Every growing business in Malta hits the same fork. Marketing is working well enough to matter, so the question becomes whether to hire someone to own it or bring in an agency to run it. The Growth Bully, a Malta performance marketing agency, gets asked to make this case constantly, and the honest version is more useful than the sales version: the right answer depends on how much marketing work you actually have, not on which option looks cheaper on paper.
The mistake almost everyone makes is comparing an agency retainer to a salary. That is the wrong comparison. The real comparison is a retainer against the total cost of employment, and the total cost of one capable person against the range of skills that one person would need to cover.
Is it cheaper to hire a marketing agency or an employee?
For most businesses below a certain scale, an agency retainer works out cheaper than one senior in-house hire once you count everything. A single salary buys one skill set. A retainer buys a bench, paid media, creative, tracking and strategy, for less than the loaded cost of that one hire. In-house only wins on cost when there is enough work to keep several specialists busy full time.
What does a marketing manager actually cost in Malta?
Public Malta salary data puts a mid to senior marketing manager at roughly 45,000 to 57,000 EUR gross a year, with senior hires reaching into the mid sixties (directional, per published Malta salary surveys). The headline number is only the start. The true cost of employment also carries:
- Employer contributions on top of gross pay, plus bonus and paid leave.
- Tools and subscriptions the role needs, from ad platforms to design and reporting software.
- Recruitment and ramp, the months of reduced output while a new hire learns your market and builds campaigns from zero.
- Management time, because one generalist still needs direction, review and cover when they are on leave or move on.
Add those and a single hire quickly costs well beyond the salary line, for one person who cannot be expert in paid media, creative, copy, tracking and strategy all at once.
What do you actually get for an agency retainer?
A retainer buys a team and a system, not a headcount. Instead of one generalist, you get specialists who each do one thing well, plus an operating method already proven on other accounts. That is why results tend to arrive in weeks rather than after a hiring cycle and a ramp. Across our client accounts that looks like:
- 25.61x return on ad spend and 321 orders in a single retail season for Bigmat, carrying 52 percent of online revenue.
- 1,305 leads at 5.28 EUR each for Bajada New Energy, feeding a sales team a measurable pipeline.
- 6.14x return on ad spend for NJA, with email revenue up 18 percent on top.
No single hire delivers that spread, because no single person is a specialist in every channel at once. Our Decision Maker Pipeline and lead generation work runs on that bench model by design.
When does hiring in-house make sense?
In-house wins when marketing is a core, full-time function with enough steady work to keep several people busy, when deep product or institutional knowledge matters more than channel expertise, or when you are large enough to hire a genuine team rather than a lone generalist. At that point the loaded cost of a team is justified by volume, and the day to day speed of an in-house unit pays for itself.
The common failure is hiring one person and expecting an agency's range from them. That hire ends up stretched across strategy, execution and reporting, master of none, and the marketing stalls. If you are going in-house, hire for a team, not a hero.
What about a freelancer, consultant or boutique agency?
These sit between the two options, and the right pick comes down to accountability:
- Freelancer: cheapest per hour and good for a defined task, but you are still the manager, and cover disappears the moment they are busy or unavailable.
- Consultant: strong for strategy and direction, but usually hands you a plan rather than executing it, so you still need someone to build and run the work.
- Boutique versus full-service agency: a smaller, founder-led agency gives you senior attention and direct accountability, where a large full-service shop can bury your account under junior staff. For most Maltese businesses, senior accountability beats a big logo.
If you are weighing these, brief them all the same way and judge the answers. Our guide on how to brief a marketing agency and the piece on retainers versus projects both help you compare like for like.
The honest bottom line
Compare total cost to total cost, not retainer to salary. For most businesses in Malta that are growing but not yet running a full marketing department, a retainer delivers more skill, faster, for less than one loaded senior hire. Once marketing is big enough to keep a real team busy, in-house earns its place. And if cost is the blocker, remember that Malta grant schemes can offset marketing investment, covered in our Malta marketing grants guide.
Not sure which side of the line you are on? The fastest way to find out is to see what your current marketing is missing. Take the Pipeline Scorecard and get a clear read on your growth gaps.