Pricing

How much does digital marketing cost? How much does Kapok Marketing charge for its services? Those are two questions we get asked a lot. The answer is that it depends.

Too Long; Didn’t Read

We’ve got a more detailed explanation below, but we also know most people just want the cold hard numbers. In order to offer services that will actually work for our clients, we require each and every new client to commit to one of the following three choices:

1. Spend at least $2,000–$5,000 developing a one-time digital marketing strategy for your business. The strategy we develop is a deliverable PDF document that you’ll own. You can execute it yourself in-house, with another agency, or with us. We hope the strategy is so great that it’s obvious that you should choose us, but you are under no pressure to do so.
2. Commit to spend a minimum of $2,500 per month on digital marketing for the next 12–36 months. This doesn’t mean you will pay us all of that money, because some of that money will likely be spent on advertising. Even though we request that you commit to a long-term marketing plan, you’re always free to cancel, if you’re not satisfied. We only request that you settle any unpaid invoices for services rendered
3. Spend at least $6,000–$12,000 to design and develop a website for your business. 80% of small business websites will fall within that range. The rest will mostly be under $25,000. Some very complex website projects some can exceed $100,000. Depending on the project details, we normally divide the projects into three payments. A certain percentage is paid upfront and after the mockup is approved. The remainder is due upon completion of the project but before the website goes live.

How Much Does Marketing Cost?

Marketing is not like a lot of other business expenses. If you save $100 on your business’ electric bill, you have $100 more in profit. If you spend $100 less on marketing, you don’t necessarily have $100 more in profit. This is because marketing is a driver of revenue.

If you’re doing marketing right, it will always produce a positive return on investment (ROI). All other aspects of your business being equal, each marketing dollar spent will yield more dollars in revenue within a given period of time.

Various types of marketing require different periods of time to realize a return. Pricing for a small business website or other complex digital assets might require as long as 3–5 years. For branding campaigns, it might be 2–3 years, and for lead generation, it might be 3–12 months.

Given all of the different components involved, we recommend carefully considering your options. Set your ideal marketing budget based on strategic research about your industry, your individual business goals, and your time horizon.

How Much Do Kapok Marketing Services Cost?

We work with small to medium sized businesses who are serious about marketing their products, services and causes. For us, this means clients who expect to have at least $500,000 in annual revenue and want to allocate at least 3–10% of their expected annual revenue on marketing.

For established clients with higher annual revenues, we can work with slightly smaller percentages of annual revenue. Similarly, we can help well-capitalized startups who are willing to invest larger percentages of annual revenue to establish themselves more rapidly.

This doesn’t mean we get all of that money either. This includes money spent on advertising, as well as money spent with other marketing vendors. The percentage and revenue ranges are just to establish the types of clients who are best aligned to take advantage of our services.

In terms of our actual cost, we normally start with a monthly retainer of at least $2,000. A small portion of that is dedicated to us keeping up with your business. The rest can be allocated to any of our monthly recurring services or other projects and consulting.

Beyond the initial retainer, almost all of our work is quoted and billed on a monthly or per project basis. For your reference, we use hourly rates between $67 and $197 to build most of our quotes, depending on the personnel and other resources needed for each project.

What Should I Do If These Prices Are Too Expensive?

We realize everyone has to start somewhere, and no one wants to waste money on digital marketing. We’re happy to help whenever possible, but, unfortunately, there are instances where it just doesn’t make business sense for us or the client.

In those cases, we recommend the business owner try to do as much on their own as possible. This is one reason we offer tons of free information on our blog and podcast.

Feel free to send us an idea or topic for a blog post or podcast that might help your business. We obviously won’t be able to provide personalized information, but hopefully we can at least get you started or pointed in the right direction.

Business owners can also look for help by hiring an in-house employee or intern to help as much as possible. You can also hire freelancers to help with certain projects, if you’re willing to take the lead on strategy and management.

Here are a few sites that might help you get started with some creative freelancers: Upwork, Fiverr and 99designs. Just keep in mind that all of the people on these sites work for themselves, and not the websites, so your results may vary on a project-by-project basis.