Half of small business owners do all of their own marketing, and the ones who do say it takes them about 20 hours a week.
Those figures come from a CallRail survey of 600 US business owners reported by Search Engine Journal in 2021. The same survey found that 74% of those owners would rather be spending the time on the work the business exists to do.
That is the cost nobody puts on a spreadsheet. An agency invoice is visible. Twenty hours of your own week are invisible, because nobody sends you a bill for them. Most guides to marketing for small business owners skip straight to tips on email and social media. This one prices the hours first, because the hours decide whether the tips are worth following. If the sums point to hiring help, the next step is choosing a digital marketing agency in the UK.
Where the 20 hours figure comes from, and how far to trust it
The 20 hours is self-reported, American and five years old, so treat it as a rough size. CallRail's is the only recent survey we found that asked owners directly how long their own marketing takes, which is why it gets quoted so much.
It does have company. A Constant Contact survey of about 1,300 small business owners in 2014 found an owner and one employee between them spent an average of 20 hours a week on marketing. Two surveys, seven years apart, land on the same number.
For UK context, a OnePoll survey of 1,000 UK small business owners for Uswitch in 2025 found 65% work between 30 and 50 hours a week, and 40% work more than 40. Put 20 hours of marketing inside a 45-hour week and it is close to half the job.
If your own number is ten hours, halve everything below. The sums still hold.
What an hour of your time is worth
The lowest honest figure for a UK owner's hour is the median full-time wage, which the ONS put at £20.81 an hour in April 2026. If you could earn that as an employee, your hour is worth at least that much to the business.
For most owners it is worth more. You are the only person who can quote, close the sale, do the billable work or sign the thing off. A plumber charging £60 an hour, or a consultant on a £600 day, has an effective rate of two or three times the median before they even count the sales they close.
Pick your own number in one of two ways. Use your charge-out rate if you have one. If you do not, take last year's gross profit and divide it by the hours you worked. Then multiply by 20 hours a week, or 86.6 hours a month.
The worked table
Twenty hours a week costs more than a basic retainer at every rate except the lowest, and at the lowest it is roughly level. The retainer range in the right-hand column is the one UK price comparison sites keep arriving at.
Expert Market says "a small business can expect to pay between £1,000 to £2,000 per month" for an agency package. Whito's 2026 UK agency retainer research gives the same £1,000 to £2,000 as the starting point for SMEs, with a single channel like SEO or PPC at £1,250 to £3,500.
| Your effective hourly rate | What 20 hours a week costs you each month (86.6 hours) | Typical SME retainer each month |
|---|---|---|
| £20.81 (ONS median full-time wage) | £1,802 | £1,000 to £2,000 |
| £40 | £3,464 | £1,000 to £2,000 |
| £75 | £6,495 | £1,000 to £2,000 |
| £120 | £10,392 | £1,000 to £2,000 |
The £20.81 row is the only one sourced to a published figure. The other three are the kinds of rates we hear from trades, professional services and small agencies, and you should replace them with your own.
Two honest adjustments before you read too much into the table. First, a retainer does not buy back all 20 hours. You still approve work, answer questions, send photos and read a monthly report. Budget three to four hours a week for that, which leaves you about 16 hours clawed back, not 20.
Second, Expert Market notes that a monthly retainer "generally covers one to three days of agency time". So you are trading roughly 86 of your hours for somewhere between 8 and 24 of theirs. The bet is that their hours produce more than yours do.
For an experienced specialist working inside their own channel, they should. Not every agency clears that bar, and a retainer that does not is a second cost on top of the first. How that retainer is structured, and where the incentives sit, is covered in marketing agency pricing models.
The jobs you are not doing
The real cost is the work that does not happen in those 20 hours, and for most small firms that work is selling and delivering. A quote that goes out on Thursday instead of Monday. A job finished a day late because the owner spent Tuesday evening editing a reel. The follow-up call to last month's enquiry that never gets made.
A 2016 FSB survey found owners were spending over 33 hours a month on internal admin and only eight hours 50 minutes a month on new business development. That is a decade old now, but the shape is familiar: the activity that feeds the business gets the time left over after everything else.
Put the two surveys side by side and the picture is uncomfortable. Owners report around 86 hours a month on marketing and under nine on sales. Marketing is supposed to create conversations; sales is where they turn into money. Most small firms have the ratio the wrong way round.
