Your first marketing hire probably shouldn't be a hire

A $75,000 salary does not cost $75,000. Add superannuation, leave loading, software seats, a laptop, recruitment, and the standard on costs land the real number around $95,000 a year before they have shipped a single campaign. That is the visible part.

The invisible part is that you just became a marketing manager. Someone has to set this person's priorities, judge whether their work is good, and notice when it is not. That someone is you, and judging marketing work you have never done yourself is exactly as hard as it sounds. Most clinic owners can tell a good patient outcome from a bad one in seconds, and cannot tell a well run ad account from a leaking one in a month of Sundays.

Then there is the risk shape. An employee is a single point of failure: when they resign, and eventually they will, the engine stops, the passwords scatter, and the institutional knowledge walks out with them. Compare the exit costs honestly. A good agency you can leave with 30 days notice, and the account history stays yours. A hire you have to unwind takes months either way.

Here is the structural problem with the all purpose marketing hire, and it is nobody's fault. 'Marketing' at a clinic is at least five different crafts: paid ads, content, design, the website, and the community work. A $75,000 candidate is early career by definition. They will be genuinely good at one or two of these and improvising the rest, and the improvising is invisible until you know what to look for.

Paid search is the craft where the improvising costs the most, because the meter is spinning while they learn. Google Ads for clinics is a deep, specific game: search term hygiene, conversion tracking that counts real bookings, AHPRA safe copy, bidding that matches the data. A specialist doing this across a hundred plus accounts sees the pattern of the week before your hire has seen it once. That is not a talent gap. It is a reps gap, and reps are the one thing you cannot pay a junior to already have.

But flip it around, because the honest version cuts both ways. There is a set of marketing work where the in clinic person destroys any agency: filming the team, patient stories done properly and compliantly, the Google profile, referrer relationships, the open day, the local netball club sponsorship. That work needs someone who is in the building, knows the clinicians, and picks up the phone to the physio who just had a great patient outcome. No agency does that well, including us.

The comparison below prices the paid ads function specifically, three ways: your own hours, a hire's loaded cost for the share of their week the ads would actually take, and a specialist fee. Put your real numbers in. The point is not that one door is always right. The point is that the doors should be priced honestly before you walk through one.

Sometimes the hire is the correct call, and pretending otherwise would make this article a brochure. Three or more locations changes the maths: there is enough internal work for a real marketing role, and enough budget to pay for actual seniority rather than a generalist. A clinic whose growth genuinely runs on content, a strong personal brand, a podcast, a serious referral education program, needs that machine inside the building.

And if you already have the paid engine handled and measured, an in house person who owns everything else is not competing with the agency at all. They are the other half of the system. The mistake is not hiring. The mistake is hiring one junior to be the entire marketing department, including the craft where inexperience bills by the click.