How Much Should Digital Marketing Cost?

Are you working hard to improve your inbound marketing only to hear crickets on your website? It doesn’t matter if you have the best sales funnel in the world if you don’t have an audience to lead through your funnel and make sales. If you want to scale your marketing and increase your lead generation, then digital marketing needs to be a priority for you. But you don’t have time to learn everything there is to know. And it seems like the digital marketing cost can be exponential. How can you scale your efforts without breaking the bank? Don’t worry if the idea of outsourcing your digital marketing leaves you wanting to run back to direct mailers. We’ve got you covered. Keep reading to learn more about what services you need and how much the pricing should be.  At the end of the day, we think you’ll agree that a full-service agency is the best value for your money.

The Variables to Digital Marketing Cost

Overall, you might find it challenging to get one singular price point when it comes to digital marketing cost. This is because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all model when it comes to creating your digital marketing strategy.

Some businesses will need help with their building their website and connecting with their email list. While other businesses already have their website, but they need it to be optimized, and then they want to run paid ads towards their site. Each of these services will change the price point for your marketing plan.

When you hire a full-service agency, you get access to the many experts within their company who can help you on many levels. To find out what service you need, you first need to ask yourself two key questions.

What Are Your Goals?

Before you sign any contracts or run a single ad, you need to know what your end goals are. If you don’t know where you’re going, you run the risk of ending up somewhere you never wanted to be. Thus you will find that digital marketing cost was wasted.

Instead, take some time now to establish your goals and what you want to accomplish through your marketing plan. Do you need more customers to sell your product to? Then grow your email list.

Do you have a website that isn’t drawing in visitors passively through organic searches? Or possibly you get a few visitors, but nobody is converting to your funnel. With the right expertise, you can create a plan that will allow your business to reach your goals and grow your bottom line.

Based on your goals and timeline, you will need to establish a budget next. Don’t jump straight to hiring without first considering this critical variable.

What Is Your Budget?

As a general rule of thumb, businesses should allocate roughly 10% of their revenue to marketing. And this could go as high as 20% depending on your goals. If you’re in an extreme growth mode and adding leads to your funnel, then you might consider increasing the budget incrementally for a short time.

How does hiring a full-service agency compare to hiring an in-house marketing team? The average salary for each team member will likely be between $50,000 and $80,000. This will, of course, vary depending on your company location and expertise of the person you hire.

Despite what anyone might try to tell you, rarely will you find one person who is an expert in several different aspects of digital marketing. You will need to consider hiring multiple experts, which will drive up your total cost annually.

Instead, you could pay one monthly retainer to an agency that will handle the hiring and training of several experts whom you will have access to. Experts will manage your projects in each of the areas you choose to focus on in your contract.

What Services Will You Need?

Digital marketing cost is made up of a large group of services that encompasses several areas. As mentioned above, you will likely not be able to hire one person who is an expert in all areas of marketing. As you look through the list below, you might realize that you don’t need all the services.

Most agencies can work with you on your budget and hours needed per project. Likewise, if you do need to use only one person in-house, choose one area you want them to focus on and become an expert in.

So, what do you get with a premium account with a full-service digital agency? Here are the main categories of marketing and how they break down in cost. You will quickly see that one monthly retainer goes a long way over trying to hire individuals.

1. Website Design and Development

Website design and development are not always intertwined. And if you do hire a developer be sure to know the scope of the project before you start so you know what they offer. You don’t want to get half-way through a contract only to find out they are only the designer, and you still need to hire a developer to code their design.

Likewise, some of the best developers can create the most stunning websites, but they expect you to give them the design plans that they will then create. You can help mitigate lost money and hard feelings by presenting the full expectations ahead of time.

On average to hire a web developer will cost either an hourly rate of $75-150 per hour or a flat rate of $2,500 to $15,000 and can go as high as $100,000 for a large complex website for a large corporation.

Many website developers contract with content marketers to offer complementary services to their clients. But it is improbable that you will find a developer that is also well trained in content research, natural keyword integration, and writing valuable content.

2. Content Marketing Cost

Therefore, you will likely need to hire a separate content marketer after you finish working with your web developer. Content marketing can come at various price points and payment structures.

