- "I don't know what's working." That's call tracking and a monthly report.
None of those add up to 40 hours a week for a business with a handful of trucks or one franchise location.
Signs you're ready for a first marketing hire
Some businesses really do need a full-time person. You're probably there if most of these are true:
- The work fills 40 hours. Multiple locations, daily content, events, a heavy ad budget, and a steady flow of projects.
- You need someone on site. Photographing jobs, filming crews, running events, working the front desk on promotions.
- You have a plan already. You know what channels work. You need someone to run them, not figure them out.
- Someone can manage them. You or an operations manager has real time to direct the work.
- The budget absorbs it. A six-figure cost doesn't squeeze what you can spend on ads.
Signs you're not ready yet
- You want someone to "figure out marketing." That's a strategy job, and a junior hire usually can't do it alone.
- You can't describe the job in 40 hours. If the honest list is 15 hours of work, a full-time hire will fill the rest with busywork.
- You don't know what a lead costs you now. Fix tracking before you add headcount.
- You'd be hiring to avoid the problem. If no one is answering the phone, a marketer won't fix that.
The options in between
A lot of owners think the choice is "do it myself" or "hire someone." There's a whole range in the middle.
| Best for | Watch out for | |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | Very early, very small, or a tight budget | It's the first thing you skip when you're busy |
| Freelancer | One defined task, like a logo or a website build | Usually one skill, and you're the project manager |
| Agency | Larger budgets and many channels at once | Layers of account managers between you and the work |
| Fractional marketer | Owners who need senior help a set number of hours a month | Not on site, and not a 40-hour employee |
| Full-time hire | A full 40-hour workload with someone to manage it | The total cost and the one-person skill gap |
If you're starting from zero, my 2-hour-a-month plan is the DIY floor. If you're comparing the paid options side by side, I break them down in fractional marketer vs. agency vs. full-time hire.
Where a fractional marketer fits
I'm biased here, so I'll be specific. A fractional marketer is a senior person you hire for a set number of hours a month. You get experience across ads, SEO, local, and social, without the salary, benefits, or management load.
I charge $125 per production hour with a 15-hour monthly minimum, which comes to $1,875 a month. Meetings are free, it's month-to-month, and you own every account and file. That's not right for everyone. But for a business whose real marketing workload is 15 to 30 hours a month, it covers more ground than a junior hire for a fraction of the cost. You can see what those hours look like in what a fractional marketer actually does all month.
The bottom line
Hire a full-time marketing person when you have a full-time marketing job, a plan to run, and someone to manage them. Until then, buy the hours you actually need from someone who already knows how to do them.
And if you do eventually hire, the work you did in between isn't wasted. A new hire who inherits clean accounts, working tracking, and a library of content starts months ahead of one who inherits a mess.
Alex Lamy16 years in marketing, from radio to agencies to running his own shop. Now a fractional marketer for St. Louis small businesses. You talk to him, he does the work.
Want this handled for you?
$125 per production hour. Meetings are free. Month-to-month, and you own everything. Want a reference first? I'll connect you with someone I did similar work for.
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