Do it yourself while revenue is small and you can give marketing about 5 steady hours a week. Hire help when those hours disappear, results sit flat for two quarters, or the next step needs a skill you don’t have. For most owners, the smart split is to hire for the thinking and keep the easy parts.
First, the good news. Neither answer is wrong, and the wrong one is cheap to undo. You built this business, and plenty of owners like you do their own marketing really well. Plenty of others hire too early and pay for a plan they can’t use. The test below sorts you out in about 5 minutes.
What are other owners actually doing?
Honestly? Mostly squeezing it in. Fiverr surveyed nearly 6,000 small business owners in 25 countries and found 70% spend less than 5 hours a week on marketing. Meanwhile, vcita’s April 2025 survey of 500 US small businesses found 52% still outsource their marketing. But outsourcing doesn’t always stick. In the same survey, 40% of owners who outsource eventually dropped or switched their agency, and 60% of those cited a lack of return.
Read those together. Most owners put in very few hours. And many who buy help buy it without a clear job for it. Both mistakes are fixable, and the test below catches them.
AI has changed the DIY math a little. A first draft takes minutes now, and we use these tools every day ourselves. But the Census Bureau’s business survey found that fewer than 20% of firms with four or fewer employees reported using AI between December 2025 and May 2026. If you’re comfortable with the tools, that’s a real head start. Don’t get us wrong, though... a fast draft still doesn’t tell you what to say, or to whom.
A 5-signal test for your situation
Answer these for this quarter. Not for the version of you with a free weekend.
| Signal | Lean toward doing it yourself | Lean toward hiring |
|---|---|---|
| Hours | You can protect 5 hours a week, every week. | Marketing gets whatever’s left after everything else. Which is usually nothing. |
| Skill | You can say who your best customer is, and why they pick you, in 2 sentences. | The next step is ads, a site build, search setup, or automation, and you’d be learning on live money. |
| Stakes | A slow month costs you time, not cash. | A bad month costs real money, like ad spend or a missed busy season. |
| Results | Something is working and you want more of it. | Six months in, you can’t name a customer marketing brought you. |
| Energy | You don’t mind doing it. | You put it off every single week. |
3 or more in the left column? Keep doing it, and spend on a one-time plan instead of a monthly bill. 3 or more on the right? Hire. Split down the middle? Skip to the middle path below.
When does doing it yourself win?
More often than people who sell marketing like to admit. And yes, we sell marketing. Here are the cases where we’d tell you straight to keep it in-house.
You’re small and busy. A solo electrician in Greenwood with a full calendar doesn’t need a retainer. A finished Google profile, a text asking each customer for a review, and 1 real photo a week will beat most paid help at that size.
You are the product. A coach or consultant sells trust in 1 person. Your voice at the networking breakfast or on LinkedIn is hard to hire out. So get help with the plumbing, like email setup and your website, and keep the voice.
You’re consistent. The owner who posts every Tuesday for 2 years beats the agency that posts for 3 months. Customers can tell the difference.
You haven’t proven the offer. If you’re not sure anyone will pay for what you sell, a retainer pays someone to polish an unproven idea. Founders in that spot should read our founders page for the homework we’d give instead.
When does hiring win?
When your hours are gone. If marketing happens in the 20 minutes after dinner, it’s going to keep getting skipped. And a skipped plan is the same as no plan.
When the next step is a specialist’s job. Google Ads, search work, site builds, and automation reward experience, and mistakes on ads cost money by the day. Someone who has set up many ad accounts skips the errors you’d pay to find.
And when you’ve stalled. 6 months of steady effort with nothing to show for it usually means the thinking is off, not the effort. Fresh eyes are cheaper than a 7th month.
What does hiring cost next to doing it yourself?
Your hours count, even when no invoice shows up. Say your time is worth $75 an hour. 5 hours a week is roughly $1,500 a month. DIY is cheaper only when you’d do the work anyway and it stays steady.
For the hiring side, let’s start with the pricey option. The median pay for advertising, promotions, and marketing managers was $165,780 a year in May 2025, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That’s about $13,800 a month in wages, before benefits and software. Our retainers are $1,200, $2,400, or $4,800 a month, 3 months minimum, and every tier is on our pricing page. At $300K in annual revenue, the $1,200 tier is 4.8% of sales. Our marketing budget guide runs the rest of that math.
Here’s the candid part. If $1,200 a month would be your entire marketing budget, don’t hire us yet. Do it yourself, and spend that money on your Google profile and on answering every call.
What’s the middle path?
It’s where most owners we talk to end up, and it costs less than either extreme. It’s not paying for the doing, it’s paying for the judgment.
The $3,000 strategy engagement is 1 way. You get positioning, a defined best-fit customer, a sharp offer, and a 90-day plan you can run without us. If you move to a retainer afterward, half of it ($1,500) is credited. The other way is an advisor who reviews your work every month. Our comparison of a fractional CMO and a marketing agency covers which kind of help fills which gap.
What should you hand off first?
Hand off what’s technical, slow to learn, or expensive to get wrong: ad accounts, website builds, search setup, tracking, and automation. Keep what only you can do, which is talking to customers and showing your real work. In our book, the rule is simple: give away the plumbing and keep the voice.
And whoever you hire, get ownership in writing. Your website, your Google Business Profile, and your ad accounts should be registered to you from day one.
Find the step holding you back
The Five-Step Check-Up asks 10 plain questions and scores your answers against the 5 steps we run every client through. It names your weakest step, which is usually the real answer to “do it myself or hire?” No email. No login. Just a straight answer.
If your answer is hire, our marketing practice covers brand, campaigns, content, and email. Retainers run $1,200, $2,400, or $4,800 a month, 3 months minimum, then month to month. We take 8 clients at a time, so you get somebody in your corner, not a ticket number. If you ever leave, you keep your site, your Google profile, and your ad accounts. And if we’re not the right fit, we’ll tell you so on the first call.
What else do owners ask about DIY marketing?
Is it cheaper to do my own marketing?
On paper, yes. But it costs hours, and those hours come out of selling and serving customers. 5 hours a week at $75 an hour is roughly $1,500 a month in time. DIY is cheaper when you’d do the work anyway and keep it steady. It costs more when it keeps getting dropped.
How many hours a week does marketing take?
Fiverr found 70% of small business owners spend under 5 hours a week on it. In our book, 5 steady hours is the floor for 1 channel done properly: a finished Google profile, review requests, and a weekly post. 2 channels done well beat 5 done whenever you remember.
Can I do some of my marketing myself and hire out the rest?
Yes, and honestly it’s the setup we’d pick for most owners. Hand off the technical parts, like ads, site builds, and tracking. Keep the customer conversations and the photos of your real work. Split it by skill, not by channel.
Should I hire a freelancer, an agency, or a consultant?
Match the hire to the gap. A freelancer fits 1 defined job. An agency fits production at volume. A consultant or fractional CMO fits a missing plan. Our article on a fractional CMO versus a marketing agency walks through each one.
What does Carson Poore Consulting charge?
Retainers are $1,200, $2,400, or $4,800 a month, with a 3-month minimum, then month to month. A one-time strategy engagement is $3,000, and half of it ($1,500) is credited if you move to a retainer. We take 8 clients at a time, and nonprofits get a reduced rate.