Hiring a Marketing Person: The UK & Ireland Guide
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Hiring a marketing person is one of the more consequential calls an SME owner makes. Get it right, and you gain someone who builds your pipeline, sharpens your positioning, and takes real work off your plate. Get it wrong, and you’re £30,000 or more into the year before realising the role was never defined properly.
This guide is for business owners, directors and managers across the UK and Ireland who are close to that decision. It covers what a marketing person actually does, whether to hire in-house or bring in an agency, the IR35 rules that apply to freelance marketers, and how to structure the process from job ad to first 90 days.
What Does a Marketing Person Actually Do?
A marketing person is, broadly, someone responsible for creating, executing and managing strategies that promote a business, its products or its services. Their core job is understanding your audience and connecting what you offer to the people who need it.
In practice, that title covers very different roles depending on which specialist you’re actually looking at:
- Digital Marketing Specialists focus on paid search, social advertising, email and display, channel by channel.
- SEO Specialists improve organic visibility through technical site health, content strategy and link building.
- Content Marketers write and manage blog posts, case studies and email sequences that build an audience over time.
- Social Media Managers run your brand’s channels and grow reach; this often bleeds into content creation.
- PPC Specialists manage paid advertising, primarily Google Ads and paid social, and own cost per acquisition.
- Digital Marketing Managers sit above the specialists, setting strategy and coordinating activity across the team.
- Generalist Marketers cover a range of tasks without deep specialism in one channel, often the most practical first hire for a small business.
Many SMEs advertise for “a marketing person” when what they actually need is clearly one of the roles above. Naming it correctly before you write the job ad saves months of mismatched expectations.
In-House Marketer vs Marketing Agency: What It Actually Costs
Every SME reaches the point where this question becomes unavoidable: build the capability in-house, or bring in outside support? Both work. Both come with real trade-offs.
A full-time generalist marketer in the UK or Ireland costs more than the base salary suggests. Once you add employer National Insurance, pension contributions, equipment and recruitment fees, a £28,000–£35,000 salary typically becomes a £38,000–£50,000 annual cost. One person also can’t cover every channel to a specialist standard; a generalist strong on content and social will usually have gaps in technical SEO or paid media, and closing those gaps means freelancers or accepted underperformance.
Agency support works differently. A small business marketing agency brings together specialists across web design, SEO, content and strategy rather than a single generalist, which is coverage most SMEs can’t replicate with one hire. Agencies flex too: you can scale activity up around a launch and down in quieter months, something a permanent hire doesn’t allow.
The trade-off is proximity. An in-house marketer builds deeper knowledge of your business over time and reacts faster to internal change. Where that daily immersion matters most, it’s worth the extra cost. It’s also worth weighing this against the general disadvantages of outsourcing before deciding.
| Factor | In-house generalist | Digital marketing agency |
|---|---|---|
| Annual cost | £38,000–£50,000 all-in | Retainer-based, roughly £800–£4,000/month depending on scope |
| Channel coverage | One or two channels in depth | Multiple channels via specialists |
| Flexibility | Fixed headcount | Scalable up or down |
| Business knowledge | Deep, builds over time | Requires onboarding |
| Best suited to | Daily execution, brand nuance | Strategic breadth, multi-channel work |
Which Type of Marketing Professional Do You Need?
Before browsing CVs, work through this honestly.
Start with the business goal, not the job title. Need organic search visibility? You need SEO capability. Need leads quickly? Paid media experience matters more. Building long-term brand authority? Content marketing should lead. Vague objectives like “grow our presence” produce vague hires; specific ones, such as “increase organic enquiries from SMEs in Belfast by 20% over 12 months,” give you an actual brief.
If there’s no clear marketing strategy yet, that’s usually the first thing to commission. Hiring before the strategy exists means the new person spends their first months building it rather than executing it, which is an expensive way to plan.
Before you hire, audit what’s already working. Poor organic traffic points to an SEO gap. High traffic with weak conversion points to content, UX or offer clarity instead. And are your social channels generating real engagement, or posting into a void? A social media manager can lift engagement, but can’t fix a weak offer underneath it.
Match the role to your stage. Early-stage businesses usually need a generalist who can build the basics: a content plan, consistent posting, baseline SEO hygiene. Growing businesses need to specialise once they know which channel is working. Established businesses need strategic leadership, someone who can set direction and manage a mix of in-house and agency resources.
