The comparison is nearly always run wrong. Somebody puts a monthly salary next to a monthly retainer, notices the salary is smaller, and concludes that hiring is cheaper. It is not a like for like comparison and it is not even close.
What an in-house team really costs in Egypt
The smallest team that can actually run multi channel marketing is three people: a performance marketer, a designer, and someone on content and community. In Cairo this year, gross monthly salaries for competent mid level people land roughly at 20,000 to 40,000 EGP for performance, 15,000 to 30,000 for design, and 12,000 to 25,000 for content and community. A head of marketing who can hold the strategy is considerably more.
Now add what the salary line hides. Employer social insurance contributions. Annual leave and end of service entitlements. Recruitment, which is typically a month of salary through an agency and six to ten weeks of vacancy before that. Equipment. And the management time of whoever supervises three people who each do a different job, which is a real cost even though it never appears on a spreadsheet.
Then tools, and this is where the last eighteen months have been brutal. Rank tracking, design software, scheduling, analytics, stock imagery and email are almost all billed in dollars. After the successive devaluations since early 2022, a modest 200 dollar a month stack costs about twice what it did in EGP terms two years ago, and there is no local substitute for most of it.
Finally, the risk you cannot budget. Three specialists is three single points of failure. The video editor who resigns in month seven takes the workflow with them, and you are back to a two month hiring cycle while the content calendar empties.
What an agency really costs, told honestly
The retainer is not the whole number either. Add your own time, because an agency without decisions is an expensive waiting room. Add a ramp up of sixty to ninety days before the relationship is genuinely productive, which is the period most engagements are judged in and should not be. Add the switching cost if you leave, which is the reason the contract clauses matter more than the price.
And be honest about what agencies are worse at. Institutional product knowledge. Instant turnaround on something small. Being in the room when the commercial decision is made. Those are structural, not fixable by choosing a better agency.
In-house marketing team or agency: the split that usually wins
For most Egyptian SMEs the answer is not one or the other. Keep one person in house who owns the marketing function: the strategy, the brand, the customer knowledge, the relationships and the decisions. That role should never be outsourced, because it is the institutional memory.
Then buy the specialties you cannot keep busy full time. Technical SEO, paid media operations, video production, development. A senior technical SEO is expensive and, in a single SME, idle most of the month. Shared across accounts they are affordable and they stay sharp, which is the actual argument for using an agency and has nothing to do with cost per hour.
Run the comparison properly, with the loaded cost of the team on one side and the retainer plus your own time on the other, and the decision usually makes itself. If you want the specialist half of that split costed out by discipline, that is exactly how our digital marketing solutions are structured.
