There is a lot of confusion about why marketing products and services cost what they do.
I always get asked how much marketing costs.
If you’re here for the straightforward answer, to compare, you should expect to spend around $59,100 a year, or $4,925 a month.
Yes, you can find it cheaper, but be careful.
A disclaimer, many companies might sperate and offer different packages, but this is a standard marketing stack.
What Does Marketing Include?
- A website with full-time Conversion Rate Optimization, including
- Lead Capture
- Call Tracking
- SEO
- Landing Pages
- Advanced Analytics
- Forty-eight emails sent per year, with a bonus 6 email drip campaign for free.
- Community management & lead generation on LinkedIn (Social media marketing)
- Connection Campaign
- Content Generation
- Interaction campaign (3–6 activities per week)
- PPC/Google Ads management (with $750 a month ad spend)
- Continual content creation for Blogs/emails and social media.
- Marketing Team
- Strategist
- Fulfillment
- Design
- Writing
- Development
This piece will break down each part of this package and answer why it costs what it does.
The full-funnel treatment is an investment in your business and should provide a return year-on-year.
To help alleviate the sticker shock, one more quick point I’ll make is $42,000 is in the middle of the average pay rate for a marketing salary.
Why Spend that much?
What agencies provide is a team of 4–7 people for the price of 1 in house person.
To hire a team in-house would cost you $160,000 a year on the low end in salaries, $320,000 on the high end.
Similarly, other agencies will charge $36,000 a year and offer far less than this list. And more prominent agencies can charge in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
There are a lot of variables when it comes to marketing costs.
Do you remember mathemagic land from math class? Your teacher used this to ignore things like air resistance, gravity, and other complicated factors to solve real-world problems.
Well, this analysis of marketing costs is going to be like that. We’re going to travel to a perfect world with round numbers, fixed costs, and straightforward projects.
If you would like to learn more about what goes into each of these services, I have other write-ups for them individually.
To expand on these services in greater detail would make this article 10,000 words long. (it’s about 2,500 words right now.)
You are also always welcome to send me an email or connect with me on LinkedIn with any questions.
Now for the long answer…get a drink and get comfortable.
Let’s get into it.
Marketing Variables
A marketing campaign consists of different areas that need to be accounted for, looked at, managed, and strategized.
Some of these areas can be created and given to autopilot. Websites can be this way: email marketing can be this way, social media posting can be this way.
However, I do not always recommend you do this.
To increase the likelihood of ROI with your marketing, continually improve your campaign’s aspects, which takes experimentation and an expert strategists’ attention.
Let’s start simple and work our way up the complexity and price ladder.
How Much Does a Website Cost
Let’s begin with the bedrock of the digital marketing campaign — your website.
Your most basic website will consist of 4 pages:
- Home Page
- About Page
- Services/Product Page
- Contact/FAQ/ Testimonials Page
You could make fewer pages, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
Each one of those pages has it’s own purpose and needs to be built for that purpose.
The home page needs to get visitors where they want to go quickly, whether a new visitor or returning.
The About Page is exclusively created for new visitors and used to build trust and likeability.
Your services/product page should answer any questions and make it easy to convert. (FAQs and testimonials can go on this page.)
The contact needs to be alone for SEO purposes.
There should be a way to contact you on each page but having a standalone page allows easy access for returning visitors and helps local SEO.
To design and build a new website, you must employ 4 disciplines.
- Strategy
- Writing
- Design
- Development
Just like in English class, you need to outline your paper before you begin writing. The same thing with a website, we must outline the website; we call this wireframing.
The Strategist outlines the website’s primary functions.
They set the tone and direction for the sections and pages. Decides what goes where and defends those choices to the other team members.
These choices come from the intake.
Website design isn’t entirely one-size-fits-all, but they’re also not unique.
Once the Strategist finishes their work with the wireframe, the plans go to project management who schedules Design and Writing.
The design department chooses colors, fonts, and images for the website’s ‘look and feel.’
After everything is planned and approved, the developer puts the site together.
There are many permutations to this process, but building a website usually takes 3–7 people depending on the specialties.
