Source: Shutterstock
Building a marketing team requires careful decisions about which skills to prioritise and at what level to hire. For small- and medium-sized businesses, those decisions can be even more crucial.
With limited budget to grow headcount, roles can easily blur, leaving a small number of marketers juggling multiple responsibilities. While this flexibility can support agility, it can also increase pressure on teams and take away from specialist expertise.
Research from Warc and Intuit Mailchimp suggests mid-market marketing organisations are also facing a tougher operating environment, marked by rising customer acquisition costs, fragmented media channels and ongoing budget pressure.
According to the study, 51% of respondents say their marketing department has 10 or fewer employees and 42% have limited budget to hire people with specific skills.
That pressure is also driving structural change. Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey shows that two-fifths (40.7%) of SME marketing teams have introduced new team structures in the previous 12 months, while almost one in five (19.7%) have merged marketing with other departments or functions.
However, with smaller teams and lower budgets, the decision to hire or outsource has to be extremely intentional and thought out.
From generalists to specialists
Reusable water bottle brand Ocean Bottle offers one example of how SME marketing teams are evolving as businesses scale.
Founded in 2018 as a direct-to-consumer brand, Ocean Bottle describes itself as a “social impact brand first, reusable water bottle brand second”.
The brand’s marketing structure has shifted as the business has grown. Ocean Bottle now has eight full-time marketing employees, organised around specialist areas.
“It’s quite a functional marketing team. We don’t have a team of generalists,” says Millie Allen, head of marketing, who joined the business in April 2024.
That has not always been the case. Earlier in its growth journey, the brand relied more heavily on generalists, an approach Allen says reflected where the business was at the time.
“Our marketing team was a bit more of a team of generalists in some different spaces, which made sense, given the phase in which the business was in,” she explains. “In the last two years, we’ve really focused on that scale-up, so we’ve evolved the team to become more specialist.”
Ocean Bottle now has functional leads across PR, creative, B2B, social and growth.
Allen says those decisions were made by regularly reassessing the business’s priorities and gaps.
“As a leader, I always take the time to look at where we are right now,” she explains. “Rather than immediately replacing like-for-like, I wait and ask: what do we actually need to achieve our goals? Where’s the business at, and where are the other team members at now?”
Alongside changes to in-house structures, SMEs are increasingly turning to agencies, freelancers and fractional specialists.
Almost two-thirds (63.1%) of the more than 3,500 respondents to Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey say they have outsourced work to an agency or third party in the past 12 months. That is up from 46.2% the year before.
Ocean Bottle has taken a “cautious” approach, prioritising specialist skills in-house where possible. However, the brand does outsource selectively, often to complement its internal expertise.
For premium product launches, for example, Ocean Bottle brings in external photographers and videographers.
“That’s the benefit of freelance,” adds Allen. “It can be quite agile, but at the same time, for us, as a small but growing business, we’re not committed to these longer retainers.”
At the other end of the spectrum is B2B video interviewing and screening software company Willo, which operates with an entirely outsourced marketing team.
When Rachel Thomson joined Willo as vice-president of marketing in 2023, the business had nine employees and no formal marketing function. Today, Thomson is the only full-time, in-house marketer, coordinating a global network of fractional specialists.
The team spans Canada, the UK, Europe, the US and the Philippines, covering brand, content, SEO, paid media, PR, web optimisation and lead generation. Each specialist works to clearly defined objectives and time allocations.
“They all feel very accountable to those marketing metrics,” Thomson says. “Considering they’re all outsourced, they feel very much part of the success, and then they feel the pain when we miss a target or are behind on metrics.”
Willo’s CEO Euan Cameron comes from a marketing background, including a previous role as CMO at CarMoney. Thomson says that experience has helped secure internal buy-in for marketing investment.
However, her first priority on joining was not team expansion, but building brand consistency.
“The business had a foundational brand, but it wasn’t consistent,” she says. “Nobody else in the team really even knew what brand was, and so I focused a lot in terms of building the brand when I came in the door, and then educating the team on the importance of brand consistency.”
