You are a partner in an architecture practice or an engineering consultancy. Your work spans private houses, office buildings, schools, healthcare facilities, industrial units and refurbishments. Your clients are homeowners planning a self-build, developers, companies expanding their premises, and public and private bodies running procurement. A good share of new work still comes from reputation and relationships. But you can see that before anyone calls, they look at what they can find about you online.
So the question arrives: do you hire a marketing coordinator in-house to own the practice's visibility, or hand the job to an outside partner? This guide helps you decide by looking at what really matters: full cost, risk, partner time and continuity.
A profession where visibility cannot be improvised
Visibility for an architecture practice has its own demands. Posting beautiful renders is not enough. Your practice needs to appear when a couple searches for an architect for a house extension, when a company looks for an engineering firm for a new warehouse, when a school bursar asks an AI assistant which practices have experience with education buildings. And what they find must inspire confidence: references, specialisms, the way you work.
That takes an understanding of how your clients search, the ability to describe projects without jargon, the discipline to track results and the consistency to keep going for months. That mix is rare in one person, and it sits at the heart of the hire-or-outsource choice.
What a hire really costs
When partners think about hiring a marketing coordinator, they think about salary. The real cost is broader:
- Salary plus employer contributions, pension and benefits, every month, including quiet periods.
- Recruitment itself: weeks of screening and interviewing, usually done by a partner who is already stretched.
- Learning the profession: a marketer has to understand your projects, the language of design and delivery, and the expectations of institutional clients.
- Software and equipment they need to do the job.
- Management time: setting priorities, reviewing and approving everything that goes out under the practice's name.
The only honest comparison is over twelve months, full cost against full cost. A partner's monthly fee set against a gross salary tells you nothing.
The risks of each option
Hiring
The most common risk is a mismatch between the person hired and the actual need. A strong graphic designer is not necessarily someone who generates project enquiries. A capable social media manager will not necessarily get your practice found when a client searches for an engineering consultancy. The second risk is isolation: alone in a practice full of architects, a marketer has nobody to stretch them in their own field. The third is departure, which stops everything.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing has its own risks: a partner who misreads the nature of your projects, misses deadlines, also serves the rival practice down the road, or keeps the accounts and website in its own name. Those risks are managed by comparing proposals carefully, as our guide on comparing visibility quotes explains, and by insisting that every account sits in the practice's name.
Partner time, the practice's most expensive resource
In an architecture practice, partner time is the scarcest resource. Partners design, meet clients, present schemes to planning committees and oversee key projects on site. Every hour spent managing a marketing hire is an hour taken away from design or client relationships.
An in-house hire demands a significant time investment at the start, then regular supervision. A well-run outsourcing arrangement mostly asks you to read a weekly report, pass on information about completed projects and attend the review. For a practice whose partners are already at capacity, that difference carries real weight.
Continuity, the underrated issue
Visibility builds over time. A gap of several months loses part of the momentum already gained. In a small practice, what happens when the person handling marketing leaves, falls ill or gets absorbed by a competition entry? Often, everything stops.
An organised partner provides continuity because the work rests on a team and a process, not one individual. It is also what lets a practice move from relying purely on its network to a steady flow of enquiries, as our guide on outbound prospecting or inbound enquiries describes.
Making the call
Hiring in-house makes sense if your practice is large enough to keep someone fully occupied across many tasks (bid documents, award entries, presentations, press, social media) and someone can manage them. Outsourcing fits better if your priority is measurable project enquiries without drawing on partner time, with continuity built in. Many practices combine the two: an in-house coordinator for bids and awards, an outside partner for visibility and measurement.
If referrals alone are no longer filling your pipeline, see also our guide on when referrals are not enough for an architecture firm.
What Traffic Engine offers an architecture practice
Traffic Engine is Kolonell's service for making your practice visible when clients search for an architect or engineering consultancy, on Google and in AI assistant answers. Nobody to recruit or manage: a dated report every week, results tracked in your own Search Console and a measured review at three months.
The Visibility Audit at €690 sets out where you stand and an action plan; it is deducted from the €1,500 setup if you go ahead within 30 days. To compare with a hire, think in annual terms: €14,700 in the first year on Presence and €24,300 on Momentum, setup included. Set that against the fees from a single new commission using the payback calculator. Seats are capped at 3 per sector and area. See the offer and open seats for architecture practices.