How to build the right brand communications team
Not every business needs the same team. That’s not a compromise, it’s a fact. The size of your communications function should reflect where your business is right now, what it can sustain, and what kind of output will actually move the needle. Hiring beyond your stage doesn’t make your brand stronger; it makes your operations heavier.
This guide walks through the most common frameworks businesses use to build their brand communications capability, from the simplest setup to the most sophisticated, so you can make a decision that fits your reality, not someone else’s benchmark.
The Freelancer Model
At its most fundamental, this is a single dedicated person handling your brand communications end-to-end, creatives, copy, scheduling, posting, and everything in between.
The appeal is obvious: it’s lean, relatively affordable, and gives you a consistent point of contact. But the limitation is just as clear. One person, no matter how talented, is still one person. Content creation is a discipline with many distinct skill sets, and expecting a single freelancer to excel at all of them is an unfair ask. A strong visual designer may struggle with long-form copy. Someone who writes well may not be equipped to shoot, direct, and edit video. Newsletters, email campaigns, and platform-specific content each carry their own demands.
This model works best for businesses in early stages, where the priority is simply showing up consistently, not yet at the point where content sophistication is the main growth lever.
The Freelancer Plus Internal Lead Model
This is a meaningful step up. Here, the freelancer is supported and guided by someone inside the business. That person may be the founder, a senior team member, or someone formally assigned to manage communications. Their role isn’t to do the creative work; it’s to provide direction, maintain brand standards, and ensure that what goes out reflects the business accurately.
The quality of output improves significantly with this arrangement. The freelancer no longer has to guess at intent or make brand decisions alone. There’s a feedback loop, a point of accountability, and someone who understands the business deeply enough to keep the work on course.
For growing businesses that aren’t yet ready to build a full internal team, this is often the most practical and high-value setup available.
The Small Brand and Marketing Team
A team of three to four people who, between them, can handle most of what a brand needs content creation, copywriting, design, and deployment. What makes this model work isn’t specialisation; it’s versatility. Each person brings more than one skill, and the combination creates coverage across most formats and channels.
There’s typically no formal team lead at this stage. The team reports directly to the business owner or CEO, which means decision-making is fast but can also mean the team is only as focused as the founder’s attention allows.
This model is a strong fit for businesses in a growth phase generating enough revenue to invest in a proper team, but not yet at the scale that demands deep specialisation. The risk to manage is bandwidth: a small team can stretch thin quickly when the content calendar expands.
The Medium Brand and Marketing Team
At this level, the team grows to between six and ten people, and the structure shifts meaningfully. These are specialists, each person owns a defined role and brings focused depth to it. A dedicated copywriter. A social media manager. A designer. A content strategist. There’s less overlap by design.
There’s also a team lead: someone who takes direction from management, translates business goals into strategy, and gives the team clear KPIs to work toward. This layer of leadership changes the dynamic. The business owner is no longer managing the day-to-day of communications they’re managing outcomes.
This model fits businesses that have reached a point where brand consistency and output quality are directly tied to revenue, and where the cost of getting communications wrong is high enough to justify investing in expertise.
The Large Brand and Marketing Team
This is a full department with fifteen to thirty-five people, sometimes more, with multiple specialists per function. Three graphic designers. Two to three video editors. A team of copywriters. Motion graphics designers. Platform-specific content creators. In some organisations, teams are structured around channels, markets, or product lines, with each unit operating with its own internal leadership.
At this scale, the brand communications function operates less like a support team and more like a business within a business. The focus shifts from execution to systems, ensuring consistency across a large, complex output at a volume that smaller teams simply couldn’t sustain.
This model is appropriate for established enterprises where brand communications is a core competitive function, not just a supporting one.
Outsourcing Alongside an Internal Team
Outsourcing doesn’t have to mean handing everything over. Many businesses run a hybrid model the internal team handles certain aspects of communications while an external partner manages the rest. This might mean the internal team owns strategy and brand governance while the external team handles content production, or vice versa.
What this model gives you is scale without headcount. You increase the capacity, talent range, and creative output of your communications function without the cost and complexity of hiring more full-time staff. It also introduces outside perspective into a function that can easily become insular, fresh eyes on a brand often see what familiarity has made invisible.
Full Outsourcing
Here, the entire communications function is managed by an external team that operates as though they were in-house. They learn the brand, carry the strategy, produce the work, and are accountable for the outcomes, without occupying space on your headcount or your payroll structure.
This model is more powerful than it often gets credit for. A capable external team brings breadth of expertise across industries, objectivity that internal teams can struggle to maintain, and the ability to scale output up or down as the business needs shift. For companies that want a sophisticated brand presence without building and managing an internal department, this is often the most efficient path forward.
Choosing the Right Framework
The right setup for your business comes down to three honest questions:
What stage is your business at right now? Early-stage businesses rarely need large, specialised teams. The priority is clarity, consistency, and presence not volume. Match the team to the moment, not the aspiration.
Can you afford to hire and manage an internal team? Hiring is only part of the cost. Managing a team providing direction, maintaining culture, handling performance — takes time and leadership capacity. If those resources aren’t available, an internal team will underperform regardless of talent.
Can you afford an external team? The right external partner typically costs less than an equivalent internal team when you account for salaries, benefits, tools, and management overhead. The question is less about affordability and more about fit finding a partner who understands your brand well enough to represent it with the same care you would.
There’s no universal answer here. The businesses that get this right are the ones who choose honestly based on where they are, not where they’d like to be seen to be. Start with what fits, build what’s needed, and evolve the structure as the business earns it.
Since 2014, we’ve acted as strategic partners for bold businesses — discovering what makes them distinct, defining how they show up, and distilling that into work that holds. We sit at the intersection of thinking and making, strategy and craft, vision and execution. The businesses we work with don’t just end up with better brands, they end up with clearer direction, stronger foundations, and the tools to grow without losing what made them worth noticing in the first place.
If this aligns with where your business is right now, let’s talk