There is also a quieter cost. The CallRail survey found 23% of owners who do their own marketing spend nothing on checking whether it works. If that is you, the 20 hours might be producing nothing, and you would not know. Constant Contact's then chief executive Gail Goodman put the underlying problem plainly:
"Most small business owners are not marketing professionals." Gail Goodman, Constant Contact, quoted in Small Business Trends, 2014
A 2010 thread on UK Business Forums has the same lesson in miniature. One poster described a friend who organised freelancers to hand out flyers. It took "a lot of his time, energy and money" for limited results. He then paid a consultant £300 for a few hours and did far better. The thread is old and the prices have moved, but the pattern has not.
When doing it yourself still wins
Doing your own marketing is the right call in three situations, and the table above does not change that.
The first is very early stage. If you have no customers yet, your hour is not worth £75, because there is no billable work queuing up behind it. CallRail found 35% of DIY marketers said they did not have the budget for an agency.
If £1,000 a month would put real strain on the business, that is a complete answer. Spend the hours, learn the channels, and revisit the sums when the diary fills.
The second is a tight niche you know cold. If your customers are 200 people you could more or less name, and you already know which forum they argue on and which trade show they attend, an agency will spend its first three months learning what you knew on day one.
A firm that restores one make of vintage motorcycle, or a consultant who only advises dental practices on CQC inspections, is often better served by one afternoon a week of their own effort plus a freelancer for the technical bits. Where that line falls is the freelancer vs marketing agency question.
The third is capacity. If you are booked solid for the next eight weeks, the opportunity-cost argument runs backwards: more leads just mean a longer waiting list and more people you have to turn away. Fix capacity first, by hiring, raising prices or dropping your least profitable work. Then buy marketing.
If none of those apply, and you still enjoy the marketing and can show it brings in work, carry on. Just count the hours honestly, and keep checking that the number in the left-hand column is lower than the one on the right.
What to keep in-house whatever you decide
Five parts of marketing should stay with the owner even when an agency does everything else.
The voice. What the business thinks, what it will not do, the opinions that make customers choose you over the firm down the road. An agency can tidy, schedule and distribute, but if the words stop sounding like you, regular customers notice within a month. Write or dictate the first draft of anything that carries an opinion.
The customer relationships. Replies to existing customers, complaints, the WhatsApp from the client who has been with you five years. None of that should route through an agency inbox. It is the relationship, and it is also the best source of the next marketing idea.
The review requests. BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey of US consumers found 80% of consumers had been asked by a local business to leave a review in the previous year, and 65% went on to leave one. Asking in person worked for 33% of people and asking by email for 34%. The in-person ask should come from whoever did the job, which means you or your staff. The follow-up email can be automated so it goes out the day after every completed job.
The replies to reviews. The same BrightLocal survey found 88% of consumers were likely to use a business whose owner responds to all reviews, against 42% for one that responds to none. Replying to reviews is part of the monthly Google Business Profile routine that keeps a local listing healthy. The reply should sound like the owner, because readers can tell when it does not.
The accounts and the budget. Your Google Business Profile, ad accounts and domain should be in your company's name, with the agency given access. Any decision to raise or cut spend is yours. If an agency wants to own any of those, that is a reason to look elsewhere.
Hand over the rest in whatever order gives you the most hours back. For a local trade or clinic that usually means local SEO and the Google Business Profile work first, because it is slow, technical and easy to neglect at 9pm.
How to run the sum for your own business
Time your marketing for two ordinary weeks before you decide anything. Use the stopwatch on your phone and include the bits that do not feel like marketing: the 20 minutes choosing a photo, the evening you spent fixing the website footer. Most owners we ask guess low.
Then work out your rate using the method above, multiply by your real weekly hours, and compare it with a written quote for the one channel that matters most to you. Take three or four hours a week off the saving for the time you will still spend.
If the number favours an agency but the cash flow does not, start with a one-off setup or a single channel and expand once it has paid for itself. A short paid strategy phase can also be the cheapest way in, when the unknowns are real.
The decision rule we would use is this: if your hour is worth under £25 and there are gaps in the diary, keep doing it yourself and get good at it. If your hour is worth over £50 and there is a quote you did not send this week, the retainer was never the expensive option.
If you would like someone to check the numbers for your business, talk to us about local SEO or paid media. We will tell you if DIY is still the right answer.