Hiring a Marketing Person: The UK and Ireland Guide

Making the decision to bring marketing expertise into your business is one of the more consequential calls an SME owner will make. Get it right and you gain someone who can build your pipeline, sharpen your positioning, and take a real set of tasks off your plate. Get it wrong, and you’re £30,000 or more into the year before you realise the role was defined poorly from the start.

This guide is for business owners, directors, and managers in the UK and Ireland who are at the decision point: thinking seriously about hiring a marketing person but unsure whether they need a full-time employee, a specialist, a generalist, or an agency model. We’ll walk through how to assess your actual needs before you post a single job listing.

What Does a Marketing Person Actually Do?

The term “marketing person” covers a wide range of roles, which is part of what makes hiring one so confusing. A marketing professional is, broadly, someone responsible for creating, executing, and managing strategies that promote a business, its products, or its services. Their core job is to understand your audience and develop activities that connect your offer to them.

In practice, that can mean very different things depending on which type of professional you’re looking at.

Common Marketing Roles and What They Cover

Digital Marketing Specialists focus on online channels: paid search, social media advertising, email marketing, and display. They’re channel-specific by nature.

SEO Specialists work on improving your website’s organic visibility in search engines. This involves technical site health, content strategy, keyword research, and link building.

Content Marketers produce and manage written content: blog posts, case studies, whitepapers, video scripts, and email sequences. Their goal is to attract and nurture an audience over time.

Social Media Managers handle your brand’s presence across platforms, creating content, engaging with followers, and growing reach. This role often bleeds into content creation and community management.

Email Marketing Specialists manage campaigns designed to convert prospects and retain existing customers. They focus on open rates, segmentation, and automation.

PPC Specialists manage paid advertising, primarily on Google Ads and paid social platforms. They’re responsible for cost per acquisition and return on ad spend.

Digital Marketing Managers sit above the channel specialists, setting strategy, coordinating activity across teams, and aligning marketing with business goals.

Generalist Marketers handle a range of tasks without deep specialisation in any one channel. For small businesses, this is often the most practical starting point.

The role taxonomy matters because many SMEs post a job for “a marketing person” when what they actually need is clearly one of the above. Defining this upfront saves both time and money.

In-House Marketer vs Marketing Agency: The Real Cost Comparison

Every SME reaches a point where this question becomes unavoidable. You need marketing capability, but you’re not sure whether to build it in-house or bring in external expertise. Both routes work; both have genuine trade-offs.

The True Cost of an In-House Hire

A skilled, full-time generalist marketer in the UK or Ireland will typically cost you significantly more than their base salary suggests. Once you factor in employer National Insurance contributions, pension contributions, equipment, recruitment fees, and ongoing professional development, the real annual cost of a £28,000–£35,000 salary sits somewhere between £38,000 and £50,000, depending on location and seniority.

Beyond the direct costs, there’s the capacity question. One person cannot cover every marketing channel to a specialist standard. A generalist who’s strong on content and social media will almost certainly have gaps in technical SEO, paid media, or analytics. Filling those gaps usually means either paying for external freelancers or accepting underperformance in those areas.

There’s also the cost of maintaining skills. Digital marketing changes fast. An in-house marketer needs to keep their knowledge current across channels that are being reshaped by AI tools, platform algorithm updates, and shifting consumer behaviour. That requires year-on-year training investment.

What Agency Support Actually Covers

A digital marketing agency brings together a team of specialists rather than a single generalist. ProfileTree, for example, works with SMEs across Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the UK, across web design, SEO, content marketing, digital marketing strategy, video production, and AI implementation. That breadth of coverage from a single relationship is something most SMEs can’t replicate with a single hire.

The agency model is particularly strong for businesses that need multiple channels working together, where an SEO strategy aligns with content output, which in turn aligns with a social media plan. Coordinating that internally requires either a strong marketing manager or a sizeable team. Agencies provide that coordination as part of the service.

Agencies also offer greater flexibility than permanent hires do. You can scale up activity during a product launch or a busy trading period, and reduce the retainer’s scope during quieter months. That’s not possible with a full-time employee.

The trade-off is daily immersion. An in-house marketer will come to understand your business more deeply over time and respond to internal changes more quickly. For businesses where brand nuance and real-time responsiveness matter most, that proximity has value.

Comparison: In-House vs Agency at a Glance

There’s no universally correct answer. The right choice depends on your growth stage, your budget, and whether your primary need is daily execution or strategic breadth.

Which Type of Marketing Professional Do You Need?

