The search usually starts with a decision you’ve already made. You’ve been running the marketing yourself — or paying someone to run one piece of it — and neither version is producing what you need. Time to properly hand it off. The question is who you hand it to.
Searching for an “outsourced marketing team” returns everything from recruitment platforms to marketing agencies to freelance hubs. They’re all answering variations of the same question, but not solving the same problem.
Business owners who end up working with me typically weren’t looking for a team when they started searching. They were looking for a function. Those two things look similar on paper but produce entirely different results.
The in-house hire looks clean until you run the numbers
Bringing on a marketing manager is the most legible option. A salary, a job description, one person accountable. For a business with a clear brief, existing assets to hand over, and budget for a full-time role, it can make sense.
For an established product business at the stage I usually work with — strong offline presence, real revenue, but no coordinated marketing behind it — it actually turns out to be not so great. You’re not hiring into a working setup; you’re hiring someone to build it and run it simultaneously, and few people with this level of skill are willing to work for someone else. Paid ads, email, organic content, SEO, strategy: that’s not one person’s scope, it’s five.
The overhead accumulates fast: recruiting time, onboarding, superannuation, holiday pay and the rather-demanding conditions of employment that come with Australia’s HR regulations.
The freelancer route has the same problem, compressed
Naturally, you’ll then think hiring freelancers is a good idea. Separate contractors for each channel — someone for Meta ads, someone for email, a content writer for SEO, someone to do technical SEO — appears to be a flexible, lower-cost version of the same approach. In isolation, it is lower cost.
The issue is the this: with a bunch of contractors, nobody cares enough about your brand. And, no channel is talking to any other. Your email contractor doesn’t know what ads are running. Your content writer isn’t informing the email strategy. Your ads aren’t retargeting from your email list. Each person is doing their job independently and trust me, after managing contractors for an ad agency, I know nobody is checkign the links work (as in, actual “click this button” links) between platforms. I’ll never forget asking an email specialist why the call-to-action button didn’t go anywhere, to which she replied “Oh, I forgot about that; I was thinking about the photography.” Making the channels work together doesn’t belong to anyone’s brief.
This is what the done-for-you marketing model was built to address. Not more people — one coordinated function.
What an outsourced marketing function looks like in practice
McKee Creative runs across your channels — paid ads (Meta and Google), email marketing, SEO content and technical work, and strategic oversight — as one coordinated function. All are handled by the same human, skilled in strategy and what it is that makes a customer buy. Not handed off to a team, not split between contractors. One person across the whole picture.
The practical difference: when a new product drops, the Meta campaign, the email sequence, the SEO post, and the ad creative all move together. Paid traffic builds the email list, which feeds the retargeting audience. SEO content compounds over time, reducing reliance on paid spend. Google retargets and keeps your brand top of mind. Each channel makes the others more effective — that’s the flywheel at work.
For clients, this means one point of contact, no coordination overhead, and a marketing function that builds on itself. Documented results include 52% revenue growth in the first 12 months for an established fashion brand with no functioning online channel at the start, 30–50% revenue growth in year one across the client base, and 10.9x ROAS. Those results don’t come from doing more. They come from doing it in a coordinated way.
Click here to read full case studies …
What it costs, and what the comparison misses … plus the jet fuel at no extra charge
The Economy Package is $4,900 AUD/month + GST — paid ads, email marketing, SEO content, and strategic oversight, run as one integrated function by a single strategist.
The comparison usually made is against an in-house hire: a marketing manager’s salary plus superannuation, plus the contractors that employee will still need to cover all four channels. Run the numbers on the in-house version and the monthly cost is considerably higher — and the channels are still unlikely to be working together.
The more direct comparison is to what many businesses in this position are already spending: $3,000–$5,000 across separate providers on different channels. Similar spend, but no coordination. Each channel is being worked. Nothing is making them work together.
And, McKee Creative’s clients are getting tailored AI systems built in to their marketing function, at no extra charge. We’re not talking app bolt-ons. We’re talking from-the-ground-up solutions the clients didn’t even know they needed. Like the tailored content system built for a store running on Shopify that meant they could delete a $99/month plugin. The agent that scans 1879 products every night, rewriting thin product descriptions, formatting images for social posts, adding new products to the pipeline, fixing brokin links if the client archived a product. Or the legislatively-compliant process documentation for a service-based business’ upcoming audit. These are the things we just love to do, to send a client an email saying “Hey, we just saved you $1188.”
Why pay for the diagnostic when agencies commonly offer an audit for free?
Because they’re not giving you the map; they’re giving you a thin overview to compel you to hire them.
The Marketing Diagnostic gives you a detailed step-by-step strategy across each of your channels, to tie them into a cohesive function that reliably grows your revenue. You can take it to implement in-house if you decide not to hire McKee Creative, and if your in-house team knows what they’re doing, the roadmap willl succeed.
If you choose to hire McKee Creative to implement, the Marketing Diagnostic fee is deducted from your first month’s invoice.
The decision worth reviewing before you hire anyone
I work with businesses that have already made the call. They’ve decided the marketing can’t keep running on their desk, and they’re not interested in managing the person who does it.
What they want is a function that runs — that produces documented results and doesn’t require their oversight to keep moving.
If you’re working through the timing, the seven signs your business is ready to hire a marketing agency is a useful reference for confirming where you’re at.
When you’re ready to talk, book a free strategy call. We’ll look at what you’ve got, where the gaps are, and whether McKee Creative is the right fit for what you’re trying to build.
Book a free strategy call – we look forward to meeting you!
