Do you know the real costs of hiring an in-house marketing coordinator (salary, benefits, training, tools) vs. outsourcing marketing to specialists?
I share with you some realistic numbers for hiring a junior team member vs. outsourcing marketing projects to senior professionals.
What I don't show in the numbers is the recruiting costs. Companies can spend $5,000-$10,000 on recruiting for a single role.
The average tenure for a new marketer in the AEC industry at their first firm is 2.3 years.
Hire smart and develop your team members well. If not, the numbers I show you can go up because of the recruiting costs associated with the hiring process.
Let's talk about the real cost of hiring in-house versus outsourcing some marketing needs. Companies struggle with this decision a lot. I'm going to share some information on what you really need to think about when choosing either option.
I'm not advocating for one over the other because it is a revenue issue. It is how do you want to grow the business issue. You have to ask yourself where do you see your company over time?
The hypothetical scenario is showing some made up numbers, but pretty close to the real thing. If you were to hire an in-house marketing coordinator, what you're looking at is, on average, a starting salary of $70,000. This is for someone that has zero to three years of experience in the AEC industry. The benefits are a percentage of their salary and it includes health and dental, company insurance, etc.
Tools and software, everyone has a number associated with them.
The overhead expenses include the desk, a computer, a phone, a percentage of office rent. That number will adjust depending on what your company offers to employees, but you need to include that in this equation.
Management and supervision is the manager's time of sitting down with the new hire, reviewing their work, mentoring and coaching them. If you don't currently have a marketing leader, then this may be a director, principal, senior designer, or project manager's time allotted to supervising the new hire.
Professional development. If you're not, getting your internal people trained you are doing your company a disservice. You want to make sure that you have money set aside for continuing education. You definitely want to keep your people training and learning on the latest and greatest things that are coming out of the AEC industry.
Productivity gaps are going to include sick leave and PTO time and simply a learning curve of understanding a new industry and also a new business. It's likely their first time working for your company (or any company).
If you add up all those costs you're looking at just over $120,000 of what the company would be paying for a new, entry level, junior person in a marketing career.
Now, if we also look at the options to outsource, a fractional CMO or a senior level person, on average retainer base, you're going to spend about $96,000 a year.
That doesn't mean that they're going to spend a hundred percent of their time in your company. If they did, they would be an employee and you would have to provide the benefits and everything else that goes with the full-time employee. So this cost is for several hours a month, but it's not full-time status.
You can also do the option of a part-time specialist. A part-time specialist could be useful if you needed to have a social media manager, a website refresh, or a project pursuit consultant. On average, these specialist costs about $60,000 a year to bring in those types of senior level experts.
Then the last row that I have on the simple spreadsheet is a project based specialist. These are ideal if you need to do videography, photography (headshots or project photos), graphic design, and these projects are on a case-by-case basis. You could spend anywhere between $18,000 and $50,000 per project, per specialist.
The difference between in-house versus outsourcing is that your in-house person is going to be a engrained in your team. They're going to help build the culture at your company. They can catch additional things that maybe you hadn't planned for or you didn't foresee that the company was going to need to do.
Outsourcing the work gives you access to more senior people with a lot more experience. However, you are going to pay for additional scope creep and requests that fall out of the agreed to contract. You also won't have an internal full-time employee.
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