There is no universal right answer here, and anyone who offers one without seeing your workload is guessing. The workable answer comes from two inventories: the marketing work your firm needs done, and your capacity to direct, supply, and review whoever does it. Hire when a sustained role exists and someone can manage it. Buy defined expertise for bounded scopes. Combine the two when a named owner can coordinate both.
If you are doing the marketing yourself today, or approving everything while a supplier executes, you are already describing the workload this article will help you organize.
Key Takeaways
- Inventory the recurring work and the missing skills before comparing a salary to a retainer.
- In-house, outside, and hybrid arrangements each carry specific risks when supervision, inputs, or review capacity go missing.
- Budget the full commitment on each side, including your own coordination and review hours, rather than the invoice alone.
- Judge candidates and suppliers on relevant work samples and clear explanations, and treat a guaranteed top Google ranking as a warning sign.
- Name one decision owner inside the firm, and settle scope, review, and handover terms before work begins.
Inventory the Work Before You Shop for a Role
Write down the marketing work as it happens: setting priorities, deciding what to say, producing articles, emails, or ads, maintaining the website, reviewing drafts for accuracy, and reading results. Expect the list to mix several kinds of work that solve for different gaps.
Then separate four problems that look identical from the outside. A missing skill means nobody on the team can do the task well. Missing time means someone could, but client work wins every week. Unresolved direction means the firm has not decided what it wants marketing to accomplish. A blocked approval process means finished work sits in an inbox. A hire scoped for execution addresses the first two. The second two depend on the mandate behind the role: a position chartered to set strategy or rebuild a workflow can take them on, provided leadership sponsors that charter and stays involved in the decisions and reviews that follow. An execution hire without that authority has no lever for them, and a new employee working inside an undecided firm may end up producing activity in place of progress.
Last, mark which tasks need ongoing internal context and which are defined deliverables. The knowledge behind credible advisor content lives inside your firm, and a documented handoff, like the one in our guide to turning advisor expertise into content, decides whether any writer succeeds with it. That distinction, context-dependent work versus defined deliverables, is the raw material for the staffing choice.
Three Ways to Cover the Work
Hiring In-House
Consider an employee when the inventory shows a coherent, sustained role: enough related work to fill a real position, and someone senior available to set priorities, review output, and develop the person. One failure pattern is a job description that asks one hire to be strategist, writer, designer, and analyst at once; a role built from three part-time jobs is difficult for any single hire to cover well. A second risk is management. Without supervision, a marketer can drift toward work that is easy to display, and the firm can drift toward judging by volume because volume is what it can see.
Outside Specialists or an Agency
Consider outside help when the scope can be written down: a bounded set of deliverables, channels, or decisions where your team can supply inputs and approvals on a dependable schedule. The tradeoff to price in up front: the internal work remains, concentrated into direction, supply, and review. If nobody inside the firm can do those three things, the engagement can stall regardless of the supplier's talent.
A Hybrid Split
A workable shape for a growing firm is a split: strategy and approval stay inside, defined execution goes outside, or a senior hire owns one function while specialists cover the rest. Hybrids can fail through duplicated decision ownership, where the employee and the agency each assume the other sets priorities. Split responsibilities in writing, down to who approves final copy and who can pause a campaign.
Budget the Whole Commitment
The spreadsheet version of this decision compares salary to retainer and stops there. The honest version compares total resource commitments. On the employee side, include recruiting, onboarding, benefits, tools and subscriptions, management hours, and the outside specialists you will still need for the gaps one person cannot cover. On the supplier side, include the internal hours for direction, input supply, and review cycles, plus the cost of re-onboarding a replacement if the relationship ends.
Ask every option the same questions. What work is included, and what is excluded? Which dependencies sit with the firm? What happens to continuity if a specific person leaves? How are working files, accounts, and data handed over? A budget that ignores your own hours can make the cheaper-looking option the expensive one, and it skews the comparison before you start. Fill it in with your real figures; a generic salary survey or fee range may not match your market and your scope.
Evaluate the Skill, Then the Working Relationship
Whether you are interviewing a candidate or a supplier, ask who performs the work, ask for relevant samples you can review, and ask them to walk you through a past decision and its reasoning. Judge the explanation alongside the artifact. You are buying judgment you will have to supervise, and a person who cannot explain their choices is unlikely to become easier to manage after you hire them.
Keep delivery evidence separate from business outcomes. A quiet quarter of inquiries after a staffing change does not prove the model failed, and a busy one does not prove it worked. Outcomes depend on market conditions no one controls, and on follow-up and the sales process, whose ownership depends on the agreed role: your team may own them, or the hire or supplier may own or share them. What you can demand either way is clear, reviewable work and honest reporting about what changed and why.
A Concrete Example From Search Hiring
One discipline illustrates the standard. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO recommends asking how the provider will communicate, whether they will share every change they make to your site with detailed reasoning, and how results will be measured. The same page warns that no one can guarantee a number-one ranking on Google, so treat that promise, from a candidate or a vendor, as a warning sign rather than a qualification. Apply the same posture to every other discipline: evidence of relevant work, explained in plain language, carries more weight than confident projections.
What Stays With the Firm Either Way
Some tasks transfer to an employee or an agency when the agreed scope says so; accountability does not. Subject-matter input, prospect qualification, and follow-up with the people who raise their hands can sit with your team or be assigned to the hire or supplier, depending on the role you design. Compliance review and final approval work the other way: delegating production does not remove the firm's accountability for what it publishes. Our own content production work runs inside the firm's review process, and we do not provide legal advice or compliance sign-off. Keep ownership inside as well: register your website, analytics, ad accounts, and subscriber lists in the firm's name no matter who operates them day to day.
Make the Decision Small Enough to Reverse
Write down four things before work starts: the selected workstreams, the accountable owner on the firm side, the review path and cadence, and the criteria for revisiting the arrangement. If nobody can supply input or review work, narrow the scope or assign that responsibility first. Adding recurring spend to an unmanaged gap can produce invoices instead of progress.
A practical next step is to scope one real workstream end to end, with an owner and a review schedule, before committing to a broad arrangement. If an outside read would help, our strategy consulting engagement is built for that: setting direction, with execution scoped separately so your team can carry the plan forward with us, internally, or with another partner. The introductory conversation is a discussion rather than a written plan or audit, and it lets both sides test fit before anyone commits. When you are ready to compare your inventory against the options, you can book a strategy call.
Related RIA Marketing Guides
Ready to turn marketing into a system?
Connect with our team at RIA.Marketing. We help advisory firms build practical, compliance-conscious systems for visibility, follow-up, and qualified inquiries.
Schedule Your Private Strategy Session
