How your marketing team is unintentionally burning money

The real cost of in-house marketers

It seems like a logical reflex: we’ll hire a strong marketer, invest in training, and build internal knowledge.

But anyone who lines up the numbers quickly sees that the story doesn’t hold up as well as expected.
An internal profile — junior, medior or senior — costs you much more than just a gross monthly salary. A realistic calculation looks like this:

• Average gross salary (Belgian market, incl. social security):
  • Junior: €42,000/year
  • Medior: €58,000/year
  • Senior: €78,000/year
• Overhead and indirect costs (recruitment, coaching, tools, hardware, management): on average +20% on salary
• Recruitment and retention:
  • Recruitment cost via agency/headhunter: 20–25% of gross salary
  • Average retention of a digital marketer: 18 months
  • Impact of turnover: loss of knowledge, onboarding cost, temporary drop in productivity
• Productivity:
  • Effectiveness on the job
    • Junior with little guidance: 40–55%
    • Medior in a good structure: 65–75%
    • Senior in an optimal setup: 85%

The rest of the time goes to meetings, misalignment, waiting time, distractions, or strategically unproductive work.

• Sick leave and absence:
  • Average number of sick days per employee per year in Belgium: 21 days (including long-term illness)
  • Impact: 8% direct productivity loss plus coordination loss within the team

When you add up all these factors, you’ll find that the team cost per productive hour is often higher than expected. Add your own management time on top, and your total cost of ownership (TCO) skyrockets.

And then there’s effectiveness

Even if the cost stays manageable, the question remains: is your team actually delivering? Because in a classic in-house structure, you quickly hit limitations:

• One person has to do everything: SEO, SEA, CRM, social, analytics, automation…
• Specialists are stuck in silos, without collaboration or room to grow
• Too much time is spent on internal alignment
• Strategic insights don’t translate into daily action
• Learning curves are slow, innovation rarely comes from within

You create capacity, but not agility. You build people, but not a system.

Freelancers as a solution? Sometimes, but not structurally

Freelancers offer flexibility, especially for short-term projects or specific expertise. But they also bring challenges:

• Limited scalability
• Less teamwork or knowledge retention
• Dependence on the availability and seniority of one person
• Often higher rates without structural follow-up or optimization

For short periods, it works fine. For structural marketing growth, much less so.

The alternative: a hybrid team

With Hybrid, we build marketing teams that perform better and cost less from day one than a traditional in-house team. Not because being cheaper is our goal, but because our model is structurally more efficient: no puzzle of disconnected profiles, but an integrated team solution that functions as an extension of your organization.

What makes the difference?

1. T-shaped profiles: not one-trick ponies, but specialists who can operate broadly. People who not only know their channel, but also how it fits into your funnel, sales flow, and strategy.
2. Multidisciplinary teams: SEO, SEA, social, CRM, data, martech — all within one integrated team. You don’t have to choose between profiles; we build the team that fits your needs.
3. Flexibility instead of fixed salary costs: you don’t pay for someone sitting idle on Monday. You don’t waste a senior on execution work or a junior on strategic decisions. You scale based on needs, without social liabilities or recruitment stress.
4. Less overhead, more output: coaching, training, follow-up, quality control, process optimization — all included in our model. You pay for results, not for conditions.

What does the cost model say?

We compared apples to apples to create an objective cost comparison between three team models:

1. Internal hiring (junior/medior/senior, with and without good guidance)
2. Freelancers (full-time engagement, max effectiveness)
3. Hybrid Team-as-a-Service

And what did we find?

• In almost every scenario, TCO with Hybrid is 15–35% lower
• Effectiveness per hour is structurally higher (due to less waste, better seniority mix, and stronger knowledge sharing)
• Long-term impact is greater, because there are no gaps due to sickness, turnover, or capacity issues

You get more done, with less budget, in less time.

Okay, but what about control and knowledge building?

That’s exactly the strength of a hybrid team:

• Everything happens in your systems
• We build knowledge inside your organization, not outside it
• Our people aren’t a black box but integrated team members
• Strategy, execution, and optimization are aligned with your business
• Reporting, planning, and processes follow your flow
• And if someone leaves? The team still stands

You keep control, without having to micromanage or put out fires. You get speed and stability. Strategy and execution. Growth and peace of mind.

Let us calculate it for you

We’ve developed a model that allows us to make an objective comparison between your current (or planned) team structure and our approach.

We’ve validated this model with multiple clients and external experts. It’s clear, realistic, and fully based on Belgian benchmark data.

📊 How much does your team really cost?
📉 Where is the productivity loss?
📈 How much more could you achieve with a hybrid model?

Request your free calculation.
We’ll fill in the model together, based on your reality and your numbers. That way, you’ll get a realistic view of your true costs and potential gains — the perfect starting point for an honest and transparent conversation about the ROI and future of your marketing organization.

Let’s be honest: it’s at least worth calculating once, isn’t it?