It’s half nine on a Tuesday night. The van’s unloaded, the invoices are half done, and there’s a note on your phone that says “post something on Facebook” from eleven days ago. You know marketing matters. You keep meaning to get to it. You never get to it, because there is always a customer, a supplier or a leaking tap that matters more right now.
Here’s the thing nobody says: that’s not a discipline problem. Marketing is a proper job. You already have one of those. Expecting yourself to bolt a second one onto the end of a ten-hour day, and to do it well, and consistently, for free, was never a realistic plan. The guilt you’re carrying about it is doing you no good at all.
The realistic plan is one of two things: deliberately shrink marketing to something tiny you’ll actually do, or outsource marketing to someone who does it for a living. This post is about how to decide, honestly, with the numbers in front of you.
The time maths nobody does
Work this out before anything else. Take what an hour of your time is worth when you’re doing billable work. Now count the hours decent marketing actually needs each month: writing and scheduling posts, chasing reviews, updating the website, figuring out why the phone’s gone quiet. For most owners it’s several hours a week, done properly.
Say you bill £40 an hour and marketing needs five hours a week. That’s roughly £800 a month of your time, spent on work you’re slower at than a specialist, done at the end of the day when you’re knackered. Against that, handing the same work to a done-for-you service costing well under £200 a month isn’t an indulgence. It’s the same maths as hiring a bookkeeper. Nobody calls you lazy for not doing your own accounts.
And that’s before the cost of the version where you do neither, where marketing just doesn’t happen for months. Quiet pipelines don’t send an invoice, but you pay for them anyway.
What outsourcing your marketing actually means
Digital marketing outsourcing is paying an outside team to run defined marketing jobs for a fixed fee, instead of hiring staff or doing it yourself. For a small business it usually covers some mix of:
- Your website, built and kept updated for you
- SEO, so you show up when locals search for what you do
- Social media, posted consistently without you thinking about it
- Paid ads on Google or Facebook, managed month to month
You don’t need all of it. Most small businesses shouldn’t start with all of it. The point is that each strand becomes a fixed line on your outgoings and disappears from your to-do list.
What it costs in the UK
Fixed monthly pricing is exactly what MarketingDone4U sells, so rather than being vague we’ll show you ours:
| Service | Starts at | What that gets you |
|---|---|---|
| Website | £99/month | 5-page site, copy written for you, hosting, SSL and professional email included |
| SEO | £49/month | Monthly health check, Search Console review, on-page recommendations |
| Social media | £79/month | 4 posts a month on 1 platform, captions, design and scheduling done |
| Google Ads management | £89/month | 1 campaign, keywords, copy and monthly optimisation (ad spend is separate) |
Two honesty notes, because pricing transparency is the whole point of our model. Website plans are a managed monthly service on a minimum 12-month term; MarketingDone4U owns the site unless you buy it out (buyout available), extra work is £50 an hour, and support is by email or ticket. And on any advertising service, the management fee never includes your ad budget. Anyone who blurs that line is hiding something.
If your starting point is “do I even need a website first?”, read our honest answer on that before you spend anything.
What to hand over first (and what to keep)
Don’t outsource everything on day one. Hand over the jobs that are repetitive, skilled and constant, because those are the ones that quietly die when you’re busy:
- The website. It’s the foundation everything else points at, and the most technical thing on the list.
- Consistent posting or SEO basics. Whichever channel your customers actually use. Consistency is what you can’t supply, and it’s what these channels reward.
- Ads, if and when you use them. Badly watched ad accounts burn money quickly.
Keep the things only you can do: talking to customers, taking the photos of finished jobs, asking happy clients for reviews. That raw material is gold, and five minutes of it a week is enough for a good outsourced team to work with. You stay the voice; they do the labour. The full comparison of doing it yourself versus having it done is in our DIY versus done-for-you breakdown.
When outsourcing is the wrong call
It happens, and we’d rather tell you now. Skip outsourcing if you genuinely can’t commit to a monthly fee for a year, because marketing paid for in odd months achieves very little. Skip it if your order book is already full and you don’t want growth. And skip it if you actually enjoy marketing and have the hours, because enthusiasm plus consistency beats most agencies.
But if you’ve read this far at half nine on a Tuesday, you already know which camp you’re in. The work isn’t going to do itself, and you were never going to find the twelfth hour of the day. Start your journey, tell us what you’re drowning in, and get your evenings back.
Frequently asked questions
What does it mean to outsource marketing?
Outsourcing marketing means paying an external team to handle defined marketing work, such as your website, SEO, social media or ads, for an agreed fee. Instead of hiring staff or doing it yourself after hours, the work happens on a schedule, and you review results rather than producing everything personally.
How much does outsourced marketing cost in the UK?
It varies by service and scope. As a worked example, MarketingDone4U charges from £49 a month for entry-level SEO, £79 for social media management, £89 for Google Ads management with ad spend separate, and £99 a month for a managed five-page website on a minimum 12-month term.
Is it worth outsourcing marketing for a small business?
Usually, once your time has a real cost. If marketing needs five hours a week you don’t have, and your working hour is worth more than the monthly fee, outsourcing pays for itself. It’s the same logic as using an accountant: specialist work, done consistently, off your plate.
What marketing should a small business outsource first?
Start with the website, because everything else depends on it, then the channel your customers actually use, whether that’s local SEO or social media. Keep customer conversations, job photos and review requests in-house, since those need your voice, and hand the repetitive skilled work to the specialists.
Can I outsource marketing on a small budget?
Yes, if you pick one channel and fund it properly rather than spreading pennies everywhere. Under £100 a month covers entry-level SEO or a managed social presence from MarketingDone4U. One channel done consistently for a year beats five channels attempted for six weeks each.
Want this done for you? See our done-for-you services, or compare every service and price in one place.
