Is it worth it to hire a marketing agency?
See above. It's worth it when the marketing capacity gap costs more than the retainer. The bigger question is whether the agency has actually done what you're hiring them to do. Ask for case studies with attributable results (revenue, leads, ranking improvements, not "engagement lifted"), ask who specifically will run your account, and ask what happens if the first 90 days underperform. A good agency answers those cleanly.
What the alternative actually costs
Do the comparison against a salary rather than against zero. 946 US listings in The Wall are filed under Marketing, 755 publish an hourly rate, and 633 of those price between $100 and $199 an hour.
Minimums are lower than most buyers expect. 743 of the 814 firms publishing a minimum open at $10,000 or less, and 675 open at $5,000 or less. At the modal band, a 20-hour month lands in the low four figures, which is well under the loaded cost of one mid-level hire.
Team size is the other half of the comparison. 697 of the 840 Marketing listings that publish a size run fewer than 50 people, and the most common band is 10 - 49. You are buying access to a handful of people who split their week across several clients, which is the actual trade against a full-time hire who splits nothing.
How to use this
The question is not agency against nothing. It is agency against a hire, and the deciding factor is usually whether you need one skill deeply or five skills occasionally. Agencies win the second case and lose the first.
How this was computed. Every figure on this page is counted from The Wall's own directory of approved, US-headquartered, machine-verified-live listings: 3,460 of them in the snapshot captured 2026-09-14. Rates, minimum project sizes, team sizes, founding years and ratings are provider-declared figures published on public profiles. 1,738 of those listings publish a service list, and that field holds at most 4 services per firm, so service counts are counts of what firms name first rather than everything they sell. Percentages of disclosed values exclude listings that publish no figure. Nothing here is modeled or estimated. Sourcing standards: editorial policy.
Why this matters
Google puts this question in People Also Ask for the "marketing agency" query, which means buyers are asking it while they shop. The Wall answers it from the directory position: we index 3,460 verified US growth-services vendors across 10 pillars, so the figures above come from those records rather than from a survey.
If you are evaluating vendors in this category, the Marketing pillar page carries the full US firm list with rate, team size and headquarters filters.