Before looking at CVs or briefing a recruitment agency, work through these questions honestly.

Start With Your Business Goals

Your marketing objective defines the expertise you need. If the primary goal is building organic search visibility, you need SEO capability. If you need to generate leads quickly, a paid media experience is more relevant. If you’re trying to build long-term brand authority and audience trust, content strategy and content marketing should lead.

Vague objectives like “grow our presence” make for vague hires. Specific objectives, such as “increase organic enquiries from SMEs in Belfast by 20% over 12 months,” provide a hiring brief.

For SMEs that haven’t yet built a digital marketing strategy, that’s often the first thing to commission. Hiring a marketing person without a clear strategic direction means they’ll spend their first months building the strategy rather than executing it, which is an expensive way to do strategy work.

Audit What You Already Have

Before hiring, assess what’s already working and what isn’t.

Look at your website traffic: are you getting organic visitors, and are those visitors converting? Poor organic performance usually indicates an SEO gap. High traffic with poor conversion suggests the issue is more likely content, UX, or offer clarity.

Check your social media performance. Are your platforms generating genuine engagement, or are you posting into a void? A social media manager can improve engagement, but they can’t compensate for a weak offer or a mismatch between platform and audience.

Review your content. Are your blog posts or resources attracting search traffic and building authority? A content marketer adds most value when there’s a clear strategy behind the content programme, not when they’re writing posts reactively.

A marketing audit before hiring is genuinely useful here. It tells you where the gaps are and which type of professional would have the most immediate impact.

Match the Role to Your Business Stage

Early-stage or very small businesses typically need a generalist who can establish the basics across channels. The priority is building a foundation: a clear content plan, consistent social presence, and baseline SEO hygiene. Specialist knowledge is less valuable at this stage than versatility and execution speed.

Growing businesses usually need to specialise. If content is working, invest in someone who can deepen that channel. If paid search is driving leads, a PPC specialist will deliver more return than a generalist trying to manage it alongside five other channels.

Established businesses typically need strategic leadership. A marketing manager or head of digital who can set direction, manage a mix of in-house and agency resources, and align marketing with sales and product priorities. This is a different hire entirely from a channel executor.

Consider the Fractional Option

One route that’s genuinely underused by UK and Irish SMEs is the fractional marketing leader. A fractional CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) or fractional marketing director works with your business for a fixed number of days per month, providing senior strategic input without the cost of a full-time senior hire.

This is well suited to businesses with a turnover of £500,000–£3 million that need more than a junior generalist but can’t justify a £70,000+ full-time marketing manager. The fractional model gives you experienced strategic oversight combined with the flexibility to bring in execution support through an agency or freelancers.

Understanding IR35 and Hiring Compliance in the UK

If you’re considering hiring a freelance marketer rather than a permanent employee, IR35 is a legal area you cannot ignore. IR35 is HMRC’s off-payroll working legislation, designed to ensure that contractors who work in a manner consistent with employment pay the same tax and National Insurance contributions as employees.

Since April 2021, medium and large businesses in the UK have been responsible for determining a contractor’s employment status. If your business qualifies as medium or large under the Companies Act 2006 criteria (two or more of: over 50 employees, over £10.2m turnover, over £5.1m balance sheet), you bear the responsibility for assessing whether a freelance marketer should be treated as inside or outside IR35.

Wrongly classifying an inside-IR35 contractor as outside can result in significant back-tax liability, so this is worth taking legal advice on before engaging a freelance marketing resource. Small businesses remain exempt, with the contractor responsible for their own IR35 determination.

This is one of the practical reasons some SME owners find the agency model cleaner. When you engage a digital marketing agency as a service provider, you have no IR35 exposure. The agency handles its own employment and tax obligations.

The Hiring Process: From Job Description to First 90 Days

Once you’re clear on what you need, the hiring process itself needs structure.

Writing a Job Description That Attracts the Right Candidates

The most common mistake in marketing job descriptions is listing too many responsibilities for one role. “Must be able to do SEO, PPC, social media, content writing, email marketing, analytics, and strategy” describes a team, not a person.

Start with the three or four activities that will take up the majority of the role’s time. Then add the skills and tools that matter for those activities. Be specific: “experience with Google Analytics 4 and Search Console” is more useful to candidates than “analytical mindset.”

Include realistic KPIs. If you want the role to generate 50 qualified leads per month within six months, say so. Candidates who can’t see a route to that outcome will self-select out, saving you interview time.

