Pricing

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 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 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.

We work with small to medium-sized businesses 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 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 and money spent with other marketing vendors. The percentage and revenue ranges are just to illustrate 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 $5,000. We dedicate a small portion of that to keeping up with your business. You may allocate the rest 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.

We realize everyone has to start somewhere, and no one wants to waste money on digital marketing. We’re happy to help but, unfortunately, sometimes it just doesn’t make business sense for us or the client.In those cases, we recommend that 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.

Send us an idea or topic for a blog post or podcast that might help your business. We 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.