What to Keep In-House When Marketing Is One Person's Job

Picture a 14-person firm that designs and installs commercial landscaping. Marketing belongs to Dana, the office manager, who also handles payroll and scheduling. She posts project photos when she has a free hour, answers the website contact form when she happens to see it, and once a quarter the owner asks why leads feel random. The owner's next question sounds sensible: should we hire a marketer, or hand all of this to an outside firm?

That question treats marketing as one job. It is closer to a dozen jobs that happen to share a name, and they do not all belong in the same place. We have already compared the three models head to head in https://netwebmedia.com/blog/fractional-cmo-vs-marketing-agency.html. This post takes the other route: split the work first, then see which model each piece fits.

Sort the work by what goes wrong when it is done badly

Every marketing task falls into one of three groups. The sorting question is simple: if this task is done poorly, what is the damage, and who inside the company would feel it first?

• Jobs that need to know your customers. Done badly, you lose deals you were already winning.
• Jobs that are craft with a clear finished state. Done badly, you get an ugly or broken asset and you fix it.
• Jobs that must run steadily every week. Done badly, momentum stalls and nobody notices for a month.

The first group stays inside the company almost without exception. The second group is where outside help earns its keep. The third group is the one people get wrong, and it gets its own section below.

Keep in-house: anything that needs to know a customer by name

• Answering inquiries and following up on leads. A prospect who asked a question this morning compares you with whoever answered first and best. No vendor can sit in your inbox the way you can.
• Deciding who the ideal customer is and what you refuse to sell. Someone outside can propose this. Someone inside has to own it, because they will live with the consequences in every sales call.
• Approving claims. Anything that says what you guarantee, what you cover or what you have done is a promise made in your name.
• Collecting proof. Before and after photos, a customer's own words, the story of a job that went sideways and got fixed. This material sits with the people doing the work, and an outsider can only ask for it.
• Knowing the numbers. Which source produced the lead, which lead became a job. That record has to live where your sales conversations live.

For the landscaping firm, this list is mostly Dana's work already, just undervalued. The first useful change is to name it as a job, give it a weekly hour, and stop treating it as something she squeezes in between invoices.

Outsource: work with a deliverable and a done date

If you can write the task as "this thing, finished, by this date," a specialist will usually do it faster and better than a generalist on payroll, and you do not need that skill every week.

• Building or rebuilding the website, and the occasional fixes after.
• Setting up an ad account, tracking and the first set of creative.
• Photography and video editing.
• Designing email templates and landing pages.
• Technical clean-up such as page speed, redirects and listing consistency.

A full-time hire for these tasks mostly means paying for idle capacity between projects. A freelancer or a small studio, briefed well, is the cheaper and sharper option. The brief is the part that stays in-house, and it comes straight from the first list above.

The middle: jobs that look outsourceable and fail without an inside owner

Content writing, social posting, ongoing ad management and monthly reporting can all be done by an agency. They also fail most often, and the cause is almost always the same: nobody inside owns the outcome. The agency writes about your work without access to the people who do it. Reports arrive and nobody reads them. Ad spend continues while the leads it produces wait days for a reply.

One rule fixes most of this. For every outsourced job, write down one name inside the company who owns the result, and give that person a recurring half hour a week to feed the vendor and read what comes back. If you cannot name that person, hold off on signing the contract.

Where a fractional CMO fits

A fractional CMO is a decision layer more than a bucket of work. The role picks the two or three things worth doing this quarter, sequences them, briefs the specialists, and checks that the vendors delivered what they promised. In a company under 20 people, the scarce resource is usually someone whose job is to decide, since hands are easy to rent.

That is why the model pairs well with the split above. The fractional leader sets priorities and writes the briefs, specialists produce the assets, and Dana runs the customer-facing work that only an insider can do.

Three situations, three splits

The office manager does marketing on the side

Keep inquiry handling and proof collection in-house and make them explicit. Add senior direction so the work has priorities. Outsource the website and creative production in bursts. A full-time marketing hire is probably premature until the lead flow justifies a second person.

The owner is the marketing department

The owner should keep positioning and approvals, and nothing else. Everything with a finished state goes out. The goal is to protect the owner's time for selling, so be strict about it: if the owner is resizing images, the split is wrong.

An agency is already in place and results are unclear

Move the numbers and the lead handling in-house first. Then ask the agency for a list of deliverables per month and who on your side approves each one. Often the issue was never the agency itself. The agency was handed jobs from the first group, which cannot be done from outside.

A one-page exercise for this week

1. List every marketing task your company did in the last 90 days, including the small ones such as replying to a review.
2. Next to each, write who did it and roughly how long a good version takes.
3. Mark each task as knows-the-customer, craft, or steady-run.
4. Circle every task with no clear owner. Those are your leaks.
5. For every task you outsource or plan to, write the name of the inside owner.

Most owners finish this page surprised by how much of the real work is the first group, and by how many tasks nobody owns.

Signs you have drawn the line in the wrong place

• Your vendor keeps asking for the same information, which means the knowledge was never kept in-house.
• Ads are running and leads sit unanswered for days.
• Nobody can say which source produced last month's leads.
• Your in-house person spends most of the week on production work that a freelancer could finish in a day.

Any one of these is fixable in a week. The point of the split is to make the fix obvious.

Hire for the jobs that need to know your customers. Rent the jobs that have a finish line. Name an owner for everything in between.

If you would like a second opinion on how to divide your own marketing work, message us through https://netwebmedia.com/whatsapp.html and we will go through the task list with you.

← Back to all articles