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When (Not) to Hire a Marketing Coordinator

Farming out your online marketing doesn't always pay off. Sometimes what you need is a smart hire and to in-house someone. Many of our larger clients today are faced with the same problem: they're technically savvy enough to know that the Web has become their most important marketing channel, but they don't have the time to educate themselves about how to use it effectively, let alone do the work themselves.

By Tommy Humphreys /

When (Not) to Hire a Marketing Coordinator
Outsourcing all of your online marketing can be expensive – like dining out every night.

Farming out your online marketing doesn’t always pay off. Sometimes what you need is a smart hire and to in-house someone.

Many of our larger clients today are faced with the same problem: they’re technically savvy enough to know that the Web has become their most important marketing channel, but they don’t have the time to educate themselves about how to use it effectively, let alone do the work themselves.

As a result, they’re outsourcing this work to agencies, which, while convenient, can get very expensive very fast – sort of like eating out every night. The solution, of course, is to hire your own cook. Or in this case, an online marketing coordinator.

When to bring it in-house

Internet marketing involves everything from writing and editing content, to SEO and paid search, to Facebook Pages and Ads, to Twitter accounts, to Google Analytics and Alerts, just to name a few. There are also the day-to-day tasks of running a website. All of this together can add up to a full-time job at a medium-sized business – or add up to some pretty big bills if it’s all outsourced. If you do decide to keep it in-house, it’s also important that the work be designated to a specific – and qualified – employee. Too often, I see this work left to the controller, the accountant, or whoever can get to it in their spare time.

When to call in a specialist

While a web-savvy person can acquire a working knowledge of these methods fairly easily, today each of these aspects of internet marketing is its own specialized field. If you really want to drill down on one area, such as SEO, it’s definitely worth hiring a specialist, at least to do the initial heavy lifting and point you in the right direction. Agencies are also a wise choice for running complex, large-scale campaigns. That said, it’s still worth having an in-house staff member who’s sufficiently knowledgeable to coordinate this outsourced work.

Where to find good help

Since online marketing is all about content, look for a recent journalism or communications grad to do your marketing dirtywork. They tend to be excellent writers, strong students and have an intuitive grasp of all things online. And we all know there are too few well–paying jobs in the journalism industry anymore. 
 
You should even consider hiring your agency to write up this job description and set specific goals for this new position. As an agency principal myself, I am much happier educating a client and letting them run with it than billing them at full rate for what is often tedious, unskilled work (such as uploading a blog post or even Tweeting).
 
Certainly, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for online marketing. Nor does hiring a full-time employee make sense for every organization. For smaller companies, where we all wear many hats, this role simply needs to be given to the most capable person. But if you’re a bigger SMB, you will have a better cost–adjusted ROI by hiring someone in-house rather than outsourcing everything to agencies, no matter how cool they seem.