A Helpful Guide to the Cost of Digital Marketing
Jackson Dunagan
Digital Influencer, Speaker, & Founder of Bright Vessel | Bright Plugins | Bright Hosting | Co-Founder of Print Mavericks | Flawless WordPress management & plugins for eCommerce brands
When you’re a small business or a start-up, or perhaps even an established business starting to get your feet wet in digital marketing, it can be hard to know what specifically to invest in— especially if money is tight.
The good news is that it’s not as expensive as you might think, and there’s also a lot you can do on your own or in-house. The following is a breakdown of digital marketing as an expense to your business.
Your Options for Execution
DIY
The great thing about digital marketing is that you can do much of it yourself. Most businesses opt to manage their social media accounts as this is the easiest of the digital marketing strategies and there’s not much of a learning curve.
Freelancer
Hiring a freelancer is a helpful option when you’re looking for guidance in creating a digital marketing strategy for your business. A freelancer with expertise in this industry can also be of assistance with the more complex digital marketing tasks with a higher learning curve, like designing a digital sales funnel, creating social media and search ads, SEO, and link building.
Some freelancers will offer more comprehensive services to execute a digital strategy or be able to refer you to other freelancers with expertise in content marketing, social media management, web development, or graphic design.
Digital marketing freelancer rates in the US start at $50 an hour. Most US-based freelancers prefer the hourly model while UK and European freelancers tend to prefer either a project-based payment system or a monthly retainer fee.
Agency
Many agencies offer more all-inclusive packages for your digital marketing that do everything for you from creating your custom digital marketing strategy to executing on that strategy. If you don’t have the resources to execute digital marketing in-house, then this might be the best option for you.
According to a survey featured on Entrepreneur , the most popular services that clients of agencies seek are:
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It’s common for agencies to use monthly-retainer contracts, and the average industry fee for one of these contracts comes to about $1,000. The bigger the agency is, the more services that they provide. If you lack the resources to do your marketing yourself but have the funds to do out-source it, then hiring an agency is ideal for your business.
The Price Guide
When it comes to digital marketing, many businesses say they’re either going to do it right or not at all. There are so many elements to digital marketing that it can be difficult to judge what exactly it takes to do it well.
We put together a supplement post about "4 Important Ways to Build a Website that ?Works for You " that can help with the web building process.
Moz has a visual guide that helps you to understand what digital options are best suited for your business:
As you can see, all digital marketing efforts either require your (or someone else’s) time or money or both. So there’s no easy answer to how much you should budget for marketing your business— every business has different digital marketing needs and priorities, and different skill sets in-house.
But what exactly is the breakdown for each of these digital marketing tactics?
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