According to anonymous salary submissions on Glassdoor, the average salary for a Marketing Assistant in the UK, as of May 2018, is £20,300 per year. Manageable? Probably yes but what about the hidden costs that come with that hire?

Costs such as national insurance, recruitment fees, tech and even senior management resource need to be taken into consideration to paint a true picture on what that marketing assistant will cost your business.

We conducted some research! Of course, these are estimates and may not be relevant to your business. Having said that, they should be able to illustrate a benchmark for what to expect. If you want a more accurate costing specific to your business – this handy calculator can provide more accuracy.

1) National Insurance 

First, the obvious stuff…. If you pay your Marketing Assistant £20,300 a year, you can expect to pay £1,638.89 pa in NI contributions.

2) Recruitment Fees 

Next, you want to ensure you hire the right Marketing Assistant. If you go down the agency route, you can expect to pay 20-30% of their annual salary. If you’re looking to pay £20,300 – this would be around £5000. You can of course also advertise the position yourself. Using LinkedIn and another job site can cost around £200-400.

3) Pension

As part of the auto-enrolment scheme, employees are automatically signed up to a basic company pension scheme. This means employers have to pay a minimum of 2% of workers’ monthly salary towards a pension – rising to 3% by April 2019. In this scenario, this is £406 pa rising to £609 by April 2019.

4) Tech

What will your Marketing Assistant need in order to do their job properly. Lets look at the basics?

• The basic Office 365 Business package costs £7.90 per user every month. That’s £94.80 for the year – it includes all the standard programs; Word, PowerPoint, Skype, Excel etc. Using GSuite from Google is marginally cheaper at £7.50 per user per month – £90 per year.
• Hardware: Mid-range laptops cost around £500-800, but if you want a higher spec, you can expect anything between £1000 – 2000. Fancy taking the Mac route? All their machines start from around £1400
• Mobile Phone: On a cheap business deal, you can look at between £350- £400 per year for a 24 month contract.
• Marketing tech solutions vary in price but HubSpot Pro for example starts around £655 per month. This enables your Marketing Assistant to automate content and track leads more effectively.
• IT support: £1,200 per year will probably be the cheapest you find for user/hardware support.

5) Business costs

Stationery, furniture – it all adds up! We couldn’t possibly estimate a cost for this depending on how fancy your office is but you certainly should when conducting your analysis.

7) Holiday and sickness

After employee benefits, you need to take into account annual leave, bank holidays and sickness day allocation. On average, employees get:

• 28 days paid holiday – will this need to be covered by another member of the team? Thats an additional cost of resource to consider.
• A high average across the UK for sickness is 7 days. Looking at our average paid Marketing Assistant – this means a loss of £546.56 pa.

8) Wasted time

There are hundreds of articles online talking about how poor tech, pointless meetings and office gossip can add up to hundreds of hours of unproductive time. Probably not something for this list but worth bearing in mind when you conduct your analysis. Check these out: Workplace distractions, poor technology and pointless meetings.

9) Additional resource

On top of all these costs, a Marketing Assistant will need a manager, objectives and ongoing support in order to do their job effectively. You can decide how much time you want to allocate to this but remember time is money! Any time spent on mentoring your marketing assistant is time taken away from core activities to keep your business running effectively.

What does this mean?

Of course, we haven’t put a cost against everything but for the things we have – you’re looking at a cost of at least £18,000 for that £20,300 Marketing Assistant hire.

Of course, its great to add another member of the team to help with business growth but if you’re looking for effective and transparent marketing services – perhaps speaking to an agency may be an option.