You can sign a monthly retainer with a writer to provide you a certain number of articles each week. Or you can hire out individual posts from online content mills, which can become difficult to manage several writers. Lastly, you can choose to hire an agency that will provide quality articles by quality writers they have trained to do research and optimization techniques.

Hiring an agency means less headache, less micromanaging, and more expertise. Additionally, because they have their own full-time staff, you don’t have to worry about one person taking a week vacation and all your marketing falling behind. They have enough staff to pick up when one person takes a vacation or sick day.

3. Social Media Cost

Organic social media traffic and conversions can be tricky to monitor and assess. However, if you’re not engaging with your audience on social media, you’re leaving money on the table.

Social media shouldn’t be an afterthought. It needs to be part of your overall strategy, and it needs its own strategy as well. Just as in the rest of your marketing plan, within your social media, you need to know:

• Your goals
• Your budget
• Who will create the graphics
• How often you will post
• Who will be responsible for responding to engagement

Don’t just throw together a few cute photos and post them, then never respond to any of the comments. Your followers will notice, and you will lose business. When it comes to organic reach, engagement and consistency is everything. Don’t drop the ball on this.

4. Email Marketing Cost

Email marketing can have a considerable return on investment when done right. On average, companies see a 4400% ROI on their marketing budget for email.

When you work with a professional, you will create a strategy and theme for every email campaign. Every email within that campaign will drive your readers to a final goal that you predetermined.

Additionally, an expert will work with you to create segments to increase engagement with your reader, higher open rates and click-through rates, thus higher conversions and sales.

Email marketing can vary widely, as can the level of service you outsource. Some strategists will look at your business, email list, and sales funnel. Then they will give you their advice on the strategy you should take.

This could work if you want to do the work yourself but need guidance on what to do. To hire someone to run your entire marketing campaign will run you between $500 and $5,000 per month. This varies so much due to varying email list sizes and campaign goals.

5. Local SEO Services

If you’re running a small local service business, then you need to increase your local SEO strategies. Just as with traditional search optimization, you want to rank on page one for specific terms. However, instead of merely trying to rank for “plumber,” you’re instead going to rank for “plumber in Phoenix” or “plumber near me.”

Thanks to Google’s incredible map tracking capabilities, there is an easy way to rank for near me searches. To do this, you need an optimized Google My Business profile. Yes, creating the profile is the first step. However, if you stopped at the name, address, and phone number, then there is a lot more you can do to better optimize your profile and rank in the covetous Map Pack.

Don’t know what any of this means? Don’t worry; you can outsource this to a professional and watch your rankings climb and sales increase.

If you were to hire an individual to help you with this, pricing will usually run you around $500-$1,000 a month. This will include optimizing your GMB profile as well as creating regular content that focuses on establishing your authority in your niche and community.

6. PPC Services

While inbound marketing is ideal and the key to passive growth and scaling your business, sometimes you want to speed things up a bit. You can do this with pay per click advertising.

The interesting part about budgeting for PPC advertising is that it is two-fold. First, you must determine the cost of the service and then determine the budget for your ads. Many agencies offer this stand-alone service for roughly $399-499 per month and then suggest you budget between $5,000-$10,000 per month for your ad spend.

The numbers might seem intimidating. However, the average business sees a one to two return on investment for their ad spend. This means for every $1 you spend in ads, you will likely see $2 in sales. What would it mean for your business if you could scale a $20,000 per month increase in revenue?

When you outsource your digital marketing and increase your sales, you will truly begin to scale your business.

Knowing What to Look for Will Allow You to Get the Most From Your Marketing Budget

As you can see, there are several aspects of digital marketing and hiring an entire team. Hiring individual team members or freelancers can be time-consuming and cause more headaches than its worth.

Additionally, you’ve seen that hiring ad hoc per service can really start to escalate when you need multiple services.

At first glance, the overall digital marketing cost of a full-service agency might have seemed overwhelming. However, once you dig deeper into the full array of services they offer, you can see why they’re worth it. Additionally, you’re getting access to their many experts without needing to hire or train them.

Instead, you can get back to running your business and doing what you do best. As your company and business grow due to the increase in marketing, you will keep very busy closing new clients and managing your business. As you scale, you will be grateful you outsourced this vital piece to your overall business plan.

To learn more about how we can help you grow and scale your business through digital marketing, reach out to us today.