How much does it cost to train your own marketer in advertising?

Training your own marketer in advertising costs a one-off 7,500 euros plus half to a full day a week of that person's time for eight weeks. Outsourcing to an agency costs 12,000 to 30,000 euros a year, year after year. Which of the two is cheaper depends mainly on something other than the price: whether you have someone with the time and motivation to take it on.

In conversations, it almost always immediately comes down to the day rate. Yet the most expensive factor is rarely listed: the time of your own people, and what happens when someone leaves. Below I have set out the four options as we would weigh them ourselves.

Option 1: outsourcing to an agency

Ongoing campaign management with an agency costs 12,000 to 30,000 euros a year. Hourly rates in the Netherlands in 2026 range from 75 to 175 euros; we charge from 115 euros. At the lower end of that range, you pay a low rate for the hour of someone who is still learning the ropes using your budget.

What you get in return: execution without it costing your team time, and experience built up over dozens of accounts. What you don't get: knowledge that stays within your organisation. If you stop after two years, you are back to square one, with two years of invoices behind you.

Option 2: hiring a freelancer

Freelancers and entry-level typically range between 500 and 1,500 euros per month, growing SMEs between 1,500 and 5,000 euros. Cheaper than an agency, and often with shorter lines of communication.

The risk lies in the dependence on a single person. If they fall ill, land a bigger client or quit, your channel comes to a standstill. With an agency you absorb that, with a freelancer rarely.

Option 3: have your own marketer trained

Us in-house training programme Costs 7,500 euros as a one-off payment. Six sessions spread over eight weeks, with a video call after each session to monitor progress. Between sessions, your marketer builds the campaigns themselves, using our frameworks and feedback.

Add to that the time of your own people: half a day to a full day a week for eight weeks. That is the item that is almost always missing from comparisons, and it is precisely the item that determines whether this will succeed. If your marketer doesn't have that time, this isn't the cheapest option but the most expensive, because then you're paying for a process that grinds to a halt halfway through.

What you get in return is a one-off payment that lasts: someone in your organisation who knows how it works, is closely involved in your business and can make adjustments themselves.

Option 4: figure it out yourself

The cheapest option on paper, and in practice often the most expensive. Not because teams aren't capable of it, but because the costs disappear into the media budget instead of appearing on an invoice. A campaign that is judged against the wrong metric for three months costs you the entire budget of those three months plus the conclusion that advertising doesn't work.

Where the comparison usually goes wrong

Three costs are structurally forgotten.

• The time of your own team. Even with outsourcing it takes hours: supplying materials, collaborating, approving. With training it's more, and concentrated at the beginning.
• The media budget. That is separate from all the amounts above and goes directly to Google, Meta or LinkedIn. We work with a lower limit of approximately 1,250 euros per month, because below that amount an algorithm gets too little data to learn anything.
• The apprenticeship. Whichever option you choose, the first few months are about building up. Anyone who expects a return after just six weeks is almost always choosing wrongly.

What happens when your trained marketer leaves

This is the objection we hear most often, and it is a valid one. If that person leaves, the knowledge goes with them.

What remains in place: the campaigns themselves, the measurement setup and the working structure. These will keep running. What you have to rebuild is the judgment, which means knowing why something has been set up the way it has. You largely capture this during the process by documenting what has been built and why, and by involving two people instead of one wherever possible.

The same sort of thing happens at an agency, by the way, you just don't see it: people change there too, and then the new account manager gets to know your account on your budget.

When training is not the right choice

We ourselves say no to this trajectory in three situations.

• There is no marketer or team with the time to go through the process and keep building afterwards.
• The media budget cannot scale up once the campaigns are running profitably.
• The proposition has not been proven yet. We build advertising on an offer that is already selling somewhere; testing your proposition is a different process.

If you recognise yourself in either the first or the last situation, outsourcing or refining your offer first is a better use of the same money.