Search this question and you’ll get ranges so wide they’re useless. One article says fifteen hundred a month. The next says fifteen thousand. Both are technically true and neither helps you decide anything.
The number isn’t really the problem. Two proposals can land within a few hundred dollars of each other and buy completely different amounts of work, and the owner picking between them usually has no way to tell which is which. That’s the part worth understanding before you sign anything.
Why do quotes for the same thing vary so much?
Because “marketing” isn’t one service, and almost nobody defines it the same way twice.
One agency’s monthly fee covers a person actually writing pages and building links every month. Another agency’s identical fee covers a software subscription, an automated report, and about ninety minutes of human attention. Same price. Wildly different value. Nothing in either proposal makes the difference obvious.
The gap usually comes down to four things:
How much is being built versus maintained. Building new pages, producing content, and running campaigns takes real hours. Monitoring something that already exists takes very few. A proposal heavy on words like managing, monitoring, and optimizing, with nothing being produced, is usually the second kind.
Whether the work is done by a person or a tool. Plenty of agencies resell software and add a markup. That isn’t automatically bad, but you should know when you’re paying for a subscription and when you’re paying for judgment.
How competitive your market is. Ranking a remodeler in a small New Hampshire town is not the same job as ranking one in metro Boston. The second takes more content, more authority building, and more months.
How many channels are running at once. Every added channel adds real cost, and adding all of them at the start is usually how budgets get wasted.
What's the difference between the fee and the ad spend?
This one costs contractors more money than anything else on this page, and it’s an easy fix.
If you’re running paid advertising, there are two separate numbers. The management fee goes to the agency for building and running the campaigns. The ad spend goes to Google or Meta and buys the clicks. They’re different dollars going to different places.
Some proposals bundle them into one figure. That looks simpler and it hides the thing you most need to see, because you can’t tell whether you’re paying a fair management fee or handing over most of your budget before a single click gets bought.
Ask for the two numbers separately. Every time. An agency that won’t split them is telling you something.
How much should a small business spend on marketing?
The percentage-of-revenue rules floating around online mostly come from national brands and don’t translate well to a business that runs four trucks.
A more useful way to think about it: what’s a booked job worth to you, and how many more would make this obviously worth doing?
A remodeler averaging thirty thousand a project needs very few additional jobs a year for almost any reasonable budget to pay off. A service company averaging four hundred dollars a call needs volume, and needs to watch cost per lead much more closely. Those two businesses should not spend the same amount, and no article can tell either of them the number.
What you can do is set the benchmark before you start. Know what a lead is worth and what a job is worth. Then you can answer whether the spend is working instead of guessing, which is the position most owners are stuck in six months into an agreement.
What should a proposal actually spell out?
If any of these are vague, that’s where the money goes missing.
What gets produced each month, in units. Not “content strategy.” How many pages, how many posts, how many links. You should be able to count what you got.
What’s included versus billed separately. Website changes are the usual surprise. So are landing pages for ad campaigns, and any tool that turns out to be a separate subscription.
Who does the work. Ask whether the person on the sales call is the person doing the work. Often they aren’t, and often that’s fine, but you should know.
How results get reported. Impressions and rankings are inputs. Leads, calls, and booked jobs are outcomes. A report full of the first category and none of the second is a report designed to look busy.
Contract length and how to leave. Which brings up the biggest one.
Should you sign a long-term contract?
A twelve month agreement is common in this industry and there’s a defensible reason for it. Local SEO genuinely takes months to move, and an agency that gets fired at month three never gets to show whether the work would have paid off.
Here’s the problem with that logic in practice. A long contract protects the agency from being judged too early, and it also protects them from being judged at all. If you can’t leave, they don’t have to keep earning it.
We run month to month for that reason. It means we have to show something every month, and it means a client who isn’t seeing value can walk. That’s uncomfortable by design. If you’d rather have the security of a longer term, that’s a legitimate choice, just go in knowing which risk you’re taking.
What questions expose a bad deal?
Four, and you can ask all of them on a first call.
What exactly will you produce in the first ninety days? A real answer has nouns and numbers in it. A vague answer is the answer.
What’s your fee and what’s my ad spend? If they won’t separate them, you’ve learned what you needed to know.
What happens if I want to leave in month four? Listen for whether the answer is about penalties or about performance.
What will you report, and will it include booked jobs? Anyone can show you traffic went up. Tying it to work you actually got is harder and it’s the only number that matters.
So what's a fair price?
The honest answer is that it depends on scope, and any article giving you a firm number is guessing about your business.
What we can tell you is that cheap usually means nobody’s doing much, and expensive doesn’t automatically mean somebody is. The middle of the market is where most of the confusion lives, and the way through it is comparing what gets produced rather than comparing totals.
Our own plans and what’s in each one are laid out on our pricing page, and the FAQ covers most of what owners ask before a first call. If you’re comparing proposals right now and want a second set of eyes on one, send it over. We’ll tell you what we’d ask, even if the answer is that the other quote looks fine.