You may ask, why use 7 people if you can do it with 3? Doesn’t that seem inefficient?
The answer is no: there are so many nuances to building a website, writing, designing, security, and strategy that it can be useful to have experts in disciplines.
Switching costs kill efficiency.
It’s more efficient if the writer writes all day, the designer only designs, and if fulfillment builds sites.
If the Strategist also has to write, build the website, and do some graphic design, it will take a lot longer and have lower quality.
So how much does all of this cost?
If we use billable hours, it should take about 30–60 hours combined to create a 4-page website with no backend.
If we take an average of 45 hours and apply a fairly standard price per hour of $200, we get $9000 for a website.
Many agencies break that out by month, which gives us: $750 a month for the year. I also see agencies sign clients up for a 24-month contract to try and sell them another new website after that period.
What about Services like SquareSpace and Wix?
There are products out there like SquareSpace and Wix that do not charge you $9,000 to build a website, but you do it all yourself.
They made building a website as simple as possible, but you would be shocked at how many people wouldn’t enjoy the process. Plus, when you hire an agency, you’re hiring an expert.
You are welcome to become a web developer and use tools like Wix and Squarespace; however, if you’re that price-conscious, I can suggest a way to get a website for $5 a month instead of the $46 a month Squarespace charges.
If you are a sole proprietor or a hobbyist, these are good options for you. They deserve your business because of what they have built.
They provide beautiful website templates that are necessary for success online but not sufficient.
You have to pay for it if you want professional work.
If you want to increase revenue, a simple static website will not achieve what you crave.
So what else do you need for a successful marketing campaign?
How Much Does Email Marketing Cost?
After you get your website, the next recommendation is an automated email flow.
“But Luc, what about SEO? Social media!? How do I get traffic to my website?”
We will get there a bit later when we hit ongoing content.
First, emails.
I highly recommend that you add an introductory drip email campaign introducing yourself and your business.
You can find my entire philosophy and breakdown on my email marketing services page.
I recommend starting with these 6 emails:
- Ethical Bribe/informational reward
- Introduction
- Transparency
- Authority
- FAQ
- Testimonials
These are relatively simple to create and, once written, are built into an autoresponder and go out when someone signs up through your website.
To create this drip campaign, we need 3 disciplines:
- Strategy
- Writing
- Fulfillment
- (optional) Design
The Strategist outlines each email and does the research the writer will need.
The emails are then written, approved, and built by fulfillment.
That usually happens in tandem with the website.
An email capture form is also included in this.
The cost for this would average out to about $150 per email, times 6 emails will be $900 for these six emails. That brings our total to $9,900 or $825 a month.
If done right, this can increase revenue over 12–24 months. Most small to medium-sized businesses don’t do this. Meaning you will beat them.
Let’s keep moving — next, maybe an essential aspect of marketing.
Ongoing Content
Content is the most impactful money you can spend in marketing. I could write an article 3x this size on ongoing content.
But content is hard to box in. It depends on industry and taste. So even with its importance, this section will be short.
Content improves your visibility on Google SERP.
Content also gives you resources to pull from to have a healthy social media ecosystem.
Content is also the most challenging thing to perfect.
I’d recommend 2–4 pieces of content per month.
If we stay with our $150 apiece price, and you decide to be aggressive with four pieces a month, that adds $600 a month price tag to the $825, resulting in $1,425 a month.
Let’s continue.
How Much Does Social Media Marketing Cost?
There are two types of social media services that can be purchased.
The most popular is merely posting content to social media. The second is called community management.
Posting on SM creates some visibility but isn’t the most effective. However, the cost to do this is some manpower to schedule posts.
There is a more effective type of social media marketing called community management.
For most clients I work with, we do this mainly on LinkedIn; therefore, I will use that example.
However, unlike social media posting, to add more social media accounts will not be as cheap as merely posting.
For community management, typically you want to:
- Grow your audience
- Provide native content (increases the workload)
- obtain leads, typically through automation or ongoing prospecting
Community management is a blend of becoming a social media influencer, providing content, and mining those impressions as a salesperson for leads.
That takes up a lot of time and effort. Most so than other services we’ve talked about because, in theory, it never ends.