Don’t omit the practical details: remote or office-based, budget responsibility, which tools they’ll be working with, and who they’ll report to. Clarity here reduces wasted interviews on both sides.

Testing Skills Before You Hire

Interview performance is a poor predictor of on-the-job marketing effectiveness. Build a skills test into your process.

For content or SEO roles, a short, practical brief works well: ask candidates to audit one page of your website and propose 3 improvements with rationale. This shows analytical thinking, knowledge of search principles, and the ability to communicate recommendations.

For digital marketing strategy roles, ask candidates to outline a 90-day plan for one specific objective, given a defined budget. The quality of their assumptions and prioritisation tells you far more than a portfolio review.

For social media roles, request an audit of your current social presence, including three specific observations and two proposed changes. Assess whether their instincts align with your brand and audience.

Paid skills tests (compensating candidates for their time) improve both the quality of candidates who submit and your brand perception in the market.

Interview Questions That Reveal Strategic Thinking

Beyond skills tests, structure your interviews around real decisions rather than abstract competencies.

Ask candidates to describe a marketing activity they stopped doing because the data showed it wasn’t working. How they answer reveals whether they’re led by evidence or by habit and ego.

Ask how they’d handle a situation where the marketing budget was cut by 40% mid-campaign. The answer shows prioritisation instincts and commercial awareness.

Ask what they’d want to understand about the business in their first two weeks. Candidates who ask good questions before starting tend to ask good questions throughout their tenure.

Onboarding and the First 90 Days

A new marketing hire’s first three months should be structured rather than left to self-direction. Without structure, even capable people default to the most visible activities rather than the highest-impact ones.

The first two weeks should be spent on observation and audit: reviewing existing activities, understanding the customer and product, meeting the sales team, and mapping the existing marketing infrastructure (or lack thereof).

Weeks three to eight should establish quick wins alongside building longer-term foundations. Quick wins create internal credibility. Longer-term foundations an improved content plan, better reporting, a cleared technical SEO backlog take longer but compound over time.

Month three is where you first evaluate against agreed targets. If those targets weren’t set at hire, set them now and work backwards. A marketer without clear objectives will optimise for output (posts published, emails sent) rather than outcomes (leads generated, pipeline influenced).

ProfileTree’s digital marketing training programmes can be a useful complement here, particularly for businesses onboarding marketers who need to upgrade their skills in specific areas like SEO, content strategy, or AI tools.

When Hiring Isn’t the Right First Move

Not every marketing challenge is best solved by a hire. Some scenarios genuinely call for agency support, specialist freelancers, or a combination rather than a permanent employee.

If your immediate need is a specific deliverable, a website redesign, an SEO audit, a content programme to build over six months, a project-based agency engagement often delivers faster and with lower risk than recruiting for a permanent role.

If your business is at a stage where the marketing strategy is still unclear, investing in strategic input before execution resources makes more sense. A content marketing consultant or digital marketing strategist can build the framework that your future hire then executes against.

If budget is the genuine constraint, a junior in-house hire combined with specialist agency support for technical channels (SEO, paid search, video production) often performs better than having a mid-level person try to cover everything.

The combination model, one strong internal person managing agency relationships and handling day-to-day content and social, is where many well-run SMEs land after going through the cycle of full in-house, full agency, and back again.

UK and Ireland Marketing Salary Benchmarks

Salary data for marketing roles varies significantly by region, seniority, and specialism. The following figures are approximate guides based on UK and Irish market ranges as of 2026. These are salary only and do not include employer on-costs.

Add approximately 20–25% to the salary to cover employer NI and pension contributions, to arrive at the total employment cost. Recruitment agency fees, if used, typically add 15–20% to the first-year salary.

Remote roles have compressed some of the regional variation in the mid-range. A strong digital marketing executive in Belfast working remotely for a London-based company will typically command closer to the London rate than the Belfast rate.

Conclusion

Hiring a marketing person is a significant decision that deserves more preparation than most businesses give it. The businesses that get the most from their marketing hire tend to be the ones that took time to define the objective first, audited their existing activity honestly, and matched the role type to their actual stage of growth.

Whether you end up hiring a generalist, a specialist, a fractional CMO, or decide to work with an agency, the analytical work before the hire determines whether the investment pays off.

If you’re not yet sure which direction is right for your business, ProfileTree’s digital marketing team works with SMEs across Northern Ireland, Ireland, and the UK to build the strategic foundations that make both in-house marketing and agency partnerships more effective. Get in touch to talk through your options.

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