£126k

£126k what a small in-house marketing team actually costs in 2026

(and most of them still can't tell you which channel made you money last quarter) 🤡 let's do the Dani maths: marketing manager - £50k social media manager - £38k marketing exec - £30k £118k in salaries. add employer NI at 15% and pension and you're at ~£126k/yr

(after claiming employment allowance!!!) before recruitment fees. before software. before the three months it takes them to find the shared drive lmao but here's what u didnt realise: u didn't actually buy a strategy. u bought three people waiting to be told what to do

(which, you don't even know where to begin with) so what does a fractional CMO actually do? not 'PoSt MoRe' not 'hAvE wE tHoUgHt AbOuT tIkToK' → owns the marketing P&L - your budget, your CAC, your margin → decides which channels get funded and which get killed → creates the strategy BASED OFF OF ROI (!!), then briefs whoever's executing it → sits in the numbers weekly (revenue, not impressions) → manages your agencies so they stop billing you for reports nobody opens 💀 → builds your in-house team when you're actually ready for one, making only the hires u need it's a marketing director's brain, two days a week. no NI. no pension. no recruitment fee. no three-month notice period. from £4k a month. £48k a year. same job. £78k less. and already witnessed every expensive mistake at someone else's company first

(so the same doesn't happen to yours) what i see literally every week: most of the time, hiring more marketing people is WAY less effective than one person senior enough to say 'we're killing that channel let's scale with xyz systems to boost MRR by 10%' - and be f**king right about it a full team with no real strategy linked to the revenue backend is just a very expensive way to look busy 😭

and I've seen it in million dollar and billion dollar brands