The True Cost of In-House
Salary is not the cost. A UK paid media specialist with genuine LinkedIn experience sits around £45,000–£65,000 depending on seniority and location. On top of that:
| Item | Annual |
|---|---|
| Salary (mid-level paid media specialist) | £45,000 – £65,000 |
| Employer National Insurance | ~£5,500 – £8,500 |
| Pension contribution | ~£1,400 – £2,000 |
| Recruitment (if agency-sourced, ~20%) | £9,000 – £13,000 one-off |
| Tools, training, subscriptions | £2,000 – £5,000 |
| Holiday and sickness cover | Nobody runs the account for ~6 weeks |
| Fully loaded | £58,000 – £84,000 (~£4,800–£7,000/month) |
So the honest comparison is not "£2,500 agency vs £4,000 salary". It is roughly £4,800–£7,000 a month for one person against £2,500–£9,500 a month for a team.
Side by Side
| In-house | Agency | Freelancer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | £4,800 – £7,000 | £2,500 – £9,500 | £800 – £2,500 |
| Product knowledge | Deepest | Good, takes time | Variable |
| Platform depth | One person's experience | Cross-account patterns | Variable |
| Speed to start | 2–4 months | 1–2 weeks | Days |
| Holiday cover | None | Built in | None |
| Risk if it fails | Redundancy process | Notice period | Stop paying |
| Scales with spend | Needs more heads | Usually yes | Capacity ceiling |
When In-House Wins
LinkedIn is permanent and large. If you are spending £30,000+ a month indefinitely, a dedicated person is both cheaper per pound managed and more embedded.
Your product is genuinely complex. Deep technical products where messaging accuracy matters more than platform mechanics favour someone who lives inside the business.
You can actually hire well. This is the real constraint. Good LinkedIn specialists are scarce because most paid media people have Google and Meta backgrounds, and LinkedIn behaves differently enough that the skills transfer only partially.
When an Agency Wins
You need senior expertise part-time. A £2,500 fee buys a share of several senior people. £2,500 of salary buys about half a junior.
Cross-account pattern recognition matters. Someone managing one account sees one account. Across 200, you learn which formats fail in which verticals and what an anomaly looks like before it costs money. That is not available to an in-house team by definition.
You need to start now. Two to four months to hire versus one to two weeks to onboard an agency.
You want tooling you would not build. We built our own LinkedIn Ads MCP server and an eight-layer diagnostic because we run 200+ accounts. No single in-house team has a reason to build that.
When a Freelancer Wins
Spend under about £3,000 a month. Below that, neither an agency nor a hire is justifiable. A good freelancer for a few days a month is the right answer, and we would tell you the same.
A defined project. One launch, one account rebuild, one audit. Agencies are built for ongoing programmes.
The honest risk: single point of failure. No cover, no second opinion, and capacity ceilings that arrive suddenly when their other clients get busy.
The Hybrid Most People End Up With
The common end state, and usually the right one at scale: an in-house marketer who owns strategy, messaging and the relationship, plus an agency doing execution and platform depth.
The in-house person knows the product, the buyers and the sales team. The agency brings platform expertise, cross-account patterns and tooling. Neither is trying to be the other.
Where this goes wrong is when the split is never made explicit and both sides assume the other owns creative strategy. Decide it on day one and write it down.