Building a bigger marketing capability, without building a bigger team

Stop building teams around job titles. Build them around capability.

You might have a marketing manager, an agency, a freelance copywriter and a web developer on your books. Then a new project comes along and you need someone who understands SEO, someone to handle PR or a designer for a rebrand. How do you find the right people, particularly at short notice? And what if you only need that expertise for a few months?

It's a question more businesses are asking as they consider how permanent employees, freelancers, consultants and agencies can work together. Robert Walters' guide to the non-permanent workforce explores this mix, while Flexing It's research describes a shift from "hiring for capability" to "accessing capability".

That distinction is an interesting one. There are plenty of skills that businesses need to own and develop internally, but that doesn't mean every capability has to become another permanent role on the organisation chart.

Building a marketing function often starts with deciding which roles to recruit, then bringing in agencies or freelancers to fill the gaps. But the range of expertise a team might need is extensive: strategy, brand, content, PR, social, search, paid media, CRM, automation, web, analytics, events and creative. Deciding what to build internally and where to bring in specialist support deserves as much thought as the job descriptions.

At the same time, budgets are under scrutiny and the technology keeps changing. A business may have a good idea of what it needs today, but be less certain about which skills it will need in 12 or 18 months' time.

The right people at the right time

When we're building project teams for our clients, we always start with two questions: what are we trying to achieve, and what skills and expertise do we need to make it happen?

This approach also creates opportunities for talented freelancers and independent specialists, who have so much to offer in-house marketing teams. In Start's own home patch, the Greater Manchester Freelancer Network launched in September 2026, alongside the new Home of Everything campaign, which is putting the region's creative industries in the spotlight. The network has been created to open up routes for freelancers and micro-businesses into Greater Manchester's creative industries policy and delivery.

Freelancers make up around 30% of the creative industries workforce in Greater Manchester, and this launch is a real vote of confidence in a critical part of the marketing ecosystem. Freelancers aren't simply people brought in when a permanent team is short of resource and needs a quick stopgap. They're often a significant part of the workforce in their own right.

Marketing is particularly suited to this way of thinking

Think about a growing B2B business with an existing marketing manager. This year, its priority might be repositioning the brand and building a stronger pipeline. That could mean strategic input, content and paid media. Six months later, perhaps it's entering a new market and needs PR and a new website. A year after that, CRM and customer retention might be the focus.

The business hasn't massively changed, but the marketing capability it needs has. Recruiting a permanent specialist for every discipline isn't practical. Equally, expecting one generalist to become an expert in every part of modern marketing isn't realistic either.

A different approach is to start with the work and build the marketing capability around it. That could mean an internal team supported by an agency. It could mean a fractional marketing director working alongside employees, a small core team supported by trusted independent specialists, several specialist agencies working together, or a combination of all of these.

There isn't one correct structure. The right answer depends on the business, its objectives and the capabilities it already has.

Flexible doesn't mean junior

One assumption about flexible work that is worth challenging is that it's mainly about bringing in extra hands to get things done. However, some of the most experienced people working independently are former CMOs, PR directors and creative directors. They've chosen to work independently for a variety of reasons, and many bring years of experience that would be difficult to replicate by simply hiring another generalist.

Access to senior specialists can be particularly valuable as businesses explore how to integrate AI into their marketing. AI can make producing content considerably faster, but producing something quickly isn't the same as knowing what's worth producing, who it's for, whether it supports commercial objectives or, quite simply, whether it's any good.

What does the marketing team of the future look like?

We certainly don't think permanent marketing teams are disappearing. Far from it. Having people inside the business who understand its customers, culture, history and commercial priorities is hugely valuable. Internal teams also provide continuity and relationships that are difficult to replicate from outside.

But we don't think the boundaries of a marketing team should be defined by whose name appears on the payroll. A modern marketing team might include permanent employees, a fractional leader, freelancers, specialist agencies and consultants: the right people with the right expertise at the right time, to do the work the business actually needs.

Of course, once you start building a team in this way, there's another question to answer.

If your marketing function includes internal people, fractional leaders, freelancers, agencies and specialists, how do you make sure everyone is working towards the same thing?

In Part Two, we'll explore how to make a flexible marketing team work in practice, bringing different people and specialisms together without creating unnecessary complexity.

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Research referenced in this series

• Robert Walters, A Complete Guide to the Non-Permanent Workforce (2026)
• Upwork, Future Workforce Index 2026
• AMS & Everest Group, 2026 Contingent Workforce Imperatives
• Flexing It, State of On-Demand Talent FY26

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