Rules of thumb circulate: marketing should be so many percent of revenue, you need one marketer per so many million. They are all equally convincing and equally useless: the answer differs tenfold between a B2B company with thirty customers and a webshop with thirty thousand.
Asking the question differently
Not "how many people", but "which work returns every month". Put that on paper for the next twelve months, with the days it takes per line:
- What is always there: website, newsletters, social, sales material, trade stands, reporting.
- What is sometimes there: campaigns, launches, a rebranding, an event.
- What is never there but has to happen: strategy, positioning, budget allocation.
The first column decides how many people you employ. The second decides your agency budget. The third decides who has to be senior enough to make calls, and that is almost never the same person.
The three functions you need regardless
Someone who decides (what we do and do not do), someone who orchestrates (who does what when) and someone who makes. In a small company that is one or two people wearing all three hats. From about five people on that starts to grind, because deciding and making need a different kind of day.
The role missing most often is the second. A company with three makers and no orchestrator spends more time aligning than working, and only notices when an agency joins and the questions double.
What actually decides the answer
How much you want to decide yourself. If you outsource everything, you need one strong marketer who can buy and judge. If you do everything in house, you need a team and an agency only for the peaks. Both work; what does not work is a team without a mandate and an agency without a counterpart.
Mapping those three functions against what you outsource is the work IKAg does under Marketing organization.
Read on: what you do yourself and what you outsource and one agency or several.