On LinkedIn, you can use automation and create a flow as we did with the email marketing campaign.
But the copy needs to be high quality. An expert marketer or salesperson must handle this to be effective.
To get the most out of LinkedIn post articles natively instead of directing people to visit your website.
However, this is where we hit lag times because fulfillment must build a piece of content more than once.
The way to scale community management is by adding bodies. You need a strategist with a small team working on your account 10–40 hours a week.
It pays off in the end with leads and is why I highly recommend choosing this option.
That costs about $1,000 a month, equaling $2,425 per month.
$2,425 a month is one marketing person take-home pay at the low end.
Now let’s talk about…
How Much Does PPC Advertising Cost?
If you want to supercharge your website leads, PPC is a great tool.
I always recommend google ads because they’re great, but any of the social networks will give you leads as well, just at different ROI’s.
Let’s focus on Google Ads for now.
Fortunately, google ads are relatively simple for an expert to execute. Easy UI, and only a few hundred characters to write. But they do need constant attention and testing. You also have to pay for the ads.
But due to the bidding system, you can set your budget to whatever you want. You can also choose how you pay. Either pay for clicks or impressions, etc.
Being successful with PPC consists of 2 main pieces:
- Constantly testing to find the best ads
- Optimizing a landing page
I recommend creating at least one dedicated landing page for your google ads.
Ideally, you’ll have as many as needed, but at least one is minimum for better performance.
For the first 3 months, the ads will require almost daily attention, then move to weekly attention. That is because a competent PPC manager will test hundreds of different ad combinations.
The copy.
That audience.
The keywords.
And more
In the spirits of ad men of yore like Claude Hopkins and David Ogilvy, every ad must sell!
Because of this, many experiments and hypotheses get tested. But at the end of the day, you will have higher conversion rates.
The downside is for at least 1–3 months; you’re paying for data. You may only get a few conversions, but these are necessary to build a robust conversion machine down the line.
Let’s take a typical $25 a day budget for the ads or ~$750 a month for prices. (You can spend as little as $5 a day.)
Some agencies charge a percentage of ad spend. I’m not too fond of that, but to each their own.
Other companies charge a flat fee, even if on a sliding scale. A reasonable estimate would be $750 a month management fee up to 10k ad spend pr month.
That adds another $1500 to the monthly volume= $3,925 per month.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
The last thing I’ll mention is ongoing optimization for your website.
For the best return, it’s essential to test different designs and copy on your website.
I placed this piece here because it’s similar to what I described with testing the PPC ads.
A strategist would do that to your website, regularly A/B testing pages, to get the conversion rate as high as possible.
However, these tests typically take longer to run because of traffic and the work involved. We don’t just test different colors but the entire UX/customer journey’s.
Most companies won’t include this because of the hours involved.
I think most packages would put this at $1,000 a month.
So, all in all, we ended up with $4,925 per month for the first 12 months.
Or roughly $59,100 for the first year investment.
But after 12–24 months, you will own your website in most cases, and $9,900 for the website and the initial drip stream payment will end, bringing the 2nd years total to $50,000.
While this may shock you, I think putting this into perspective is essential. That would be a low average for a single marketing strategist if you hired one to work in your company.
Hiring a staff that can make everything we’ve gone over in this piece happen would be in the ballpark of $200,000 per year. (4 people x $50,000 a year)
If you can get the capacity and knowledge to hire the team, it’s not a bad idea. But in my experience, very few people outside of marketing can judge effective marketing, and you may be wasting that $160,000. Even if you don’t waste it, marketing aims to provide a return at the end of the year.
It is much easier for a business to make back $40,000 than making back $200,000. I think we can all agree.
So in this piece, we went over how much a “full-funnel” marketing campaign can cost. This price may vary wildly. Agencies may charge slightly different fees, but there are also deals out there as well.
If anything, I believe I’ve underestimated how much many companies might charge.
Now It’s Your Turn
I hope you enjoyed my breakdown of how much marketing costs.
Are you surprised at the prices?
Do you think I was too low?
Reach out and let me know your thoughts.