When marketing isn’t delivering, the reflex is to hire someone or appoint an agency. There’s a third option that gets skipped surprisingly often: make the team you already have more capable. Sometimes that’s the smartest money you’ll spend. Sometimes it’s avoiding a problem you should be solving properly. Knowing which is the whole point.
Two bits of UK context sharpen the decision. Marketing talent is genuinely hard to hire: around 38% of UK employers report they can’t find qualified marketing candidates [1], which makes strengthening existing people more attractive than the market often assumes. At the same time, most UK marketers aren’t confident in their current performance, with only about a quarter rating it highly [2], and a good share of that gap is capability and confidence rather than headcount.
When training is the right answer
Capability-building works when you have good people who are close to the business and motivated, but who have specific gaps: a skill they’ve never been taught, a framework they’ve never been given, confidence they haven’t yet built. In that situation, training is far better value than hiring, because you’re strengthening people who already understand your business rather than starting a relationship from scratch. It compounds, too: a team that levels up keeps that capability and applies it across everything they touch.
It’s particularly powerful where the gap is confidence and clarity rather than raw skill. Plenty of capable teams underperform simply because nobody has given them a clear strategic framework and the permission to act decisively. That’s a training problem, not a hiring one.
When training isn’t the answer
Here’s the honest counterweight: don’t try to train your way out of a genuine capacity or seniority gap. If the real problem is that there simply aren’t enough hands to do the work, training the existing team just makes over-stretched people slightly more skilled and equally over-stretched. And if the gap is genuine senior strategic leadership, the kind that comes from years of experience rather than a two-day workshop, no amount of training fills it.
In short: train to close skill and confidence gaps in good people. Bring in senior support or capacity to close leadership and headcount gaps, a decision explored in Build Your Marketing Team or Buy It In?. Diagnose which you’ve actually got before you spend anything.
The diagnosis is the hard part
Most of the value here is in getting the diagnosis right before spending anything, and it’s genuinely easy to get wrong. A team that looks under-skilled may actually be under-led, in which case training helps but leadership helps more. A team that looks like it needs training may simply be too small, in which case a workshop just gives fewer people more to do. Spend an honest hour distinguishing a skill gap from a confidence gap from a capacity gap, because each has a different and non-interchangeable answer.
When it is a skill or confidence gap, though, training is often the highest-return option on the table, precisely because you’re compounding the value of people who already understand your business rather than starting over with someone who doesn’t. Get that diagnosis right and training stops being a cost and starts being one of the highest-leverage investments a stretched team can make, and unlike a hire, that capability doesn’t leave when one person does.
What good capability-building looks like
Effective training isn’t a generic course bought off the shelf. It’s targeted at the specific gaps that matter to your organisation, practical enough that people can apply it the next day, and pitched at the real level of the team. The measure of a good workshop isn’t whether people enjoyed it; it’s whether they did something differently afterwards. If the honest diagnosis is that your people are good but under-equipped, marketing workshops will get you further than another hire, faster, and with capability that stays in the business.
References
- UK marketing talent shortage, employer hiring difficulty (UK). https://whitehat-seo.co.uk/blog/marketing-ai-automation-uk-guide
- LOCALiQ (2026). UK State of Digital Marketing Report, 500+ UK businesses (UK). https://localiq.co.uk/blog/uk-digital-marketing-statistics
Note for review: the 38% talent-shortage figure is reported via sector analysis; re-point to a primary UK source (e.g. DMA/CIM) at build. UK sources labelled.
