Replacing a marketing coordinator: the actual setup

What the job pays

The government counts coordinators under a wider code, and the pay is real money.

The BLS does not have a line for the plain title marketing coordinator. It folds that title into code 13-1161, Market Research Analysts and Marketing Specialists, as shown on O*NET. The median for that code is $37.87 an hour and $78,760 a year, by the BLS wage survey posted on O*NET.

It is also not a shrinking job. The BLS projections posted on O*NET count 941,700 people in the occupation and expect 87,200 openings a year, with growth rated much faster than average. So the people who do this work are not going away. What changes is which parts of the work you pay a person to do.

What the job actually is

Most of the official task list is research, not posting.

O*NET lists 5 core tasks and 8 supplemental tasks for code 13-1161. The core 5 are preparing reports of findings, seeking and giving information on market position, researching consumer opinion and marketing strategy, collecting and analyzing customer demographic and buying habit data, and devising ways to collect data such as surveys. None of those is writing a Facebook post at 7 in the morning.

The supplemental tasks on the same O*NET list include gathering competitor data and measuring how well ads work. In a small service company the coordinator does those things some of the time. The rest of the time they post, reply, and send email, and that routine output is the part an agent can hold.

What the agent does all day

It posts, replies, and emails on a schedule, and it keeps the lists.

The setup has 3 jobs. The first is posting to the company Facebook Page on a set schedule. The second is replying to Messenger threads inside the window Meta allows. The third is sending email and keeping the opt out list clean.

Each job runs against a hard limit set by someone else. Meta sets the limits for the Page and Messenger, the FTC sets the limits for email, and the vendor you pick sets the send volume and the price. The table below has all of them in one place.

The rules it lives under

Every channel has a cap, and the caps come from Meta, the FTC and the vendors.

Basis: each row's number was read from the named source's own page, and the Meta and vendor rows are those companies' own stated figures.

Facebook and Messenger limits

Meta caps the calls, and it caps who you can message and when.

Meta's Graph API docs put Page posting at 4,800 calls per 24 hours times engaged users, and Messenger at 200 calls per 24 hours times engaged users. A small company will never get near those. The Meta docs list no per call fee, and they cover limits, not prices.

The rule that bites is the messaging window. Meta's Messenger policy says a business has up to 24 hours to answer a person, and promo content is allowed only inside that window. After the 24 hours close, Meta's policy leaves 3 routes: message tags for non promotional updates, Sponsored messages that are paid and labeled in the thread, and one time notifications the person must opt into first. If the agent hits a limit, Meta's docs say it gets error code 4, 17, 32 or 80001 and calls resume once the rolling count drops, with no fixed block length published.

Email rules and cost

Email is cheap to send and expensive to get wrong.

The FTC's CAN-SPAM guide sets 7 rules, including an accurate header, an honest subject line, a physical postal address and a clear opt out. The same FTC guide says the law makes no exception for business to business email, and it does not require opt in before the first send. The FTC guide puts the penalty at up to $53,088 per email that breaks the rules. An opt out must be honored within 10 business days, and the link must work for at least 30 days after the send, per the FTC guide.

The sending itself costs little. Resend's pricing page lists a free tier of 3,000 emails a month capped at 100 a day, then $20 a month for 50,000 and $90 a month for 100,000, with extra emails at $0.90 per 1,000. Postmark's pricing page lists a free developer plan of 100 emails a month, then $15 a month starting at 10,000 emails with overage at $1.80 per 1,000. Resend keeps logs 30 days and Postmark keeps them 45 days by default, per their pricing pages.

Do the math against the human number. One hour at the $37.87 median from the BLS survey on O*NET buys about 2 months of Resend's Pro plan at $20 a month on Resend's pricing page. The cost is not the tool, the cost is the mistake, at up to $53,088 per email by the FTC guide.

What stays human

The agent holds the schedule. A person holds the judgment.

Deciding what to say, who the offer is for, and whether to send at all stays human. The 5 core tasks on O*NET's list for code 13-1161 are research and analysis, and no part of this setup does those.

The agent holds 4 things. It holds the posting schedule, the 24 hour Messenger reply window from Meta's policy, the opt out list with its 10 business day clock from the FTC guide, and the send volume against the vendor cap. Those are the parts that go wrong at 11 at night.

What we got wrong

I started this piece thinking the $78,760 was the number to beat, and it is not.

I went in to compare an agent against the median wage. Then I read the O*NET task list, and the core tasks for code 13-1161 are surveys, buying habit data, and reports of findings. The agent does none of that. Comparing it to the $78,760 median from the BLS survey on O*NET overstates what it replaces, and the honest comparison is to the routine posting, replying and emailing.

I also expected the government data to say this job is shrinking. The BLS projections on O*NET say the opposite, with 87,200 openings a year. And the agent's reach is narrower than I thought, since Meta's policy fences Messenger promo at 24 hours after the customer's last message and the FTC guide puts a $53,088 per email exposure on every send.

Have us set it up

If you would rather not build the schedules, windows and opt out lists yourself, we can install the marketing agent for you. A consult is $199, and we set the agent up inside the limits this article lays out. Book the consult and we take it from there.