You won't find a price list here, and that's deliberate. Not because prices are a secret, but because a price list without context is how businesses buy the wrong thing confidently. In all cases, it depends. What I can do is show you how this industry actually charges, what the money buys at each level, and how to do the math yourself. By the end you'll know roughly what your situation should cost, from me or from anyone.
Every provider you talk to will use one of these, or a blend. None of them is inherently good or evil. Each just rewards different behavior, so it pays to know what you're incentivizing.
A flat fee for an agreed scope. The industry standard for ongoing work. Predictable for both sides, and the model most of the tiers below describe.
Fixed price, fixed scope, defined ending. Ideal for audits, websites, and anything with a finish line. The lowest-risk way to try a new provider.
Simple and transparent, but it quietly rewards slowness. Fine for small advisory work. Be wary of it for execution at scale.
Common in paid media. Aligns effort with budget size, but notice the incentive: the agency earns more when you spend more, not when you earn more.
Rough market ranges for monthly management fees, separate from any ad spend. Every market has outliers in both directions, but after fifteen years of watching invoices from every side of the table, this is the honest shape of it.
Below this line, nobody credible can afford to put senior attention on your account. What you're usually buying is a template, a junior, and a monthly report nobody reads. If this is the honest budget, you're often better off spending it on one great project, or on nothing yet.
Enough for one channel done properly by competent people: solid SEO, a well-run paid search account, a disciplined content program. Not enough for everything at once, and providers who promise everything at this price are answering a different question than the one you asked.
Where multi-channel work becomes real: two or three channels coordinated under an actual strategy, with senior eyes on it regularly. This is the bread-and-butter tier for established small and mid-sized businesses that treat marketing as math.
Full-funnel programs with dedicated senior strategy, proper creative, and accountability across the whole loop. The businesses here have usually stopped asking "does marketing work" and started asking "how fast can we feed it."
At this level you're effectively renting a marketing department: teams, tooling, and management layers. Powerful when you need it. Overkill, and over-billed, when you don't.
Where do I sit in all this? Depends what you're buying. Running a single channel properly sits in the focused-channel tier. Fractional leadership, where I own the strategy across the whole loop, sits in the growth-engine tier. The three shapes those engagements take are laid out here. I'm happy to be exact once I understand your situation, which takes one conversation and zero commitment.
"He excels at guiding clients to the best decisions for their digital marketing needs and budget. He's also very committed to providing value, which is refreshing and rare in the SEO/SEM/PPC arena."
Jilly Dillon · Founder & Fractional CSO, Technology Aloha · via LinkedIn
The most common budgeting mistake in paid advertising: treating the management fee and the ad spend as one pot. They do different jobs. The fee buys the skill. The spend buys the audience. Starve either one and the other underperforms.
Every auction has a real entry price. If competitive clicks in your market cost $40 and your monthly spend is $500, you're buying twelve clicks and a lesson. The auction does not care about your feelings.
Start from what a customer is worth to you, subtract your margin needs, and what remains is the most you can pay to acquire one. If the channel can't deliver under that number, no amount of optimization saves it.
Paid media is a tap, not a well. The moment spend pauses, so do results. That's not a flaw, it's the deal. It's also exactly why the profits belong reinvested in assets you own.
Organic work is priced by the month but pays back over years. Judging it on week six is like judging a rental property on its first fortnight of rent. Different asset class, different clock.
The premium tiers earn their keep in three specific situations: when the cost of a wrong decision is large (senior judgment is insurance), when speed matters more than savings (a quarter of misfired marketing costs more than a year of fees), and when accountability needs one person answerable instead of five vendors pointing at each other.
And the inverse is just as true. If your situation is genuinely simple, paying for a department is buying a fire engine to water the garden. The right spend is the one your math supports, not the one your ego does.
One conversation is enough for me to give you an honest range, and whether I'm even the right person to spend it with.
I keep the ongoing roster deliberately small. Strategy doesn't scale like software, and I'd rather be great for a few than adequate for many.
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