In house marketing vs agency worksheet

This compares the two routes a business weighs before it hires or retains. Enter the salary you would pay an in-house marketer, the employer on-costs as a share of salary, the tools, ad platforms and freelancers the hire would still need each month, the retainer and setup fee an agency has quoted, the hours of marketing work the business needs each month and the productive hours one hire gives, and the page returns the loaded monthly cost of the hire, the agency's monthly cost with the setup fee spread over a year, the first-year cost of each, the cost per hour of the work you need on each route, and the hire's capacity against those hours (times ten, so a fraction does not round away). The decision is an hours decision before it is a budget decision; these are the figures, from your own numbers.

The hire side starts from a published pay figure and your own on-costs

The worksheet's default salary is the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics median for market research analysts and marketing specialists, $78,760 in May 2025, cited below; a senior hire sits far higher, at the $165,780 the same source gives for advertising, promotions, and marketing managers in 2025. Replace the default with the salary you would actually offer, add the on-costs your payroll carries and the tools the hire would still need, and the loaded monthly cost is the number the retainer has to beat.

The agency side is the retainer plus the setup fee, on the hours you need

A $6,000 retainer with a $3,000 setup fee is $6,250 a month over the first year on the worksheet's defaults, and on eighty hours of work a month that is about $78 an hour; the hire on the same defaults is about $121 an hour because a hire's cost does not fall when the work does. Change the hours and the comparison flips: at a hundred and forty hours a month the hire's cost per hour falls while the retainer's does not, which is the whole reason the hours are an input.

Capacity is the figure people forget

One hire gives a fixed number of productive hours a month, and a business that needs more than that from one person has hired a bottleneck. The page prints the hire's capacity against the hours needed, times ten so a fraction shows; below ten, one hire does not cover the work and the honest comparison is a hire plus freelancers against the retainer, or two hires against a larger retainer. Retainvia Pro keeps the comparison you settle on beside the brief the agencies pitch against.