"Should we hire someone or use an agency?" is usually answered with instinct. It is an arithmetic question first, and then a judgment question, and most people skip straight to the second half.
So here is the arithmetic, in Canadian dollars, followed by the honest case for each of the three routes, including the cases where mine is the wrong one.
What an employee actually costs
Start with the wage. Job Bank puts the median for a marketing specialist in Canada at $35.58 an hour, with a range of $20.50 to $57.44, based on the Labour Force Survey (sourced from Job Bank). At a 37.5- to 40-hour workweek, that is roughly $69,000 to $74,000 a year. That conversion is mine, not theirs.
Then add what an employer pays on top of the wage:
Canada Pension Plan. The employer matches the employee at 5.95 percent in 2026, to a maximum annual employer contribution of $4,230.45 on pensionable earnings up to $74,600 (sourced from the Canada Revenue Agency).
Employment Insurance. Employees pay $1.63 per $100 of insurable earnings in 2026 and employers pay 1.4 times that, $2.28 per $100, to a maximum annual employer premium of $1,572.30 outside Quebec, where the rates differ (sourced from Employment and Social Development Canada).
Vacation, statutory holidays and sick time. Real days you pay for and do not receive work on.
Tools and equipment. A laptop, and then the software. An analytics or SEO suite alone runs into four figures a year.
Your own time. The one nobody costs. A first marketing hire with no marketing manager above them is managed by you, and that is real hours out of your week, every week.
One thing that is not a factor at a single hire, at least in British Columbia: the employer health tax only starts above $1,000,000 in annual BC remuneration (sourced from the Province of British Columbia). Other provinces set their own thresholds, so check yours.
Add it up and a mid-level marketing employee in Canada is realistically a $80,000 to $90,000 a year commitment, before you have accounted for the weeks of hiring and the risk of getting it wrong.
What each route is genuinely good at
The employee
Good at: depth of context. A person inside your business learns the customers, the seasonality, the vocabulary, and the reason that the thing that worked for a competitor will not work for you. They are in the room when decisions are made. Over two years, that context compounds into something no external party can match.
Bad at: breadth. One person cannot be strong at technical SEO, paid media, design, writing and email lifecycle. A generalist hire is usually strong at one of those and adequate at the rest, and you will not know which until month four.
Right answer when: marketing is core to how you grow, the volume of work is genuinely full-time, and you have someone senior enough to manage them.
The freelancer
Good at: a defined job, done well, cheaply. One website. One ad account. One month of content. Ahrefs' poll of 439 providers put freelancer averages at $71.59 an hour and $1,348.63 a month (sourced from Ahrefs), though those figures are in United States dollars, from a global sample, and were published in December 2023, so treat them as shape rather than price.
Bad at: continuity and coverage. A freelancer has other clients, takes holidays, and occasionally disappears. If your marketing is a single undefended dependency, that is a risk you are carrying rather than transferring.
Right answer when: the work has clear edges, you can specify it, and you can survive a two-week gap.
The agency or studio
Good at: breadth without headcount, and accountability with a contract behind it. You get a set of skills you could not afford to employ individually, and someone whose job it is to notice the thing you did not ask about.
This is where my own experience sits. During my years at Google, I managed more than 100 small- and medium-sized business partners and $4.2M in managed ad spend across 31 brands as an employee there, and what transfers is not a tactic. It is having seen the same five mistakes often enough to spot them in week one. That pattern recognition is most of what breadth actually buys you.
Bad at: context depth and speed of small requests. An external partner will never know your business the way someone sitting in it does, and a "can you just change this line" request goes into a queue rather than happening in four minutes.
Right answer when: you need several disciplines at once, the volume does not justify a salary, and you would rather buy judgment than manage a junior.
When an agency is the wrong answer, mine included
Four situations where I would tell you not to hire us.
Marketing is not your constraint. If you cannot service the customers you already have, or the product is not landing, a retainer will make the problem arrive faster. Fix the constraint first.
You need daily availability. Some businesses genuinely need someone who is reachable within minutes. A solo studio or a small agency cannot honestly promise that, and an agency that does is promising it to five other clients too.
The work is one project with a clear end. A website, a rebrand, a single campaign. That is a project, and paying a monthly retainer for it is the expensive way to buy it.
You want guaranteed rankings or a guaranteed number of leads. Nobody can honestly sell you those, and I would rather lose the work than pretend otherwise. If that is the requirement, no route on this page will satisfy it.
A decision rule that usually works
If the work is more than 30 hours a month and requires a single skill, hire. If it is fewer than fifteen hours and needs one skill, use a freelancer. If it needs three or more skills at any volume, a retainer is almost always cheaper than assembling it yourself, which is roughly why the seven lines one person here actually covers exist as one offering rather than as separate hires.
Whichever way you go, settle the ownership question before you start. Accounts, profiles, domains and data should sit under your business with access granted outward, never the reverse, and the same principle that governs who actually owns a Google Business Profile applies to every other account you will hand over.
If you want the pricing side of this comparison in more detail, what agency retainers usually include, and the red flags in them covers it.
Run the arithmetic on your own situation before the next conversation. How many hours a month is the work actually, and how many different skills does it need?