Between $1,500 and $10,000 a month, for most small and mid-sized businesses.
That is the band where the actual work happens. You will find quotes below and above it. Below $1,000 you are usually buying scheduling and a report. Above $25,000 you are in enterprise territory with a team assigned to you.
Broken down by where you sit:
- Single channel, small business: $1,000 to $3,000 a month. One thing done properly. SEO, or paid search, or social. Not all three.
- Multi-channel, small business: $3,500 to $5,000. Two or three channels with someone coordinating them.
- Mid-market, 51 to 250 employees: $4,000 to $12,000 for two or three channels with real strategy, execution and reporting attached.
- Enterprise: $25,000 and up.
Now the more useful part, because the number on its own tells you very little.
Translate the price into hours, because that is what you are buying
Agency hourly rates in the US run roughly $100 to $300, varying by discipline. SEO tends to sit at $75 to $150. Paid search is $100 to $175. Social media lands around $90 to $200.
So take a $3,000 monthly retainer and divide it by a blended $150 an hour.
Twenty hours. That is your month.
Now ask how many channels that twenty hours is being spread across, and how much of it goes to the monthly report and the two status calls. If the answer is four channels, you are buying about four hours per channel per month, and four hours is enough to keep something ticking over but not enough to improve it.
The question that makes a quote legible is not “how much” but “how many hours, and whose.” A $5,000 retainer where a senior person spends fifteen hours is a completely different product from a $5,000 retainer where a junior spends thirty five, and both are sold with the same slide deck.
Ask directly. Anyone quoting seriously will tell you.
The three pricing models, and which one to push for
Monthly retainer. The dominant model by a distance, and roughly three quarters of agencies now use it as their primary structure. Predictable for both sides, which is why it won. Ask what happens to unused hours and whether they roll over. Usually they do not.
Project-based. A fixed price for a defined piece of work. A website build, a migration, an audit. Good for one-off work and for testing whether you like working with someone before committing to twelve months.
Percentage of ad spend. Typically 10% to 20%, most often 15% to 20%. Spend $10,000 on ads and the fee is $1,500 to $2,000.
This last one is worth a moment. The structural problem is obvious once you look at it: the agency earns more when you spend more, whether or not the extra spend produced anything, and getting the same result on a smaller budget reduces their fee. Plenty of good agencies moved to flat retainers specifically to remove that conflict. If you are offered percentage of spend, ask for a flat management fee instead and see what happens.
Compared to what? The in-house numbers
Most people asking this question are really asking whether to hire someone instead, so here are those numbers.
The fully loaded cost of an employee runs about 1.3 to 1.5 times base salary once you add payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, software and the management time. A $100,000 marketer costs you $130,000 to $150,000.
A complete in-house team, meaning a marketing manager, a content writer, a designer and a paid media specialist, starts around $250,000 to $350,000 a year in total compensation, plus another $15,000 to $30,000 in tools and licenses.
Against that, an agency at $3,000 to $15,000 a month is $36,000 to $180,000 a year.
That comparison gets used as an argument for agencies and it is only half honest, so here is the other half. The in-house person is yours full time and accumulates context about your business that an agency carrying eight other accounts never will. The agency gives you breadth, specialist tools already paid for, and someone who has seen your problem at forty other companies.
The genuinely useful framing is that they solve different problems. One senior in-house generalist plus one specialist agency for the hard channel beats either alone for most companies between $2m and $20m in revenue.
What actually moves the number
Four things, roughly in order of impact.
Seniority and hours, which we covered, and which dominates everything else.
Number of channels. Every added channel brings its own tooling, reporting and context switching. Three channels done adequately usually costs more and returns less than one done properly.
Whether ad spend sits inside or outside the fee. A $5,000 quote that includes $3,000 of media is a $2,000 management fee in disguise. Always ask which it is.
Your position in their client list. Being someone’s fourth client and their fourteenth are different products at identical prices. Ask how many accounts the person actually working on yours is carrying.
Before you sign anything
Three questions, and the answers matter more than the price:
- How many hours a month, and what is the blended rate that implies?
- Who specifically does the work, what is their title, and how many other accounts do they have?
- What is deliberately not included?
A quote that survives all three is a real quote. One that does not is a package, and a package is a price with a story attached.
I have written separately about the structural questions to ask before signing, particularly around who owns your ad accounts when the relationship ends, which is worth reading before you commit to anyone at any price.
The short version of all of this: stop comparing the monthly numbers against each other and start converting them into hours of a named person’s attention. Once you do that, the tenfold spread in quotes you have been staring at usually resolves into something that makes sense.
If you’d like to sanity check a quote you are looking at, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat about it. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch and I’m not bidding for the work. My notes on how I work cover more of the detail.