Agency, freelancer or in-house: what £2,000 a month actually buys

This is the comparison most SME owners run in their head and few run properly on paper, because the headline numbers are not comparable. Here is the arithmetic.

In-house

A competent marketing manager in the UK outside London currently costs somewhere around £40,000–£50,000. That is not the cost to employ them. Add employer's National Insurance, pension contribution, holiday cover, equipment, software licences and recruitment fees, and the realistic annual cost is closer to £55,000 — about £4,500 a month.

For that you get one person, full-time, entirely focused on your business, who knows it deeply. What you do not get is depth across disciplines. A generalist marketing manager will not be strong at technical SEO, paid search, creative production and marketing automation simultaneously — those are four different skill sets. They will need agencies or freelancers underneath them, or they will do some of it badly.

You also carry the risk: recruitment takes three to four months, and if it does not work out you start again.

When in-house is right

When marketing is central to the business, the budget supports £55,000 plus execution costs on top, and there is enough work to occupy someone full-time. Below roughly £3m turnover this is usually premature.

Freelancer

A good specialist freelancer charges £400–£600 a day. At £2,000 a month that is roughly four days — call it one day a week, or two days a fortnight.

The advantage is depth: you get a genuine specialist, often better at their single discipline than anyone in a generalist agency. The disadvantages are structural. One freelancer covers one discipline, so a full programme means managing three or four relationships yourself. There is no cover for illness or holiday. And the good ones are frequently at capacity.

When a freelancer is right

When you have one clearly defined need — Google Ads management, say — and someone internally who can own the strategy around it.

Agency

At £2,000 a month a decent agency gives you fractional access to several specialists: someone on SEO, someone on paid, someone producing content, someone accountable for the whole thing. Nobody is full-time on your account, which is exactly the point — you are buying a slice of several people rather than all of one.

What you gain is breadth, continuity, and tooling you would not buy yourself. What you lose is depth of understanding of your business. An agency will never know your customers the way your own staff do, and any agency claiming otherwise is overselling.

The honest weakness of the agency model is that account attention varies with the agency's own workload, and you are unlikely to be told when it dips.

When an agency is right

When you need several disciplines running at once, do not have enough work for a full-time hire, and want one accountable relationship rather than four.

Side by side, at £2,000 per month

	Agency	Freelancer	In-house
What you get	Part of 4–6 specialists	~4 days of one specialist	Not affordable at this level
Breadth	High	Low	Medium
Depth in one discipline	Medium	High	Medium
Knows your business	Medium	Medium	High
Cover for absence	Yes	No	No
Time to productive	2–4 weeks	1–2 weeks	4–6 months
Tooling included	Yes	Sometimes	No — you buy it

The question that usually settles it

How many marketing disciplines does your growth plan actually require running simultaneously? If the answer is one, hire a freelancer. If it is four or five, an agency is more efficient than assembling and managing that yourself. If your marketing is complex enough to occupy someone full-time and you can carry £55,000, hire.

We publish our own pricing so this comparison is possible to make without a sales call.