One option still underused by UK and Irish SMEs is the fractional marketing lead: senior strategic input for a fixed number of days a month, without the cost of a full-time hire. It suits businesses with £500,000–£3 million turnover that need more than a junior generalist but can’t yet justify a £70,000+ marketing manager.
Understanding IR35 for Freelance Marketers
If you’re considering a freelance marketer rather than a permanent hire, IR35 isn’t optional reading. It’s HMRC’s off-payroll working legislation, designed so contractors working like employees pay the same tax and National Insurance as employees.
Since April 2021, medium and large UK businesses have been responsible for determining a contractor’s employment status themselves. If your business meets two or more of these thresholds- over 50 employees, over £10.2m turnover, or over £5.1m balance sheet- that responsibility sits with you. Wrongly treating an inside-IR35 contractor as outside can mean a significant back-tax bill, so take advice before engaging a freelance marketer. Small businesses are exempt; the contractor determines their own status.
This is one reason some owners find the agency model cleaner. Engage a digital marketing agency as a service provider, and there’s no IR35 exposure at all; the agency handles its own employment and tax obligations.
The Hiring Process: From Job Ad to First 90 Days
Once you’re clear on what you need, give the process itself some structure.
Start the job description with three or four core activities, not a wishlist. “Must do SEO, PPC, social, content, email and analytics” describes a team, not a person. Be specific about tools; “experience with GA4 and Search Console” beats “analytical mindset”, and include a realistic KPI so candidates who can’t see a route to it self-select out.
Interview performance predicts marketing effectiveness poorly, so build a short skills test in. For a content or SEO role, ask candidates to audit one page of your site and propose three improvements with reasoning. For a strategy role, ask for a 90-day plan against a defined budget; the quality of their assumptions tells you more than a portfolio ever will. Increasingly, that test should cover AI fluency too: a candidate who can use AI tools to speed up research, drafting and reporting will outperform one who can’t.
“We see too many SMEs try to hire a unicorn who’s brilliant at SEO, paid media, design and PR all at once,” says Ciaran Connolly, founder of ProfileTree. “That person doesn’t really exist, and chasing them usually means the role stays empty for months while a genuinely good generalist or specialist gets overlooked.”
Structure the first 90 days rather than leaving it to self-direction. Weeks one and two: audit existing activity, meet the sales team, map what infrastructure already exists. Weeks three to eight: quick wins alongside longer foundations, an improved content plan, a cleared SEO backlog. Month three: review against targets set at hire, so the new person optimises for outcomes, not just output.
UK and Ireland Salary Benchmarks
Salary varies by region, seniority and specialism. These are approximate market ranges, salary only, before employer on-costs.
| Role | London | Manchester/Birmingham | Belfast/Dublin |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketing Generalist (junior) | £28,000–£35,000 | £24,000–£30,000 | £22,000–£28,000 |
| Digital Marketing Executive | £30,000–£40,000 | £26,000–£34,000 | £24,000–£32,000 |
| SEO/Content Specialist | £32,000–£45,000 | £28,000–£38,000 | £26,000–£36,000 |
| Marketing Manager | £45,000–£60,000 | £38,000–£52,000 | £35,000–£48,000 |
Add roughly 20–25% on top for employer NI and pension contributions to get the real cost. A remote hire based in Belfast working for a London company will usually land closer to the London rate than the local one.
What This Means for Your Next Hire
Hiring a marketing person rewards the businesses that do the thinking before they open the job board: define the objective, audit what’s already working, and match the role to your actual stage of growth. Whether that ends in a generalist, a specialist, a fractional lead or an agency relationship, the analysis beforehand decides whether the hire pays off.
If you’re not sure which direction fits your business, ProfileTree’s digital marketing team works with SMEs across Northern Ireland, Ireland and the UK to build the strategy a new hire, or an agency partnership, can actually execute against.
FAQs
A few quick answers to the questions we hear most often on this topic.
How much does it cost to hire a marketing person in the UK?
A junior-to-mid-level hire typically costs £24,000–£45,000 in salary, plus 20–25% for NI and pension. Add recruitment fees and the real first-year cost often lands between £38,000 and £55,000.
What’s the first marketing role I should hire?
For most SMEs without an existing function, a generalist with content and digital skills works best. They can build foundations across channels and flag where specialist support is needed.
Can one person handle all our marketing?
A good generalist can manage content, social, basic SEO and email together. Technical SEO, paid search and data analytics usually need deeper specialist support.
Should I hire a marketing agency or a marketing person?
It depends on whether you need daily execution or multi-channel breadth. Many SMEs land on a hybrid: one internal person plus specialist agency support.