How to get someone to run your entire online marketing for you

You want your marketing handled, not another job on your plate. Fair enough. So how do you actually hand the whole thing to someone and get on with running the business?

To get someone to run your entire online marketing, hire a managed service that handles your website, Google Business Profile, SEO, content, reviews and ads under one monthly plan. You brief them once, they run it, and you keep ownership of your domain and content. The good ones charge a flat monthly fee and sell the activities, not guaranteed leads.

The trick is knowing what “everything” should include, who to hand it to, and how to spot the providers who’ll quietly let half of it slide.

What does “running my online marketing” actually cover?

Running your online marketing means keeping every channel that brings in customers alive and working together, not just building a website and walking off. Done properly it’s a stack of jobs, and most owners underestimate how many.

Here’s the full list a real partner should own:

• Website that loads fast, works on mobile and is built to turn visitors into enquiries.
• Branded email at your own domain, not a Gmail address that looks amateur.
• Google Business Profile set up and kept fresh so you show on Maps.
• SEO so people searching for what you do can find you.
• Monthly content that answers what your customers actually search.
• Reviews system that nudges happy customers to leave a Google review.
• Security and backups so the site doesn’t break or get hacked.
• Ads and email campaigns on the higher tiers, managed and measured.

Try to keep all that consistent yourself and you’re looking at 10-20 hours a week, every week. That’s the real reason owners hand it over.

The catch most owners hit is that these jobs aren’t separate. Your website feeds your SEO, your SEO feeds your Google Profile, your reviews feed your ads, and your content feeds the lot. Hand the website to one person, SEO to another and social to a third, and nobody owns the join. Things fall between them. That’s why “one team running everything” tends to beat a pile of separate suppliers, even talented ones.

Step-by-step: how to hand it off

The cleanest way to offload your marketing is to pick the right model, brief it once, then review monthly. Don’t overthink it, but don’t skip the briefing either.

If you want the deeper version of who’s right for the job, who to hire to build and run your website compares freelancers, agencies and managed services side by side.

What a good onboarding actually looks like

The handover is where people worry it’ll eat their time, so it’s worth knowing what a proper one involves. A good provider does the heavy lifting here, not you. Expect a single call or questionnaire that captures the essentials: who your ideal customer is, the services you want to push, the areas you cover, your tone of voice, your existing logins and assets, and what “a good month” looks like to you. From that one brief, they should be able to run for months without pestering you for direction. If a provider expects you to feed them tasks weekly, that’s not really handing it off, that’s hiring yourself a manager’s job. The whole point is to brief once and step back.

What you should still expect to do

Handing it over doesn’t mean going dark. You stay the owner of the strategy. In practice that’s a short monthly review of what got done, the odd approval (a new article, a campaign angle, a change of offer), and flagging anything that’s changed in the business, a new service, a price change, a busy or quiet patch. Fifteen minutes a month, not fifteen hours a week. Everything else, the doing, sits with the team you’ve briefed.

Should you hire someone in-house or outsource it?

For most small businesses, outsourcing to a managed service beats hiring in-house on cost and on coverage. A capable marketing person costs £30k-£40k a year plus tools, and even then one person rarely covers web development, SEO, content, design and ads to a high standard.

A managed service gives you a team’s worth of skills, the paid tools included, and someone accountable for the whole picture. You’re not interviewing, training or covering holiday. You brief once and the work happens.

How much does it cost to have someone run it all?

Having someone run your entire online marketing typically costs £99-£199 a month for a small business on an all-in-one plan, with no setup fee on most no-contract services. That covers the website, Google, SEO, content and reviews; the top tier adds managed ads and email campaigns.

Two things to keep straight:

• The management fee is what you pay the provider to do the work.
• The ad spend is separate, set by you, and billed by Google or Meta directly.

A provider who lumps “guaranteed leads” into a fixed price is hiding how ads actually work. Ours is simple: flat monthly fee for the work, your ad budget stays yours. You can see what each tier covers on the pricing page.

To put the tiers in plain terms: an entry plan around £49 a month tends to cover the essentials, a website kept live and a Google Profile set up. A middle plan, often near £99, adds the SEO, content and reviews that bring the steady stream of enquiries. A top plan around £199 layers on managed ads and email campaigns for owners who want to push growth harder. Most small businesses sit comfortably in the middle. The right tier isn’t the cheapest or the dearest, it’s the one matching how much of your presence you want actively worked on.

How do you pick the right person or team?

Pick a partner by what they’ll actually do each month and what they refuse to promise. The honest ones won’t guarantee rankings or a flood of leads, because no one can. They’ll commit to the activities: site live, profile optimised, articles published, reviews chased, ads managed.

Quick filter before you sign:

1. Do they cover everything you want off your plate, or just the website?
2. Is the fee flat and the contract cancel-anytime?
3. Do you keep your domain, site and content?
4. Do they set honest expectations on timelines, or promise the moon?

Get a yes on those and you’ve found someone who’ll run it properly. If you’re still weighing whether to hand it over at all, the best way to handle your online presence when you have no time is the next read.

The goal isn’t to find the cheapest hands. It’s to find a team you can brief once and trust to keep your whole presence working while you run the business. Get that right and marketing stops being the thing you keep meaning to do.