A senior marketer in Sydney lands somewhere between $130K and $180K base, plus 11 percent super, plus equipment, plus tooling, plus office space if you have one. Loaded cost is around $170K to $220K per year. They cover one specialism well, two adequately, and the rest goes outsourced or undone.
A senior performance marketer who can run paid ads, organic content, analytics, attribution, brand strategy, and report to the board is closer to a $250K base. The market clears that level. Even if you find one, you have hired one person and one perspective.
A Dominate-tier Ignis partnership runs less than the all-in cost of one senior hire, and you get the founder strategy layer plus three to four operators (paid lead, content lead, analytics lead, brand lead), the entire production pipeline (carousels, short-form, long-form, ads, web), and the network of platform partners (Google, Meta, TikTok, Shopify, Klaviyo). Same calendar year, more output, broader skill coverage, better attribution.
The Ignite tier runs at a fraction of a single senior salary while shipping a fully-operating engine across content, ads, and analytics. Less than the loaded cost of one senior hire. More output than that hire could ship in a year.
The maths is not the only argument, but it is the easiest one.
The other argument is leverage of the network effect. The Ignis team works on multiple businesses every week, sees patterns across industries, knows which hooks worked at three other clients last month, and can compress months of testing into days. A single in-house hire learns at the speed of one calendar.
The right answer for businesses past $50M in revenue is usually both. An in-house lead who owns brand and team, partnered with an external engine that owns shipping and amplification. For everyone $2M to $30M, the partnership wins on raw maths and on speed.