There is no universal answer to the question of how much does it cost to hire a marketing agency, but there is one universal truth – if you hire proper experts, this decision will pay off in the long run. If you can get growth, credibility, brand recognition, and increased ROI, do you really care about the price?
Of course you do, because no one can guarantee all of these, and you can’t invest more than you can afford. Moreover, the marketing services you’ll want to invest in will depend on the type of your business and its needs, so a lower-cost agency might actually be a better fit for some particular cases.
While the marketing agency cost varies from $50 to $3,500 (not that much of a useful piece of info, we know), we will try to narrow down this range and explore what affects the price of marketing services, which ones exist, and which ones are worth investing in the most.
Marketing Agency Costs By Services
There are many layers to digital marketing, and you probably can’t, nor need to, pay for each of them. What you do have to do is understand them, realize which specific goals each one helps reach, and therefore make a calculated decision on the services that would square best with your business.
PPC Advertising
When you’re not sure what to pay for, it might be best to pay for results. Pay-per-click speaks for itself—no costs unless the ad gets people to click on it. Agency comes into the picture as these campaigns have to be carefully planned by thorough target audience research. Even then, the job is not done after the launch—the progress must be tracked, and the campaigns adjusted accordingly.
The average cost of a marketing agency for this service can go from $500 to $3000 per month, depending on your PPC budget, the scope of the ads, and the agency’s expertise in ensuring high-quality leads.
SEO Services
The range for SEO services is also a wide one, averaging from around $500 to $30,000 per month, depending on your needs and choice of either a monthly fee for ongoing SEO support, local SEO services, or a project-based audit.
As our SEO experts stand firmly behind the “SEO is a marathon, not a sprint” narrative, we always recommend investing in these services for at least a couple of months. Results can hardly be immediately visible, but with persistence and long-term commitment, this is the service that will boost your organic traffic and rank your website higher on search engines, which are the crucial results for the improvement of your business.
Content Marketing
“Content is king” is not just a phrase, it’s a fact. Your content is what will succeed or fail in attracting your audience and getting your visitors to convert and become customers. Your content is also the area where you have the most room to turn first-time buyers into loyal consumers. As content marketing services include copywriting, video marketing, content promotion, creation of graphics, infographics, and more, it offers you many ways to increase brand awareness and present yourself as a valuable brand worthy of retaining audiences.
It’s therefore clear why it can range anywhere from $3000 to $15,000, depending on what you include and how seasoned your chosen marketing agency is in these services.
Social Media Marketing
With social media marketing services, you get carefully planned social media strategies, the production of the content, management of your brand’s presence across social platforms, tracking and monitoring, analysis, consulting, and adjustments of the social media approach.
All of this typically averages from $1000 to $10,000 per month, depending on the scope of the services you need, the number of people working on your presence across social platforms, whether you include Meta Ads, user-generated content (UGC) campaigns, and so on.
Email Marketing
Email marketing services usually don’t get the hype they deserve, considering how they can come cheaply while yielding sizeable returns and, most importantly, fostering relationships with your customers. You decide for yourself how much you want to invest and thus how often the creation, sending, and analysis of email campaigns will be needed.
The average digital marketing agency cost for this service ranges from $300 to $1,500 per campaign or month, depending on the scale.
Link-Building Services
Link building is a subfield of SEO services, but we’re presenting it independently as it involves an SEO expert solely focused on reaching out to high-quality websites and getting them to link to your website or content, which can be a time-consuming and arduous process. However, as laborious as it is, this is the most reliable way to improve the credibility and ranking of your website
As high-quality backlinks themselves usually have to be paid for, the price depending on the domain authority of the website providing the link, agencies tend to charge a package rate fee for a certain number of links that can range from $50 to even $20,000 per month. Everything depends on the quality and volume of the links here, but a high-quality backlink on a relevant website tends to be worth the money.
Factors Influencing The Cost of Hiring a Marketing Agency
We already touched upon some of them, so it is by now understandable that multiple factors affect how much it costs to hire a marketing agency. Let’s explore each of the most common factors a bit further so you can make a more informed decision.
Your Goals
Before you decide on the marketing services you are willing to invest in, you must specify your goals and what precisely it is you aim to accomplish through marketing. Your goals determine the agency’s strategies, and whether you aim to enhance your sales, earn more social media impressions, get more clicks on your ads, or receive more contact form submissions, all affect your budget and the amount of investments.
Your Industry
Certain industries, such as SaaS, are highly competitive, and low-cost marketing simply can’t do anything. If you are aware that your business falls into competitive industries, you have to also be aware that your marketing investment must be larger. In the same way, if your industry is niche-specific and allows you to easily stand out, even small marketing investments can go a long way.
Agency’s Experience
Newer agencies with less experience will naturally charge less, but you may pay in the currency of compromising the quality of the service. Of course, this doesn’t always have to be the case—if you are unable to invest a large amount of money, it may be worth a try to give a shot to a newer agency seeking the opportunity to prove itself. However, the more you invest in an established marketing agency, the more it pays off with big results.
Technology Costs
Professional marketing agencies use technology and tools to set up the best strategies and monitor metrics. However, these tools are either paid for or developed by the agency itself, so you have to understand that these are additional costs that have to be covered through service fees. An agency that uses only free tools will hardly get you the same results as one investing in cutting-edge tech and utilizing AI tools.
Company Size
If you want a dedicated team of experts, you’ll have to pay for a dedicated team of experts. However, this is where you once again should rethink your business goals and evaluate how large of an agency you need to achieve them—some goals are attainable by only one great marketer, while others require a team of experts with experience and resources.
Pricing Models
In addition to multiple factors affecting the price, agencies can offer different pricing structures, which can also affect your budget planning. Typically, you can choose between monthly retainer fees, project-based pricing, package (tiered) pricing, value-based pricing model, and hourly agency fees.
Investing That Brings Value Always Pays Off
Finding the right partners in understanding your business needs and helping you reach your goals is priceless, and while the numbers at first glance may seem large, staying ahead of your competitors is the largest goal you can achieve.
Digital marketing services packages at PopArt Studio are concipated in a way that reflects our efforts of being the best of both worlds option for our clients—although we have 15 years of experience under our belt, our prices are affordable and often below average to prove that one doesn’t always have to exclude the other.
However, we’re not going to tell you to choose us but to advise you what to pay attention to the most when choosing—and instead of the cost, our advice is to first look into the agency’s rating on Clutch, testimonials, case studies, and a bit of your intuition regarding their approach.
