A small language school is opening a new class. The teacher and timetable are ready, but most enrolments still come through word of mouth. The owner wants to update the website, run ads and talk about the classes on social media. On Friday, he searches for a marketer. By Monday, he is reading agency proposals. On Tuesday, he thinks it might be easier to do everything himself.
He is comparing providers before defining the work. One candidate promises to run Instagram, another wants to rebuild the website, and a third suggests Google Ads. Any of them might be good at their job. They are answering different questions, though.
If this sounds familiar, start with what needs to change for the business. Then decide who should do that work, how much attention you can give it and what you are willing to pay for. The school in this example is fictional.
1. Where are customers being lost now?
Before looking for someone to hire, review your last ten to twenty enquiries, if you still have the records. Where did people come from? What did they ask? Who replied, and when? Why did a sale happen or stall? If you have no history, start recording new enquiries in a simple spreadsheet.
You might find three very different situations.
First, there are too few suitable enquiries, although the business could take on more work. You need to learn who your buyer is, where they look for this kind of service and what they need to see before getting in touch. We explored this in our article on understanding your buyer.
Second, enquiries arrive, but people do not get an answer or cannot understand the offer. More advertising could simply send more people into the same gap. Trace the path from ad to received enquiry using our guide to ads that run without bringing enquiries.
Third, individual activities work, but nobody connects them. One person runs ads, another updates the site, and the sales manager does not know what the ad promised. This calls for coordination and someone accountable inside the business, even if you outsource production.
The marketing plan guide from business.gov.au follows a similar sequence: define your customers and goals, choose activities and channels, set a budget, then review the results. That sequence works for a small business too. The plan can fit on one page if that is enough to make a decision.
2. When should you do it yourself?
Doing your own marketing works when the task is focused and you can make time for it regularly. For the school, that might mean answering common questions on the website, showing the current class timetable, asking for a review after a course or checking once a week that every enquiry received a reply.
The owner’s advantage is hearing customers directly. He knows why some people booked a trial lesson and why others postponed the decision. Gather that information before asking someone else to write ads.
Put a specific time in your calendar and pick one action for the next month. If you want to improve the website, note the questions people get stuck on before contacting you and update the relevant pages. If you want more referrals, decide who asks customers for a review and when. Check that the first action is actually happening before adding another.
But doing it yourself still has a cost. Count the hours spent preparing, responding, setting things up and checking the results. If those hours keep displacing client work, you are already paying for marketing with your own time. The invoice just never arrives as a PDF.
A one-off technical task does not require a hire who can run every channel. A specialist can set up measurement, review the ads or help structure the site, while you keep the day-to-day work. Agree on a clear deliverable and how you will check it.
3. When do you need a marketer on the team?
An in-house role makes sense when marketing decisions come up constantly and depend on what is happening inside the company. New products, price changes, sales conversations, customer feedback and seasonal constraints need to be brought together quickly. Someone close to the team can collect these signals and keep work from getting stuck between sales, the website and advertising.
Describe the role by responsibility, not by a list of software. For example: “Reviews the week’s enquiries, spots repeated reasons for lost sales, agrees changes to the offer and coordinates two specialists.” That is one job. “Shoots video, writes copy, runs ads, fixes the site, designs graphics and owns sales” sounds more like a vacancy for a small orchestra.
Before hiring, ask whether this person will be able to access the data, speak with sales and propose changes. If every edit waits a week for the owner’s decision, an in-house marketer will sit closer to the problem without being able to solve it.
Sometimes you need someone to own the marketing process inside the company rather than execute every channel. They define tasks, check how those tasks connect to sales and bring in a specialist when needed. The owner or sales lead could take this on, or it could be a separate role. Name the person responsible instead of leaving everyone to “do a bit of marketing”.
4. When should you bring in an agency?
An agency can make sense when the work needs several skills at once: clarifying the offer, improving a page, setting up measurement, launching a channel and adjusting it based on results. An individual contractor may be a better choice for one clearly defined specialty.
Judge the way the team works, not the number of people in its pitch deck. Who will manage your project? What information do they need to start? Who writes and approves the copy? What will the agency do, and what must your team do? How will you see the enquiries received and their quality, as well as the work completed?
Even a strong external team will not know which classes the school plans to open in November unless someone tells them. Appoint a person who supplies accurate service details, approves changes promptly and brings feedback from sales. If that person is you, make time for it. You can hand over execution, but the accuracy of information about your business remains your responsibility.
In its guidance on hiring an SEO specialist, Google recommends asking about past work, expected results, measurement and communication. It also warns against promises of a number-one search ranking. Those points are specific to SEO, but the conversation is useful more broadly: ask a provider what they will do and how you will tell whether it worked.
5. A hybrid approach is often easier to manage
You can keep customer knowledge and final decisions inside the company, and buy specific work outside it. For example, a sales manager records why prospects decline, the owner sets the priority, an ads specialist changes the campaign, and a designer updates the page. Everyone has a defined part. No one is expected to become an entire department overnight.
This only works with a clear handover. After a meeting, write down one change, the person responsible and the date you will review it. If the task is simply “improve marketing”, each person can imagine a different solution. It is hard to agree on the result later.
For our fictional school, the first step could look like this: the owner lists common questions from prospective students, the administrator checks which enquiries are being lost, and an external specialist updates one course page and its ad campaign. After an agreed period, the team reviews the enquiries and conversations. If the offer is the problem, they clarify it. If enquiries are not reaching the team, they fix the handover. Only then does it make sense to scale the channel.
6. How to compare your options without guessing
Write down the answers to four questions:
- Which one problem needs to move first? Too few suitable enquiries, a weak page, slow responses, unclear data or nobody coordinating the work? If there are several problems, choose the one currently holding back sales most.
- How often does this work come up? You can buy a one-off review as a project. Ongoing coordination between the product, sales and specialists needs someone who is regularly available.
- What do you already have in-house? Who knows the customer, can access the data, approve a budget and answer a specialist this week? If nobody owns the task, appoint someone before you start.
- What is the full cost of the solution? Add ad spend, content production, tools and your team’s time to the cost of a person or agency. Compare the whole way of working, not one number in a proposal.
If you cannot answer the first question yet, commission a short diagnosis or do it yourself. Agree on the document, access and next steps you will receive. Buying a long contract just to discover the task is awkward for both sides.
7. What to ask for in the first month
Whichever model you choose, agree on a starting point. How many enquiries were actually received? Which are suitable for the business? How long does a reply take? What do you know about their source, and what is missing from the data? Do not pretend the numbers are more precise than they are. If you are only beginning to track enquiries, establishing that tracking can be the first result.
Then choose one or two changes the team can make and check. For example, clarify a page for a specific service and test whether the form delivers enquiries. Record who owns each part, when you will review the outcome and what decision you will make next. A month cannot guarantee more sales, especially when deals take time, but it can show whether the team sees the customer’s actual path and works with it.
Agree on access separately. The website, domain, analytics, ad accounts, copy and files should remain available to your business if you change providers. Google Ads lets an agency manage a client account through a manager account, and a user with admin access to the client account can unlink the manager. Check those permissions in practice before launch. If access has already caused trouble, here is a short list of what to bring back under your control.
8. A message to start the conversation
Copy this and replace the brackets with your details. You can send it to a job candidate, an individual specialist or an agency:
The reply to that message will tell you more than a list of services on a website. A good candidate may ask awkward questions: how many orders can you take, who answers enquiries, and what counts as a suitable customer? Those questions do not delay the start. They help you avoid hiring people for a task nobody has defined yet.