No time for marketing: who you can hand it to

You can hand marketing to a managed service at £49-£199 a month, a freelancer at £200-£600 a day, a virtual assistant at £15-£30 an hour, or an agency from £1,000 a month. Which one suits you depends on a question most people skip: do you need someone to decide what to do, or just to do it?

That distinction matters more than the price, and getting it wrong is why plenty of outsourcing arrangements quietly fail.

Deciding versus doing

If you already know what needs doing and simply lack the hours, you need execution. A virtual assistant is the cheapest way to buy that.

If you do not know what should happen next, execution alone will not help. Handing a VA an unclear brief produces activity without direction, and you will still be the bottleneck because every decision comes back to you.

Most business owners saying “I have no time for marketing” actually mean both: no time and no particular plan. That combination points at a managed service, because you are buying the thinking as well as the hands.

The four options

A word on each, honestly.

Managed services cover the standard local business stack: website, local SEO, Google Business Profile, reviews, content. They are standardised rather than bespoke, which is what makes them affordable. If your needs are unusual they will not stretch to it.

Freelancers are excellent for projects with edges. An ads setup, a rebrand, a content sprint. They are a poor fit for a monthly drumbeat because you either buy days you do not need or the work becomes irregular.

Virtual assistants are underrated for execution and oversold for strategy. A good VA following a clear process will keep your review requests going out and your listings current, which is genuinely valuable. They will not diagnose why your rankings dropped.

Agencies earn their fee on complexity: multiple locations, serious ad spend, brand work. At the entry level of a retainer, a small business is often buying a junior’s time within a structure built for much bigger clients.

The six-week problem

Worth naming, because it is the actual failure mode rather than any of the above.

Owner decides to take marketing seriously. Posts go out, the profile gets sorted, reviews get chased, a couple of pages get written. It goes well for about six weeks. Then a busy period arrives, everything slips, and six months later the conclusion is that marketing did not work.

It did not stop working. It stopped happening.

That is the real thing you are buying when you outsource: not brilliance, but continuity. A modest amount of work that actually occurs every month beats an ambitious plan that runs for a fortnight, every time.

What actually needs handing over

For a typical local business the monthly job is small and specific:

• Google Business Profile: posts, photos, hours, answering questions
• Review requests going out to every customer, and replies to what arrives
• A page or two a year for the areas and services you want work from
• Keeping the website current: prices, staff, services, offers
• Checking the contact form still delivers and looking at whether enquiries moved

Four to eight hours a month. Not a lot. Just constant, which is exactly the kind of work that loses to a busy diary.

What to keep doing yourself

Not everything should be handed over, and a good provider will tell you so.

Asking for reviews in person. Nobody can do this for you as well as you can in the moment, at the end of a job, face to face. A provider can automate the follow-up text, but the ask lands better from you.

Photos of your work. You are the one on site. Ten seconds with a phone, and it is the raw material everything else uses.

Answering enquiries quickly. No amount of marketing survives a business that takes three days to reply.

Those three are yours, and they are also the three that matter most.

Working out if it is worth it

Take what one new customer is worth over a year, and divide the monthly cost by it.

A £99 plan against a customer worth £1,300 needs one extra client every thirteen months to break even. Against a customer worth £150, it needs eight a year. Both can be reasonable. The sum tells you which conversation you are having.

Also count your own time honestly. If handing this over gives you back six hours a month and your time is worth £60 an hour, that is £360 of your time for a £99 fee, before any new customers arrive.

What we do

Our plans are £49, £99 and £199 a month, rolling, covering website, local SEO, Google profile, reviews and content, with ads and email marketing on the top tier. We handle the deciding as well as the doing, which is the point.

The pricing page sets out each tier. If you would rather just say what your business does and how much time you have, tell us and we will say which fits, including if the honest answer is that a VA or doing it yourself would serve you better.

Related: signs you should outsource your online presence and virtual assistant versus managed marketing.