The short answer: a full-time marketing hire costs about 1.25 to 1.4 times their base salary once you count payroll tax, benefits, equipment, software seats and the cost of finding them. An agency retainer costs more per hour and less per skill. A freelancer is the cheapest per hour and the most expensive in terms of your own attention.
Which one is right has very little to do with your revenue and almost everything to do with two questions. How many distinct skills does the work actually need? And is there anyone in your building who can write a brief and judge what comes back?
What a marketing hire really costs
Take a mid-level generalist at a $75,000 base. That is not the number that leaves your bank account. The loading looks roughly like this:
- Employer payroll tax - 7.65% FICA on wages up to the Social Security wage base, plus FUTA and your state unemployment rate.
- Health insurance - the employer share for a single employee commonly runs from a few hundred dollars a month into four figures, depending on the plan and the state.
- Workers compensation, payroll processing and admin - small individually, real together. Gusto and Rippling both bill a base fee plus a per-seat fee.
- Equipment - laptop, monitor, phone, desk. It is cash out in month one.
- Recruiting - a contingency recruiter is typically 15% to 25% of first-year salary. Doing it yourself is cheaper in dollars and expensive in weeks.
- Time off - fifteen days PTO plus public holidays is roughly 10% of the working year. You pay for twelve months and get about eleven.
Add it up and a $75,000 base lands somewhere around $95,000 to $105,000 fully loaded. Call it $8,000 a month before that person has spent a dollar on media or bought a single tool.
Then there is the tooling
An in-house marketer working alone still needs a stack. Ahrefs or Semrush at a tier that tracks a real keyword set, Screaming Frog for crawls, a call tracking product like CallRail, a scheduler, Figma if they touch design, and a CRM. Entry tiers on the big SEO platforms start in the low hundreds per month and climb as you add seats and projects. Budget a few hundred to over a thousand a month.
And one person is one skill set
This is the part that gets skipped. The job is usually advertised as "digital marketing manager" but the work is six trades: technical SEO, paid account management, copywriting, design, front-end development and analytics. Almost nobody is genuinely good at more than two or three. Hire a strong paid media person and your content programme will be thin. Hire a strong writer and nobody will notice the main service page has been returning a 404 for a month.
What a retainer actually buys
The honest description of an agency retainer is a shared bench. You are renting a fraction of several specialists, plus tool licences amortised across a client book, instead of buying one generalist outright.
US bands look roughly like this. These are ranges rather than prices, and the right-hand column is what moves them.
| Scope | Typical US monthly range | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Local SEO, single location | $750 to $2,500 | Competitiveness of the metro, how many service pages need writing, whether the site needs fixing first |
| Multi-location or national SEO | $2,500 to $10,000+ | Number of locations, size of the content programme, technical debt |
| Paid search management | $1,000 to $3,500, or 10-20% of ad spend | Number of campaigns and geographies, whether landing pages are included |
| Full-service retainer | $4,000 to $15,000 | How many channels, and how much production work sits inside the fee |
| Website build (one-off) | $3,000 to $25,000+ | Template versus custom, number of templates, integrations, content migration |
Our own work starts from $200. That is a floor, not a price, and where it lands depends on the same variables in that right-hand column. The pricing page sets out how we scope it.
What a retainer is genuinely good at is work that needs several specialists in short bursts. A month where the site needs a speed fix, three new service pages written, a negative keyword sweep and a Google Business Profile cleaned up is a brutal month for one employee and an ordinary month for a team.
What contractors actually cost
Competent US-based freelancers generally run $50 to $150 an hour. Recognised specialists, such as a technical SEO who handles migrations or a conversion lead, sit higher, often $150 to $300. Offshore rates go lower and the variance goes up sharply.
Per hour this is the cheapest option available, and for a defined piece of work it is frequently the correct one. The cost that never appears on the invoice is coordination. One contractor is easy. Two is manageable. Three or more and somebody has to hold the whole picture: decide whose recommendation wins when the ads person and the SEO disagree about the landing page, chase the developer who has gone quiet, and keep the tracking consistent. That somebody is you, and it is a part-time job.
Where each one breaks down
The hire
Single point of failure. No peer review, so mistakes persist. A broken conversion tag can run for a full quarter with nobody positioned to catch it. Skills plateau because there is nobody more senior to learn from, and the good ones leave for a team. When they go, the undocumented knowledge goes with them.
The agency
Being small relative to the client book. If your fee sits at the bottom of their range, your account gets the junior and the senior person appears on the quarterly call. Watch for report theatre as well: impressions, "keywords improved", sessions. If a report does not tie back to calls, forms and revenue, it is decoration. Insist on reporting built on your own analytics rather than a white-labelled dashboard you cannot audit.
The other failure is ownership. Google Ads account, GA4 property, Google Business Profile, domain registrar, DNS, hosting, code repository: all of it should be registered in your name, with the agency granted access. If any of it lives in an agency-owned account, your exit cost is not the notice period.
The freelancer
Availability. Your urgent request queues behind a bigger client and there is nobody to escalate to. Scope drifts, because the work was quoted as a project and the reality is ongoing. And there is no cover: one illness or one better contract, and the work stops.
When an agency is the wrong answer
Four situations where hiring us, or anyone like us, is a poor use of your money.
- Your budget is small and most of it would go to fees. If you have $1,500 a month all-in and $1,000 is management, you are paying somebody to manage $500 of ads. Run it yourself on a tight geography, or pay a freelancer once for a clean setup and then take it over.
- One channel, stable, already producing. If local search brings steady calls and nothing else is planned, a monthly retainer largely buys reporting on something that already works. Keep it in-house and spend the money elsewhere.
- The problem is not marketing. This is the common one. An HVAC or home services business that misses half its inbound calls, quotes slowly, or never follows up on unbooked estimates does not have a lead volume problem. Fix intake first. A CRM with disciplined follow-up will do more than doubling ad spend.
- You need a project, not a relationship. A website build has an end date. Buy it as one. There is no honest reason to convert a build into a permanent monthly fee unless genuine ongoing work is attached to it.
A general point too: nobody can promise you a ranking position or a lead volume by a given date, and anyone who does is either guessing or selling. What can be committed to is the work. What gets built, what gets measured, and what happens when the numbers do not move.
The shape that usually works
For most businesses past the first handful of employees, the sensible structure is a hybrid. One in-house owner, often a coordinator or manager rather than a specialist, who holds strategy, brand, the CRM and the briefing. Specialist channels bought outside, because you cannot afford a full-time paid media specialist and a technical SEO and a developer all at once. Contractors for spikes.
That in-house person has one job: to be a good client. It is a real skill, and it is the difference between an agency relationship that compounds and one that quietly becomes a subscription.
Test it with arithmetic before you sign anything
Work out what a lead is worth and what it costs, because that governs every decision above. If a click costs $40 and 3% of clicks become an enquiry, each enquiry cost roughly $1,300 in media alone. If you then close one in four and the average job is worth $3,000, the maths does not work and no amount of management will rescue it. The offer, the geography or the channel has to change. Our ROI calculator runs the same sum on your own figures.
Questions worth asking before you commit
- Who does the actual work, and what else is on their desk this month?
- Which accounts and assets will be registered in my name?
- What is the notice period, and what happens to the site and the content if I leave?
- Show me a report you would send me, with the client name redacted.
- What would you tell me not to spend money on?
That last one is the real test. Anyone who has done this work for a while has a list of things they will talk a buyer out of. If you want a straight read on which of the three options fits your situation, book a call. We are based in El Paso and work across the US, and we will say so plainly if the answer is to hire someone.
