Why Your Marketing Manager Keeps Leaving (And What It's Actually Costing You)

I've had a version of this conversation more than a few times ...

The cycle most businesses don't realise they're in

Here's how it typically goes. Business is growing, leads are coming in, but marketing feels chaotic and reactive. Someone suggests hiring a dedicated marketing person. A marketing coordinator or marketing manager gets hired and usually someone reasonably capable, maybe a few years out of uni gets the gig.

And for a while, things feel better. Posts go out. The website gets some attention. A campaign or two gets launched.

Then, gradually, that person starts doing everything. They're booking the conference stand, writing the CEO's LinkedIn posts, redesigning the brochure, chasing down staff for headshots, managing the agency relationship, updating the website, running the ads, pulling together the quarterly report. They become the one-person marketing department doing the job of four people with the budget of zero point five.

Twelve to eighteen months in, they leave. Usually for somewhere with more support, a clearer career path, or honestly just less chaos.

You post the job again. The next person starts, inherits nothing ... no documentation, no strategy, no proper handover and the cycle begins again.

What's actually missing isn't a person, it's a layer

The reason the cycle keeps repeating isn't because you keep hiring the wrong people. It's because there's a structural gap between your business strategy and your marketing execution that no coordinator-level hire can fill.

What's missing is a strategic layer.

Someone who sits above the execution, sets the direction, makes the technology and data decisions, connects marketing activity back to revenue and gives your marketing person something coherent to execute against.

In a large company, that's a Chief Marketing Officer. In your company, you probably can't justify $200,000–$250,000 a year (plus super, plus oncosts) for a full-time CMO. So the strategic layer just... doesn't exist. And your marketing manager is left trying to do strategy, execution, reporting, and tool management all at once, without the experience or authority to do any of it properly.

That's not a people problem. It's a structure problem.

The real cost no one calculates

When I ask business owners how much their marketing staff turnover is costing them, they usually think about recruitment fees and the gap period while the role is vacant. Fair enough. But that's only a fraction of it.

Consider what's actually lost every time someone walks out the door:

Institutional knowledge. Your outgoing marketing manager knows which campaigns worked, why certain ad sets got turned off, what the previous agency did wrong, what the CRM data actually means. That knowledge walks out with them. The next person starts from scratch.

Continuity in your tech stack. If your marketing person was the only one who understood your marketing automation setup, your CRM workflows, or your ad account structure — and they leave — you've potentially just broken your marketing infrastructure without knowing it.

Campaign momentum. SEO, content strategy, and brand consistency all compound over time. Every reset costs you months of compounding that you'll never get back.

The hiring and onboarding cost itself. A realistic estimate for replacing a mid-level marketing hire — recruitment fees, lost productivity, onboarding time before the new person is up to speed sits somewhere between $15,000 and $30,000 per event. If this is happening every 18 months, that's a significant recurring cost that never appears on a single line in your P&L.

Why mid-market B2B companies are especially vulnerable to this

Consumer businesses often have more structured marketing functions earlier, partly because their revenue is more directly tied to marketing performance. In B2B, especially in professional services, a lot of revenue comes through referrals and relationships, which means marketing can feel optional for longer, and the case for proper investment gets delayed.

But that's changing fast. Buyers in B2B now research independently before ever speaking to a salesperson. Your digital presence, your content, your LinkedIn authority, and your SEO position matter more than they did five years ago. If your marketing function is perpetually in reset mode, you're falling further behind competitors who've figured this out ... and you may not notice until the pipeline gets quiet.

What the alternative actually looks like

The companies I see breaking this cycle aren't necessarily spending more on marketing. They're spending it differently.

Instead of a full-time coordinator trying to do everything, they have a fractional or part-time strategic layer — an experienced marketing operator who owns the strategy, manages the tech stack, sets the KPIs, and provides clear direction — combined with a leaner execution function underneath. That might be a junior internal person, a specialist freelancer for content or design, or a managed service for specific channels like Google Ads or SEO.

The strategic layer doesn't need to be full-time. Most mid-market businesses don't need a CMO in the building five days a week. They need someone with that level of experience and accountability available consistently — someone who shows up to the leadership team meetings, reviews the numbers, makes the calls, and keeps the whole thing pointed in the right direction.

That's a very different engagement model to a traditional agency retainer, and it's a very different structure to a single marketing hire carrying the whole load.

The questions worth asking yourself

Before you post that marketing manager job ad again, it's worth sitting with a few things:

Does your current marketing person have a clear strategy to execute against, or are they largely making it up as they go?

Do you have documented processes for your key marketing activities, or does everything live in one person's head?

Can you connect your marketing spend to pipeline and revenue in a way that's defensible in a board meeting? Do you know what your customer acquisition cost actually is?

If the honest answer to most of those is no — and for a lot of good businesses, it is — then hiring another coordinator isn't going to fix it. You need the strategic layer first.

If any of this is resonating, I'm always up for a conversation. You can grab 30 minutes with me at incahootsco.com.au or find out more about how we work with growing Brisbane and South East Queensland businesses as a fractional CMO.

Ben Hayward is the Director of In Cahoots Co., a marketing and automation agency based in Brookwater, Queensland. He works with B2B and professional services companies across Brisbane and South East Queensland on marketing strategy, technology implementation, and growth infrastructure.