What marketing costs in the UK: a price guide for small and medium businesses

Here's every price we charge, set beside what hiring somebody in-house actually costs. Of our fixed-price projects, only a website can cost more than £8,000, at £3,500 to £15,000; the rest run from £2,500 to £8,000. Monthly work and the fractional day rate are priced separately. Hiring a marketing manager instead costs about £62,329 a year, on the official median salary plus employer costs, before you've paid for recruitment or equipment.

Every service, and what it costs

We also take on fractional and part-time marketing lead work, leading your marketing for a set number of days a month, and we quote for that after a call. We don't offer social media management, but we can introduce you to a partner agency, and it helps to know the questions to ask when choosing a social media agency.

Strategy

The 90-day marketing plan covers where your marketing money goes now and what it earns, your customers and the competitors worth watching, a budget split channel by channel, a ninety-day plan with the jobs in order, and the two or three numbers to judge it by. The price rises within the band with the number of channels, products or markets to plan for, and with how much data has to be untangled first. If you're not sure you need one, start with whether you need a digital marketing strategy at all.

SEO

The SEO audit and first fixes covers a technical audit and the fixes that matter most, the searches worth going after and the pages that should answer them, improvements to your most important existing pages, and your Google Business Profile. The price rises with the size and state of the site. Ongoing work on content and links is optional, and runs month to month. The full breakdown is in what SEO costs.

Paid ads

The Google Ads launch builds an account properly and launches it, followed by 30 days of changes as the first data comes in. Ad spend is paid to the platform, separately from our fee. How Google bills a budget, and its 2% UK surcharge, are both explained in how much Google Ads cost.

Websites

Full sites run from £3,500 to £15,000, depending mostly on the number of pages, what the site has to do, and whether a developer is needed. The landing page sprint builds one page around the next step you want visitors to take, and tests two versions of the key section. The three-year cost of owning a site is in what a website costs.

AI search visibility

The AI visibility audit looks at how ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini answer when someone asks for a business like yours, which competitors they name instead of you and why, and what they get wrong or can't find about you. It ends with a prioritised list of fixes, in about a week. Anything after the audit is quoted separately.

Content

The content plan and first briefs sets out what to publish, for whom and in what order, with the first pieces briefed. The price rises with the number of topics and formats. It's the same approach we set out for content strategy on a small team.

Brand and messaging

The messaging sprint produces the sentence that explains what you do, the points that prove it and the words to use everywhere, and it includes a working session with you. It starts from whether you can explain what you do in one sentence.

Analytics

The GA4 and tracking fix makes sure your enquiries and sales are recorded properly, so that every other decision, and the five GA4 reports you need, rests on real numbers.

The four ways marketing is priced

None of these is wrong, but the wrong one for the job costs money. A common mistake is a monthly retainer sold before there's anything to run. The differences matter most when you're weighing what a fixed-price project includes against how much a marketing consultant costs.

What the in-house alternative costs

For many businesses, the real choice is between buying help and hiring someone, and here the figures are official. The Office for National Statistics' Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings gives these median gross salaries for full-time employees in the UK in 2025 (provisional figures):

An employee costs more than their salary. Employers pay National Insurance at 15% on earnings above £5,000 a year and a workplace pension contribution of at least 3% on earnings between £6,240 and £50,270. For a marketing manager on the median salary, that comes to about £62,329 a year before recruitment, equipment, software and management time. Eligible employers can reduce their National Insurance through the Employment Allowance, which is worth up to £10,500 a year.

An employee is usually the right answer when there's enough day-to-day marketing to fill a job. Outside help is usually better for a specific piece of work, or for senior judgement a few days a month. Every option, from agency to in-house hire, is compared side by side in our guide to choosing marketing help.

The costs people forget

Whoever you hire, these are the costs that tend to be missing from the first quote:

• Platform spend. The money paid to Google, Meta and others for the ads themselves, separate from any fee for managing them.
• Words and pictures. Copywriting, photography and video, which some quotes assume you'll supply.
• Software. Email platforms, scheduling tools, website plugins, analytics add-ons and consent tools: small monthly fees that add up.
• Hosting and domains, for websites.
• Changes. How many rounds of revisions are included, and what happens after that.
• Implementation. Whether a plan or audit includes making the changes, or only recommending them.
• Your own time. Approvals, meetings, supplying information, and answering the enquiries that result.

What a year might look like: three examples

These are illustrations built from our own published starter packages. They show the shape of a year's spend rather than recommend one, because the right mix depends on your business.

Getting the foundations right: £7,500. A 90-day marketing plan (£2,500) to decide where to spend, a GA4 and tracking fix (£2,500) so that results can be measured, and an SEO audit and first fixes (£2,500) so that people searching can find you. Most of the ongoing work afterwards can be done in-house.

Getting enquiries quickly: £6,000, plus ad spend. A landing page sprint (£3,500) to give ad clicks somewhere that converts, and a Google Ads launch (£2,500) with 30 days of changes. Ad spend is paid to Google on top, and it's yours to set from your own numbers.

Being clear about what you do: £5,500. A messaging sprint (£3,000) to agree what you say and how you say it, followed by a content plan and first briefs (£2,500) so the message reaches the people looking for it.

Each of these is a set of fixed prices, known before anything starts. None needs a retainer afterwards, though ongoing work is there if it's worth it.

When not to spend on outside help

Buying marketing help isn't always the right move.

• If you're at capacity, more enquiries won't help. Spend on delivery first.
• If the free foundations aren't done, such as an incomplete Google Business Profile or no routine for asking customers for reviews, do those first. They cost time, not money.
• If you can't say what a customer is worth, work that out before you buy anything, because it's the number every other decision rests on.
• If the problem is the offer or the price, marketing will only spread the word about something people don't want at that price. Fix that first.

How to decide how much to spend

There's no good percentage to copy. The most quoted figure, Gartner's 7.7% of revenue, comes from a survey of mostly very large companies, and the "7 to 8%" often attributed to the US Small Business Administration doesn't appear in its own marketing guide. A better method works from your own numbers: how many customers you need, what each one is worth in profit, and what you can afford to pay to win one. That's the method behind our guide to how much a business should spend on marketing, step by step.

How to compare quotes

Two quotes for "marketing" can differ by thousands of pounds and both be fair, because they're rarely for the same thing. Before you compare prices, line the quotes up on the six checks every quote should pass: who does the work, who owns the accounts, the fee kept separate from platform spend and software, the term and notice period, the measure and the date, and what you get, including what's excluded. Two more matter when the comparison is about money:

• If a fee is a percentage of spend, I understand why that is the right model, and what it comes to in pounds.
• I am comparing totals over the same period, not a monthly figure against a one-off price.

Once they line up, compare the price. Where they don't, the difference in price is usually the difference in what you're getting. And once the work has started, the question becomes whether your agency is doing a good job.

For a straight answer on what your marketing should cost, ask for a free 30-minute call. A written plan with the scope, the fixed price and the dates follows within two working days.