The Cost Of Doing Marketing In-House
An in-house team can be the right call, but it might not always be the right move, even if you have the budget to staff it properly.
Growing pains
Sooner or later, every growing contractor and manufacturer asks the same question. Should we hire our own marketing team? It is a fair question. Your website is out of date. Your best project photos live on someone’s phone.
Bids are won on reputation, and nobody is in charge of yours. The short answer is that a team that can do the job properly costs more than most owners expect. In Hampton Roads, the five roles it takes add up to about $436,000 a year in salaries alone.
The salary bill
A modern marketing function for a construction or manufacturing company needs strategy, a website, design, content and video. That is five distinct skill sets. Here is what each costs to hire locally, using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for the Virginia Beach-Norfolk-Newport News metro area.
| Role | Annual mean wage |
|---|---|
| Marketing manager | $154,510 |
| Web developer | $94,150 |
| Marketing specialist | $71,120 |
| Graphic designer | $61,180 |
| Camera operator | $54,880 |
| Total | $435,840 |
These are average wages, not the top of the market. Experienced people in your industry will often ask for more, because they know how to talk to engineers, owners and procurement teams. It’s worth mentioning that your average graphic designer usually doesn’t know how to make or animate 3D models, and your average web designer typically doesn’t know how to make 3D models or 360° images interactive parts of a web page.
The costs that don't show
Salaries are only the start. Before your team produces anything, you pay for:
- Benefits and payroll taxes on every hire.
- Equipment: cameras, lenses, lighting, audio, a drone and the insurance to fly it.
- Software: editing and design software, CRM, email marketing, SEO tools.
- Infrastructure: Web hosting, and the security / maintenance thereof.
- Ad spend: the budget your campaigns actually run on.
- Recruiting and turnover: time to hire, time to train.
- Management time: someone senior has to set priorities and review work.
Why small teams rarely work
Most companies try to save by hiring one or two people. A manager and a specialist together still cost $225,630 a year in salaries. And they still cannot build a website, shoot a facility tour or fly a drone over a jobsite.
So the work gets split. The manager outsources the website to one vendor, the video to another, and the ads to a third. Every vendor has its own invoice, its own timeline and its own idea of your brand. Your marketing hire becomes a coordinator, not a marketer.
The opposite mistake is just as common: one talented generalist asked to do everything. They burn out, or they leave, and the knowledge leaves with them.
How to decide
An in-house team can be the right call. It makes sense when marketing is central to how you sell and you have the budget to staff it properly. Before you post the first job, answer these questions honestly:
- Can we fund all five skill sets, equipment, software and ad spend?
- Who will manage the team, and how much of their week will it take?
- How will we keep the work current when someone leaves?
- What will it cost to build a marketing department in-house?
- Would one outside partner covering every discipline cost less?
- Would one outside partner move things along faster?
If the answers make you pause, you are not alone. Most mid-sized contractors and manufacturers in our region are in the same position. Talk to us, and we will help you work out what makes sense for your company.