There are only three ways to get marketing done: you do it, you employ someone to do it, or you pay a business whose only job is doing it. Most trade businesses end up in the wrong one for their size, usually because the decision was made by default rather than on purpose.
The Real Cost of Each
Doing It Yourself
The appeal is obvious: no fee, total control, and you learn a skill nobody can take off you. Plenty of trade businesses have been built this way and it is a legitimate choice.
The cost people ignore is their own hourly rate. Work out what an hour of your time is worth on the tools, or quoting, which is usually where the real money is. If your time is worth $120 an hour and you spend fifteen hours a week learning Meta Ads Manager, that is $1,800 a week of opportunity cost to save $2,000 a month. The arithmetic does not work, and it works even less well in the first six months when you are paying tuition to the platform in wasted ad spend.
There is also a quieter problem. Marketing done in the gaps stops the moment you get busy, which is precisely when you should be filling next quarter's pipeline. That is how trade businesses end up on the feast-and-famine cycle: the marketing switches off during the feast, so the famine is baked in eight weeks later.
DIY genuinely makes sense if: you are under about $500,000 in revenue, cash is tight, and you have more time than money. Start with the free work that compounds: a properly finished Google Business Profile, a real review-gathering habit, and local SEO basics. That is genuinely the best return available at that stage and no agency should tell you otherwise.
Hiring In-House
A marketing coordinator in Australia costs roughly $70,000 to $95,000 including superannuation, before software, training or ad spend. Call it $85,000 to $110,000 a year fully loaded.
What you get for that is someone who is only thinking about your business, who is in the office when a photo needs taking on Thursday, and who accumulates institutional knowledge about your customers.
What you also get, and this is the part that surprises people, is one person's skillset. Good paid ads, good creative direction, good SEO, good CRM automation and good copywriting essentially never live in one $80,000 hire. You will get one or two of those well and the rest at a beginner level. And you now have a management job: someone has to set their priorities, review their work and know enough to tell whether it is any good. If you cannot evaluate the work, you cannot manage the person.
In-house makes sense if: you are past roughly $3 million in revenue, marketing is a continuous function rather than a project, you have someone senior who can actually manage them, and the volume of work justifies a full-time salary.
Hiring an Agency
You are buying two things: specialist skill you would need several hires to replicate, and the pattern recognition that comes from having run the same play across many similar businesses. When an agency has built forty funnels for concreters, they know which offer works in your market without spending your money to find out.
The failure modes are well documented. You are one of many clients, so attention is finite. Agencies that serve every industry bring no trade-specific insight. The person who sold you often is not the person doing the work. And when you leave, the institutional knowledge leaves with them, which is why asset ownership matters so much.
An agency makes sense if: you are between about $500,000 and $3 million, you need results in a quarter rather than a year, you cannot evaluate marketing work well enough to manage an employee doing it, and your job values are high enough that the fee is small relative to one closed job.
What Actually Works Best: The Hybrid
The most effective arrangement we see is not any of the three in isolation.
Pay a specialist for the technical work that is genuinely hard and where mistakes are expensive: paid ads, funnel build, CRM automation, tracking. Keep in-house the things that require being there: photographing finished jobs, asking happy customers for reviews, answering the phone fast, and posting to your own social accounts in your own voice.
That split works because the two halves need different things. The technical half needs expertise and is genuinely hard to learn. The relationship half needs presence and cannot be outsourced convincingly. Nobody can photograph your finished deck from an office.
Where We Would Tell You Not to Hire Us
Since we sell one of these three options, here is where we say no. It happens on calls regularly.
- Your average job is under $5,000. A $2,000-a-month fee needs too many jobs to justify itself. DIY plus local SEO is the right answer.
- You cannot follow up leads within 24 hours. The follow-up system we build buys you a window; it cannot make the call. Without that, we will take your money and you will get nothing, which suits neither of us. See why speed matters this much.
- You have no capacity to take on more work. Fix delivery first. Booking work you cannot service costs you reviews you will not get back.
- You want to be involved in every daily decision. Then you want an employee, not an agency. That is a legitimate preference, just not a fit for how we work.
- Your suburb is taken. One client per suburb per trade, and we will not break it for you any more than we would break it on you.
The general test, whichever route you choose: can you name the number you expect to move, and the date by which you expect it to move? If not, the problem is not which option you pick. It is that nobody has defined success yet, and every one of the three will fail without that.
Common Questions
Should a tradie hire a marketing agency or do it themselves?
Under about $500,000 in revenue with more time than money, do it yourself and focus on Google Business Profile, reviews and local SEO. Between $500,000 and $3 million with project work over $5,000 a job, an agency usually wins because you need results in a quarter and cannot easily manage a specialist you cannot evaluate.
How much does an in-house marketing person cost in Australia?
Roughly $70,000 to $95,000 including superannuation for a marketing coordinator, or $85,000 to $110,000 fully loaded once you add software, training and ad spend. The catch is that one hire brings one skillset, and paid ads, SEO, creative, copywriting and CRM automation rarely live in the same person at that salary.
What is the real cost of doing my own marketing?
Your own hourly rate. If your time is worth $120 an hour on the tools and you spend fifteen hours a week learning ad platforms, that is $1,800 a week of opportunity cost to avoid a $2,000 monthly fee. Add six to twelve months of learning, much of it paid for in wasted ad spend.
At what revenue should I hire marketing in-house?
Generally past about $3 million, when marketing becomes a continuous function rather than a project, the workload justifies a full-time salary, and you have someone senior who can genuinely manage and evaluate the work. Below that, an agency or a hybrid arrangement is usually better value.
What is the best split between an agency and in-house work?
Outsource the technical work where mistakes are expensive: paid ads, funnel build, CRM automation and tracking. Keep in-house the work that requires being present: photographing finished jobs, asking customers for reviews, answering the phone quickly, and posting in your own voice. Nobody can photograph your work from an office.
When should I not hire a marketing agency?
When your average job is under $5,000, when you cannot follow up leads within 24 hours, when you have no capacity to deliver more work, or when you want to be involved in every daily decision. In the last case you want an employee. In the others, fix the underlying problem before buying leads.