Gbenga hired a brilliant Facebook ads freelancer last year. Within a month his cost per click had halved.
His leads didn’t move. The ads were sending people to a website that took ten seconds to load and a contact form that emailed an inbox nobody checked. The freelancer noticed, but fixing websites wasn’t his job, and nobody pays a Facebook ads specialist to say “your problem is somewhere else.”
So Gbenga sacked him and hired an agency. I’ll come back to how that went.
An agency writing about whether you should hire an agency has an obvious credibility problem, so I’ll put the conclusion first. For some businesses reading this, an agency, including ours, is the wrong answer.
The right structure depends on your spend, your need for range versus depth, and how much management you can really give the function. What follows is the framework I’d want if I were on your side of the table, including the failure modes of each option that salespeople skip, ours included.
Define the Work Before You Pick Who Does It
Modern marketing, run properly, is several jobs. As the complete guide lays out, it covers at least four walls, namely measurement, attraction, conversion and retention. Inside those sit a dozen crafts, like paid media, analytics, copywriting, design, email infrastructure and automation, that almost never live in one person.
It’s the old parable of the blind men and the elephant. The ads freelancer felt the trunk, the web developer felt a leg, and nobody was paid to describe the whole animal.
Every hiring decision collides with that fact. You’re choosing how to cover a range of crafts with the budget you have. Each option covers that range differently.
The Honest Comparison
| Option | What it’s actually best at | The failure mode nobody advertises |
|---|---|---|
| Freelancer or specialist | Deep skill in one craft at the best price. Ideal when you know exactly which single lever needs pulling and can manage the rest yourself. | Range. One excellent PPC freelancer can’t fix your landing pages, your tracking or your email, and won’t tell you those are the real problem, because they can’t bill for them. You become the integrator, whether you meant to or not. |
| In-house hire | Context and presence. Nobody outside your walls will ever know your business, customers and constraints as well. The right long-term destination for businesses whose marketing has become core. | The unicorn trap. One salary buys one person, and no one person holds a dozen crafts at a senior level. The usual result is a capable generalist drowning, doing everything at 60%, with no senior peer to check their work. |
| Agency | Range plus pattern exposure, with a team covering many crafts and seeing dozens of accounts, at a cost below assembling the same team in-house. | The delivery gap. Seniors pitch, juniors service, reports show activity instead of outcomes, and your account is one of forty. The industry’s accountability problem is real, which is exactly why we publish our goals framework and invite you to impose it on us. |
A Decision Rule Based on Spend
- Below roughly ₦1M a month in total marketing spend. A full agency engagement rarely makes sense, because the management fee eats too much of the budget. You’re better off with one excellent freelancer on your single leakiest wall, plus your own time on the fundamentals. It’s also why we only work with businesses budgeting ₦1M or more a month. Below that we’d be a bad purchase, and I’d rather say so.
- Between ₦1M and ₦10M a month. The range problem bites hardest here, because you need six crafts and can afford one salary. This is where an agency’s economics work in your favour, with senior coverage across the whole system for less than two good hires. The non-negotiable is written goals per service, with consequences for the vendor.
- Above ₦10M a month, or when marketing is the business. Start building in-house deliberately, usually with a strong internal lead first, while keeping specialist depth (analytics, paid media, automation) external. The best end state for most large accounts is a hybrid of internal ownership and external firepower.
Most bad hiring decisions come from buying the structure before defining the work. Diagnose which wall is weakest first, then buy the structure that fixes that wall. Structure follows diagnosis, always.
Whoever You Choose, Impose the Same Contract
The differences between freelancer, in-house and agency shrink dramatically under one discipline. Give each function a written goal (metric, baseline, target and timeframe), measured on data you trust, reviewed monthly, with consequences for sustained misses.
A freelancer with a written goal outperforms an agency without one. An in-house hire with a written goal knows what their job is. An agency that resists written goals has told you everything you need to know. The full accountability framework, including the consequences we bind ourselves to, is in the cornerstone guide.
Two more clauses are worth writing in whatever structure you pick. First, you own everything, including ad accounts, analytics, domains, creative and data, in your name from day one, so you can always leave. Second, a real human answers, meaning a named senior owner with response times in writing. Missing either clause predicts the end of the relationship better than any portfolio. Plenty of Nigerian founders have been locked out of their own ad account by a vendor who “set it up for them”.
“We’ll Just Use AI” Is a Structure Too
The newest option is missing from most comparison lists, and it’s doing it yourself with AI tools. It’s viable for content volume and basic automation, and I say that as someone whose company builds AI automation.
Its limit is the same as the freelancer’s, in a different outfit. AI executes crafts and leaves the diagnosis to you. It will happily write ten decent ads for a landing page that shouldn’t exist. The businesses getting real value from AI in marketing use it inside a structure where someone still owns the diagnosis, the goals and the judgement. That someone is the actual hire, whatever badge they wear.
Before You Hire Anyone
Before you interview a freelancer, an agency or a candidate, find out which of your four walls is weakest. That tells you which skill you’re actually buying, and whether one person can cover it.
Whoever you choose, put their goals in writing and keep every account in your name. Accountability decides results far more than structure does.
Diagnose, Then Hire
The rest of Gbenga’s story is short. His agency fixed the website and the inbox in the first month, and the leads finally moved. The freelancer had been doing good work all along. Nobody had diagnosed the leak before hiring him.
Do the diagnosis first. Ours takes two minutes, covers all four walls and costs nothing, whoever you end up hiring.
P.S. Businesses spending ₦1M or more a month on marketing also get a free 30-minute Leak Check. Use it to brief whoever you hire, even if it isn’t us.
Gbenga’s story is illustrative. This article reflects our experience across Nigerian SME engagements and the incentive structures of each hiring model, including our own. It is general guidance, not a recommendation for any specific provider, including us.
Related. If you decide to hire, our guide to how to hire your ideal marketer covers the job description, interview questions and first 90 days.
