Optimum Marketing
This question comes up in almost every conversation we have with mid-sized B2B companies. The business has grown to a point where marketing can’t be left to the operations manager or the owner between meetings, but a full-time marketing department feels like a stretch. So the logical step seems to be hiring someone part-time.
It’s a reasonable starting point. But in practice, it creates a different set of problems.
What a part-time hire can and can’t do
A part-time marketer typically brings one or two solid skill sets, maybe social media and content, or email and coordination. What they rarely bring is the bandwidth or breadth to run a full marketing function across multiple workstreams at the same time.
The gap shows up quickly. Your part-time hire is managing the LinkedIn calendar and the monthly newsletter, and then you need a website update, a capability statement redesigned, an SEO article written, and a campaign built for a trade show in six weeks. Now they’re spending most of their hours managing freelancers, briefing a designer here, chasing a developer there, trying to keep the output consistent across people who have never worked together.
The marketing doesn’t get done. The coordination does.
That’s not a reflection of the hire’s ability. It’s a structural limitation of the model.
What mid-sized B2B companies need from marketing
B2B marketing in industries like manufacturing, logistics, construction, and professional services is not a single-skill job. At any given time, a business in these industries needs someone thinking about positioning and competitive differentiation, someone producing content that speaks to the buying committee, someone managing the website and SEO, someone with design capability that doesn’t look like a Canva template, and someone who can pull a monthly report together and tell you what it means.
That’s five distinct functions. A part-time hire covers one, maybe two.
The case for outsourcing your marketing department
Outsourcing your marketing function gives you access to a full team, strategist, copywriter, designer, digital specialist, developer, for less than the cost of a part-time marketing manager’s salary. One point of contact. No employment overhead, no leave coverage to arrange, no managing someone’s performance review.
For B2B businesses that don’t need a full in-house team but do need consistent, competent marketing output, this model removes the gap between what needs to happen and what a single hire can deliver.
At Optimum Marketing, this is exactly how we’re set up. After working with B2B businesses in industrial, logistics, construction, and professional services sectors for over a decade, we know the part-time hire model almost always ends up costing more in coordination and lost momentum than it saves in salary.
If you’re weighing up your options, get in touch to walk through what your marketing function needs and whether outsourcing makes sense for your business: https://www.optimummarketing.com.au/contact/