What a small business actually pays for marketing

Ask an agency what marketing costs and you will usually get a question back. What are your goals? What is your budget? Let us hop on a call.

There is a reason for that, and it is not always a bad one. But it leaves the owner in a strange position: about to commit thousands of dollars a month, and the only people who know the going rate are the ones selling it.

So here are our own prices in full, what each one buys, and the one pricing model we think costs you the most without ever looking expensive.

Why you cannot find a straight answer

Almost nobody in this trade publishes their prices. The usual argument is that every business is different, and that is true: yours is. A twelve-page site for a practice with three locations is not the same job as a five-page site for one.

But the price of a website with eight pages is not a mystery, and pretending it is only makes the first conversation longer. It also leaves you with no way to tell a fair quote from a bad one, because you have nothing to compare it against.

We are not going to tell you what other agencies charge. We do not have their books, and a number we cannot stand behind is worth nothing to you. What we can do is print ours, and explain how each one is arrived at.

What each band actually buys

Marketing is not one thing, so it does not have one price. It helps to split it the way the work is split.

Things you pay for once. A website, a brand. These are projects: they have a start, a finish and a handover. They should be quoted as one fixed number before anything begins, and that number should not move because the job took longer than someone guessed.

• Website Design — $3,500, one-time. Up to 8 pages, designed for your business rather than a theme, built so Google can read it, two rounds of changes, live in 4 weeks.
• Branding and Identity — $2,500, one-time. A logo with three directions to choose from, colors and typefaces licensed, a rulebook anyone can follow, social templates, and how you sound, written down.

Things that have to keep running. Search, email, lead handling. These do not finish. Rankings slip if nobody tends them, follow-ups stop if nobody writes them, and inquiries go cold if nobody answers. They are priced by the month.

• SEO and Local Search — $2,000 a month.
• Email Marketing — $1,500 a month.
• Lead Generation — $2,500 a month. Landing pages, ads managed and rebalanced, site chat, everything into one inbox, a weekly report.

The whole system. When one team runs the website, search, local listings, email and ads together, it is $4,950 a month — All-in-One Growth. One team, one number, one report, and one senior person owning the result.

We are not the cheapest. There is always someone quoting half. Usually they are quoting half the work.

The model that costs more than it looks

There are three ways agencies commonly charge for ongoing work: by the hour, as a percentage of what you spend on ads, or as a flat monthly fee. The percentage model gets its own post. This one is about hours.

Hourly billing looks like the fairest arrangement there is. You pay for exactly the time spent. Nothing more. The trouble is who controls the time.

• You cannot see the hours. A report that says "SEO work — 11.5 hours" tells you that eleven and a half hours passed. It does not tell you whether one hour would have done it.
• Slow work gets paid more than fast work. An agency that fixes your listing in twenty minutes earns less than one that takes an afternoon. Nobody has to be dishonest for that to shape behavior.
• You cannot budget it. An hourly retainer that is "usually around" a number is not a number. The month something goes wrong is the month the invoice grows.
• You end up rationing help. This is the expensive one. When every question has a meter running, owners stop asking questions, and the small fix goes unmentioned.

A flat fee turns all of that around. The agency earns the same whether the fix takes twenty minutes or an afternoon, so the fast fix is the profitable one. You know the number before the month starts. And asking a question costs you nothing, so you ask.

What to ask before you sign anything

Whatever you are quoted, and by whoever, five questions will tell you most of what you need to know.

1. Is this number fixed? For a project: will it change if the work runs long? For monthly: is it the same every month?
2. Is any of it a percentage of something? Ad spend, revenue, "performance." If yes, ask what it is a percentage of and who decides how big that something gets.
3. What do I get every week, in writing? Not a dashboard login. A plain account of what was done, what came in, and what needs you.
4. What is in my name? The domain, the website, the Google Business Profile, the ad account, the analytics. If you leave, do they leave with you?
5. What would you tell me not to buy? A good answer names something. An agency that will sell you everything on the menu has not looked at your business yet.

Our own answers, since we are asking: fixed for projects, flat for monthly. No hourly billing, no percentage of your ad spend. One written update a week — what we did, what it brought in, what needs a decision from you. Site, accounts, content and data in your name from day one; leaving takes an email. And if the fix is smaller than the thing you asked for, we will say so — even when the smaller job is worth less to us.

Nothing starts without your yes. You see the plan and the number first. If you do not like either, nothing happens.