Once that groundwork was in place, Thomson began building the outsourced model.
“Our fractional head of content, for example, comes from an incredible amount of experience,” she says. “We’d never be able to afford that level of experience full-time, but fractional roles make it possible.”
The team operates largely through Slack and monthly Zoom meetings, a structure Thomson says has supported collaboration despite the geographical spread.
“We have this really well-aligned marketing team that is working together and working all over the world,” she adds.
Keeping it in-house
The opposite approach is taken by cleaning brand Purdy & Figg, with the entire marketing team, around 20 people, in-house.
“The pure volume of work we do means that relying on an agency partner probably isn’t the best use of time. I don’t think they could keep up with us,” explains Purdy & Figg’s marketing director Rufus Neville.
In the past year, the brand has hired a head of performance media to help with media buying across both performance and brand. On the other end, it’s hired a creative director to help the team “operate as a mini internal agency”.
“All the campaign work we do – when we want to go on TV or OOH – she will be in charge and leading that. We want to rely as little as possible on external agency partners,” he explains.
Neville says one of the biggest advantages of a fully internal team is speed and control.
“We do a lot of work, and we turn it around pretty fast. And because we sell 95% through our own channels, there’s a sense that we are in control of our own destiny in a way,” he explains. “We’re not fighting for shelf space. We’re not competing with offers in Sainsbury’s and Tesco.”
On the flip side, with smaller teams and budgets, everything must work “really hard” for the brand.
“You’ll only ever visit the Purdy & Fig website if we made you go there, or you’ve been referred to by someone else. We have to fight pretty hard for every new customer,” he says.
Like many SMEs, Purdy & Figg operates without the processes and legacy systems that come with large businesses. Neville sees that as both a constraint and an advantage.
“In a way, it’s a good thing for a small, agile team that can react very quickly. But it’s also a challenge that we haven’t got tons of resources to rely upon, and we haven’t got tons of history and legacy. We’re building the ship as we’re sailing it,” adds Neville.
It’s important to have [everyone] accountable for revenue, so that marketing are never blaming sales and sales are never blaming marketing.
Rachel Thomson, Willo
Deciding which skills to prioritise, and whether to hire or outsource them, remains one of the biggest challenges for SME marketers.
More than half (56.9%) of respondents to Marketing Week’s 2025 Career & Salary Survey identify performance marketing as their main tactical skills gap.
Close to half (46.1%) also cite social media expertise, despite respondents ranking social media marketing (25.2%) as the industry’s most overrated skill, ahead of AI knowledge (20.1%).
For Ocean Bottle, skills planning has been an ongoing process rather than a one-off restructure. Allen says hiring decisions are shaped by the business’s stage of growth, rather than replacing roles on a like-for-like basis.
“It didn’t happen overnight,” she says. “It was a combination of natural movement in the team and continually reassessing what the business actually needed.”
Allen says she takes time to assess business priorities, team capability and future goals before making hiring decisions.
“Rather than just immediately replacing like-for-like, I always wait and look at what we actually need to achieve our goals, where the business is, and also, where are the other team members at now,” she adds.
One outcome of that process was the decision to hire a dedicated social media lead, an area Allen says had been under-resourced as the brand sought to strengthen its B2C presence.
“It became quite clear and quite critical that we were under-resourced in that space. So that led to the development of a specialist role,” she adds.
At Willo, Thomson says her own generalist background made outsourcing specialist skills a natural choice. Leaning on fractional roles has also helped the business manage budget constraints, although Thomson says finding the right balance remains key.
“It’s about getting the right level of talent, skills and experience at a cost that makes sense for the business,” she says.
Thomson points to the value of fractional senior hires, including a head of content with experience at large enterprise brands. Willo’s marketing function is split into three areas: brand, lead generation and qualification. Thomson says close alignment across marketing, sales and customer success has been critical to performance.
“We’re not a massive team, but cross-department alignment communication is detrimental to just the overall organisational success,” she explains.
“That might seem really simple, but it’s important to have [everyone] accountable for revenue, so that marketing are never blaming sales and sales are never blaming marketing.”