Knowledge Base

Should You Outsource Your Marketing Department?

Rene Karras avatar
Rene Karras
·
·5 min read
Patent drawing of a telephone switchboard circuit beside the line: one team for the whole marketing function.

Most growing companies reach a point where marketing needs the focus of more than one person but building a full department takes time and money they may not have. Depending on your company’s size and marketing maturity, outsourcing your marketing department is often the right call if you have no marketing team yet, your team has left, or an acquisition needs cover for 6 to 18 months. It also fits if one or two marketers are stretched across several areas, you’re not getting the results you need from an agency or you expect the business to change direction.

Content Summary: what outsourcing your marketing department gives you

  • Senior and hands-on marketers for less than the salary, benefits and recruiting fees of an in-house team. In addition, the hiring process is much quicker and takes a median of 39 days per role.
  • New marketing skills when the business changes direction, with no new hire needed for each change
  • One team that takes responsibility for the plan and the results so nobody on your side has to manage several agencies.
  • A steady partner that can grow or shrink with the business and stay on after you start hiring.

Outsourcing fits many situations, but not all

A fractional marketing team takes responsibility for most of your marketing, much as an in-house department would. It sets the plan, does the work and reports to you on the results, working alongside your own people. Find your situation in the table below.

Your situationIs a fractional marketing team right for you?
You have no marketing department, or never had one.Yes. The team becomes your marketing function from the start.
Your marketing team has left and the work still needs doing.Yes. The team keeps the work going while you decide whether to rebuild in-house.
Your company has been acquired and needs marketing cover for 6 to 18 months.Yes. The team bridges the gap, keeps marketing running or resets it until the business settles.
One or two marketers are stretched across several areas or lack senior experience.Yes. The team adds the strategy and delivery they are missing.
Your agencies are falling short on the results or value you expect.Yes. One team takes responsibility for the plan and the results.
You expect to move into a new market or launch a new product.Yes. The team’s skills change with the business, with no new hire each time.
Your in-house marketing department already works wellNo. A fractional team would repeat work that is already being done.
Your team works well and needs one specialist skill, such as email marketingNo. A single skill is a job for an agency or a contractor. A fractional team fits beside an in-house team only where it can run a whole area, such as demand generation or content.

A marketing hire costs more than the salary

Building a marketing department is expensive and slow. Each person needs a salary, employment costs on top and a recruiting process that can take weeks. An outsourced team gives you several experienced people without employing any of them directly, and it can cost up to 80% less than building the same department in-house. It also lets you change course faster. That matters in the United States, and it matters even more in countries with strict employment law, such as the UK, Ireland and Germany.

The figures below show what one senior marketing hire costs in the United States and the UK.

CostUnited StatesUK
Median salary$166,790 for a marketing manager (Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025)£94,135 for a sales and marketing director (Office for National Statistics, 2025 provisional)
Employment costs on top of salaryBenefits make up 31.5% of total pay for private-industry management and professional roles (Bureau of Labor Statistics, March 2026)National Insurance at 15% above £5,000 a year in 2026 to 2027 (HM Revenue and Customs), plus a workplace pension of at least 3% of qualifying earnings (GOV.UK)
Cost of hiring$5,475 for the average non-executive hire (Society for Human Resource Management, 2025 survey of 2,371 members)£3,500 median for a senior manager or director (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2026 survey of 1,014 human resources professionals)
Time to hireA median of 39 calendar days for a non-executive role (Society for Human Resource Management, 2026)

Compared with those costs, a fractional team gives you more for a similar outlay.

  • You do not recruit, onboard or pay salary and social security for a marketing team.
  • You get the skills of several people, including what they have learned at other companies, for less than one full-time employee costs.
  • You start sooner, because you skip the recruiting time a direct hire needs.

Your marketing skills can change when the business changes direction

Startups and small businesses change direction often. A company might start out needing a new website and regular content. Six months later it decides to sell into a new country, and now it needs paid advertising, local campaigns and someone who has launched in that market before.

With an in-house team, each new skill usually means a new hire, with the recruiting cost and the weeks of searching described above. With a fractional team, you change the scope of the work and the team brings in the specialists the new plan needs. The people who suited the old plan move on to other work.

A fractional team takes responsibility for the whole function

Agencies work in many different ways, and some offer strategy and management as well as delivery. The difference is usually in what you hire them for. An agency is often brought in to deliver a particular service or campaign. A fractional team is brought in to take broader responsibility for the marketing function, including the work of directing campaigns and connecting marketing with sales, customer success and product.

