Every founder building a marketing function in Egypt hits the same wall about eighteen months in. Junior hires are easy to find and inexpensive. The senior person who can actually run the thing is either unavailable, unaffordable, or already working remotely for a company in Dubai or Berlin that pays in a currency yours does not earn.
What the talent market actually looks like
The supply curve here is lopsided. Egypt produces an enormous number of capable juniors every year, and a graduate with a content or social background is genuinely cheap to hire by any regional standard. Mid level specialists are scarcer than the volume of CVs suggests, because titles inflate faster than skill does. A great many people carrying a senior label have three years of running one channel at one company, which is not the same thing as knowing how a marketing function fits together.
At the top, you are competing with the world. Remote work made an experienced Egyptian performance marketer or technical SEO specialist hireable from anywhere, and Gulf packages remain the strongest pull in the region. Repeated currency moves made this worse in a specific way. A pound salary that was competitive when it was agreed can lose a third of its dollar value inside a year, so retention here is a repricing exercise before it is a culture exercise. Budget for salary reviews at a cadence you did not need a decade ago, and expect the conversation to be about the exchange rate whether anyone says so out loud or not.
The three roles that belong inside the company
Someone who owns the brand and the message, because nobody outside your walls will ever hold that with the same conviction. Someone who owns the customer data and the reporting, since those numbers are a company asset and should never live only inside a vendor account. And someone who owns content production, because the required volume is constant and the required context is deep.
Notice what is not on that list. Media buying, technical SEO, development, motion design and analytics engineering are all specialties where you need real expertise for a handful of hours each week. Hiring full time for four hours of work produces an underemployed specialist who gets bored and leaves within the year, which is one of the most common ways a small team burns a good person.
What outsourcing is genuinely good at, and what it is not
Buying outside help gets you three things: expertise you cannot justify full time, capacity that flexes with the season, and exposure to what is working across other accounts. That last one is badly undervalued. An in house team sees one account and learns slowly. Nobody inside a single company gets to watch a platform change land across a dozen advertisers in the same week.
It is weak elsewhere and it is worth being blunt about that. No outside team will know your product as well as your own people. Response times are slower than a colleague at the next desk. And if the relationship ends, institutional knowledge can walk out with it unless the ad accounts, the analytics property, the domain and the documentation are in your name from day one. Put that in the contract at the start rather than negotiating it during a breakup.
Hiring marketers or outsourcing: the arrangement that usually wins
A small, senior internal team owning strategy, brand, data and content, supported by specialists who are excellent at a narrow thing and held to a number. Two or three strong people plus external depth beats six generalists in almost every Egyptian SME we have watched try both structures.
Whichever way you lean, decide it against the org chart you need in two years rather than the salary you can avoid this month. If you want a straight answer about which parts of the work should sit inside your company and which should not, that view is free from our digital marketing solutions team, and you can start the conversation on our contact page.
