Do You Actually Need a Marketing Person?

I get asked this question a lot. Usually by founders who feel like they should be doing more marketing, but aren’t sure if the answer is hiring someone, contracting someone, or just trying harder on their own.

The honest answer is: it depends. And sometimes the honest answer is no, not yet.

The signs you’re ready

After twelve years working in marketing — from corporate roles at Navico and Garmin to running my own fractional practice — I’ve seen a pattern. The businesses that get the most from bringing in marketing help tend to share a few characteristics.

You have something that works, but you can’t scale it. Maybe word of mouth has carried you this far. Maybe you’ve got a product people love but your pipeline is unpredictable. You know there’s demand, but you’re not systematically capturing it. That’s a good time to bring in marketing help, because there’s something real to build on.

You’ve tried doing it yourself and it’s falling through the cracks. You started a blog, posted twice, then got busy. You set up a CRM but nobody uses it. You briefed a designer on a new website but couldn’t articulate what you actually wanted it to do. Marketing keeps ending up at the bottom of the to-do list because everything else feels more urgent.

You can describe your customer clearly. This one surprises people. But if you can’t tell me who your ideal customer is, what problem you solve for them, and why they pick you over the alternatives — then a marketing person is going to struggle too. That’s strategy work that needs to happen first, and it usually needs the founder in the room.

The signs you’re not ready

This is the part people don’t always want to hear. But I’d rather be honest upfront than take someone’s money when the timing isn’t right.

You don’t have product-market fit yet. If you’re still figuring out what you sell, who you sell it to, or whether people will pay for it — marketing isn’t your bottleneck. You need more conversations with potential customers, not a content calendar.

You want marketing to fix a sales problem. Sometimes the real issue is that leads come in but nobody follows up. Or the sales process is clunky. Or pricing is confusing. More traffic to a broken funnel just means more wasted opportunities. Fix the funnel first.

You’re looking for someone to “just do the social media.” If the brief is “post on LinkedIn three times a week,” you don’t need a marketing director. You need a content assistant or a scheduling tool. There’s nothing wrong with that — but it’s a different hire at a different price point, and confusing the two leads to frustration on both sides.

The middle ground most people miss

There’s a stage between “I don’t need marketing” and “I need a full-time marketing director” that a lot of businesses skip over. They either try to do everything themselves or they make a big hire too early.

The in-between is where most SMBs actually sit. You need someone senior enough to build a strategy, but you don’t have forty hours a week of marketing work. You need someone who can brief designers, set up systems, write positioning — but who also understands that your budget is measured in thousands, not tens of thousands.

That’s the fractional model, and it exists precisely for this gap. But even a fractional engagement isn’t worth it if the fundamentals aren’t there.

A simple test

Before you bring anyone in, answer these three questions honestly:

Do you know who your best customers are and why they buy from you? If not, start there. Talk to ten customers. Write down what they say. That exercise alone will clarify more than any marketing hire.

Can you point to a specific constraint that marketing would solve? “We need more leads” is too vague. “We get inbound enquiries but they’re the wrong type” or “We win every pitch but we don’t get enough at-bats” — those are problems a marketing person can actually work on.

Are you willing to be involved? Marketing doesn’t work in isolation, especially in a small business. The founder needs to be in the room for strategy, available for content input, and willing to make decisions. If you’re hoping to hand it off completely, it’s going to disappoint you.

The takeaway

Not every business needs a marketing person right now. Some need to nail their product first. Some need to fix their sales process. Some just need to be more disciplined about the basics they already know.

But if you’ve got something that works, you know who it’s for, and the bottleneck is genuinely about reaching more of the right people — then yes, it’s probably time. The question isn’t whether you can afford marketing help. It’s whether you can afford to keep doing it the way you’re doing it now.