A fractional chief marketing officer is a good fit when you need senior strategy and leadership. Most companies would not hire one to deliver all of their marketing alone, though. A fractional chief marketing officer usually needs either an in-house team to lead or outside help to deliver the plan.

A fractional marketing team combines the two. Its senior leaders set the strategy and represent marketing in the business, and they also do hands-on work. The rest of the team delivers alongside them. Each person is a specialist in their own discipline, so you do not end up with generalists who know a little about everything. One lead reports to you on the priorities, the budget and the results.

A fractional team works like part of your business

In practice, a fractional team’s marketing lead joins your regular meetings and works with your sales and product teams. They learn what is happening in the business and take responsibility for getting things done. An operational lead and a delivery team stand behind them for the day-to-day work.

The arrangement is also flexible. You can scale the work up when the business grows and scale it back when budgets tighten or plans change, without making anyone redundant. That gives your finance team more control over marketing costs.

A fractional team can also be a long-term partner. In many companies, marketing staff come and go over the years, and each change costs time and knowledge. A team that stays through those changes keeps the plan, the history and the working relationships in place. When you start hiring in-house marketers, it can keep working alongside them.

Two real examples, with the companies left unnamed, show how this works.

A pre-seed startup selling a benefits platform to employers of hourly workers had no marketer in-house. Its website had no conversion tracking, so nobody could tell which pages or campaigns brought in enquiries. A fractional team became its marketing function. It set up tracking first, rebuilt the website and started regular social content, all before the company made its first marketing hire. The founders could now see where enquiries came from and spend their time on sales conversations.

A software scale-up had no marketing leader and had just let its paid media agency go. A fractional team took on the marketing. It replaced the agency’s lead generation with outbound campaigns built around lists for each target industry, found a new paid media partner and repositioned the company along the way. The sales team now had campaigns and messaging written for the industries it was selling into.

Frequently asked questions about outsourcing a marketing department

How much does an outsourced marketing department cost?

Prices vary widely, so look first at what sits behind a quote rather than the price itself. Ask who will do the work, how much experience they have, how much time they will spend on your account and what is included, such as meetings and reporting.

Be wary of offers that look too good to be true. A growing number of providers with little marketing experience rely heavily on artificial intelligence and win clients by undercutting everyone on price. An offer of a whole fractional marketing team for £2,000 a month doesn’t normally include senior experts doing the work and joining your meetings.

At the higher end, compare the quote with the cost of hiring. Using the United States figures above, one marketing manager’s median salary alone comes to about $13,900 a month, before benefits and hiring costs. If a fractional quote comes close to that and covers only one senior person, you are paying an in-house price without getting a team.

How do you build a hybrid in-house and outsourced marketing team?

Start with the fractional team’s strategic lead and operational lead working alongside the marketers you already employ, with the delivery team behind them. This works best where the fractional team runs at least one whole area of your marketing, such as demand generation or content. When you begin hiring internally, the fractional team can stay on as a partner.

How do you align an outsourced marketing team with company goals?

Make the team part of the business and give it clear responsibilities. Many marketing agencies work through one or two points of contact. A fractional team should instead start by mapping how your business works inside, much like an organisation chart. The map shows the workflows and processes, the people behind them and the knowledge they rely on. With that map, the team works as part of the wider organisation, in your meetings and alongside product development, service development and customer management. Then give the team named areas of marketing or named metrics it is responsible for. Its goals then match the company’s goals by design.

What are good alternatives to hiring a fractional marketing team?

The two common alternatives are hiring in-house and using an agency. Hiring in-house brings the pay, benefits, recruiting costs and search time described above. An agency still needs someone at your company to manage it. With several agencies, you also pay each agency’s margin and each account manager’s time, so the total can cost more than one team.

What is an outsourced marketing department?

An outsourced marketing department is an outside team that performs a company’s marketing function in place of in-house staff. The term often means the same thing as a fractional marketing team. Both describe a strategic lead, an operational lead and a delivery team that take responsibility for most of your marketing.

Decide whether outsourcing fits, then talk to B2B Engine

You now have a way to decide. Look at the table at the top of this article and find the row that sounds most like your company. If the answer is no, an agency, a contractor or your own team is probably the better route. If the answer is yes, a fractional marketing team is worth a conversation.

Our friendly team at B2B Engine builds fractional marketing teams for companies in exactly those situations. Read how the process works at https://b2b-engine.com/fractional-marketing-team/, or meet the specialists behind it, who have worked together for years, on About B2B Engine.

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