The Question Every Growing Company Asks

Somewhere between $5M and $15M in revenue, the same conversation happens on repeat: marketing has outgrown “whoever has time for it,” and someone asks, “Should we just hire a team?”

It’s a reasonable instinct. It’s also usually the expensive answer — not because in-house talent isn’t valuable, but because most companies underestimate what a complete in-house marketing function actually costs, and overestimate how fast it gets productive.

What a Real In-House Team Requires

Marketing isn’t one job. To cover the ground a growing business actually needs — SEO, content, paid ads, social, and someone to make sure it all points at the same goal — you’re typically looking at a small team, not one hire:

• An SEO specialist to handle technical optimization, content strategy, and keyword targeting
• A content writer or marketer to actually produce what SEO and social both depend on
• A paid ads / PPC manager if you’re running Google or Meta campaigns
• A social media manager if you want more than sporadic posting
• Someone senior enough to direct all of it toward a coherent strategy, not four disconnected task lists

In the current U.S. market, fully-loaded costs for a lean version of this team (salary plus typical benefits and payroll overhead, which commonly runs 25-40% on top of base pay) land somewhere in the $280,000-$420,000+ per year range before you’ve spent a dollar on the software stack — SEO tools, ad platforms, design and project management tools — that a real team needs to function.

That’s before accounting for the part nobody budgets for: ramp-up time. Recruiting, onboarding, and getting a new marketing hire to full productivity typically takes three to six months. A specialist who’s still learning your business isn’t operating at the rate you’re paying for.

What a Fractional Team Costs Instead

A fractional marketing partner spreads that same range of expertise — SEO, content, paid media, social, strategy — across a team that already works together, is already fully productive, and isn’t waiting on a single point of failure if one person leaves.

Concretely, on our points system:

• Momentum ($5,500/month, 40 points) — roughly $66,000/year — covers SEO, social media management, content, email marketing, persona work, and a dedicated account manager.
• Growth ($10,000/month, 80 points) — roughly $120,000/year — adds advanced SEO, paid social ads management, more content volume, and detailed reporting.

Even Growth, the larger of the two, comes in at roughly a third of what a comparable in-house build costs — with no recruiting cycle, no ramp-up period, and no single point of failure if one specialist leaves.

This Isn’t an Argument Against Hiring

To be clear: at a certain size, in-house marketing makes sense — usually once marketing is core enough to your business that you want full-time, dedicated ownership and you have the volume of work to keep a team of specialists fully utilized. That’s a real threshold, and plenty of companies cross it.

The mistake is crossing it too early — building a $300K+ team to do the work a fractional partner could handle at a third of the cost while you’re still figuring out what’s actually working. Test the system first. Scale the commitment once you know it’s paying off.

See What This Looks Like for Your Business

Every business’s math is a little different depending on what’s already in place. Take the free Marketing Efficiency Audit — three quick questions — and see which package fits where you are today, plus where that typically goes next as you grow. Or head straight to the full pricing breakdown to see exactly what’s included at every tier.