How Much Does an In-House Digital Marketing Team Cost?

By Raka October 13, 2023

Determining how much to spend on digital marketing and how many marketing employees to hire can be a daunting task. Luckily, many others have had to figure this out, too. According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, you should spend about 7 percent of your gross revenue on marketing (if you make less than $5 million in sales per year and your profit margin is around the 10 percent range). For example, your business did $3.2 million in sales in 2018, which means in 2019 you should spend:

$3.2 million x 0.07 =$224K

While this number is by no means set in stone, it serves as a good starting point for determining your digital marketing budget. If your company decides to hire an in-house marketing team, it will likely vary in size and role depending on your budget and need. We’ve summarized the various digital marketer roles, their responsibilities, and how much they earn on average. This will hopefully serve as a helpful overview so you can get a sense of what your team may look like (note that all average salaries are from glassdoor.com)

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Campaign Manager
Responsible for the success of the entire campaign. This person may also be a marketing manager or director.
Average Salary: $40K – $75K

Project Manager
Responsible for organizing assets, schedules, and resources to ensure the success of projects.
Average Salary: $53K – $111K

Marketing Strategist
Responsible for the success of marketing campaigns. This team member will be tasked with building, implementing, and optimizing the marketing strategy. The strategist should serve as a project manager for the team while also helping out with various tasks to keep projects on track.
Average Salary: $56K – $106K

Marketing Producer
Responsible for scripting videos, writing emails, writing blog and social media content, creating and managing editorial calendars, creating content offers.
Average Salary: $47K – $103K

Marketing Analyst
Responsible for reporting on ongoing efforts and assisting the strategist in scheduling and implementing optimizations to campaigns as well as owned (website, customer relationship management tools) and unowned web properties (such as Facebook or TripAdvisor).
Average Salary: $47K – $82K

Ad Manager
Responsible for the success of all advertising efforts (digital, print, out of home), including optimizing spend and integrating advertising, content creation, and inbound marketing efforts. This team member typically will be responsible for managing external vendors as well.
Average Salary: $46K – $66K

Ad Producer
Responsible for the success of digital advertising campaigns as well as reporting and optimizing ad channels and spend, creation of ad copy, and account setup.
Average Salary: $42K – $63K

Ad Analyst
Responsible for reporting on the performance of ad channels, including Google Ads, Bing Ads, Facebook, and others as needed.
Average Salary: $52K – $75K

Video Producer
Manages storyboarding, video shoots, animations, and video production. Also responsible for creating video advertising assets.
Average Salary: $42K – $88K

Photographer
Manages photo shoots, new product shots, web, email, and social images. May also help with creating advertising assets.
Average Salary: $26K – $63K

Designer
Responsible for creating graphics for a website, email templates, social and blog post graphics, content offer design, and display advertising assets (static banner, gifs and HTML5 ads).
Average Salary: $39K – $71K

Developer
Responsible for site updates, building email and landing page templates, building forms, and creating other modules (e.g., calculators) to be used in marketing efforts.
Average Salary: $57K – $123K

If that seems like a lot of resources, that’s because it is! But your marketing efforts can’t fuel themselves, unfortunately. It’s possible that some team members may be capable of wearing multiple hats (for example, you may only need one analyst for all efforts, and your video producer may also be your designer), but successful teams often see results because they’re able to specialize and work efficiently together.

Another option is to utilize a digital marketing agency for your strategy, production and reporting needs. Agencies like Raka work with clients from all sorts of industries to help drive their marketing efforts, creating and implementing custom strategies that are closely tied to their business needs, competitive differentiators and industry demands. Sometimes, the cost of one or two full-time marketing employees can cover an agency partnership for an entire year. And by relying on the agency’s expertise and flexibility, we often see clients achieve the same results they might have needed a team of five or more internal employees to realize.

Make sure you get the most of your marketing spend with an efficient and effective digital marketing team. If you have any further questions about digital marketing and the services that our agency can offer, please contact Raka today. We would be happy to discuss your options!

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