How Much Does Digital Marketing Cost UK Businesses?

Businesses in the UK can expect to spend between £1,000 and £10,000 per month on digital marketing, if they’ve opted for a monthly retainer package with a digital marketing agency.

The average cost of an individual service, such as SEO or paid marketing, is around £960 per month if one monthly retainer, while a specific one-off project or campaign costs more, at around £1,600.

What you will pay depends specifically on the services you need, the market niche your business occupies, and the digital marketing agency you use. And since digital marketing costs aren’t often advertised by providers, we’ve created this guide, so you can view the figures that apply specifically to your business.

For tailored pricing, use our free digital marketing supplier request tool. Just provide some basic details about your marketing needs, and we’ll match you with agencies who’ll reach out with tailored quotes.

Average Digital Marketing Cost

Digital marketing agency costs £1,000 to £10,000 per month. Costs vary according to the type of services your business needs and your business’s size and budget.

Here’s the average digital marketing agency pricing per service, broken down into daily, monthly, and one-off fees:

The average cost of an individual service is around £960 per month for a monthly retainer with an agency. The monthly fee generally gets you one to three days of agency time on a long-term ongoing basis.

You may also choose to pay for one-off services, if you don’t feel you need recurring help. Individual projects (or campaigns) tend to span over more than one month, and so generally cost more, at around £1,600.

It’s far better value for money to invest in a monthly retainer with a reputable company. Honestly, you’re unlikely to achieve much with a day or two of website SEO every six months, for example. The same goes for a one-off purchase of any other digital marketing service.

Marketing strategy

A marketing strategy is your roadmap to attracting more customers who want to buy your services or products. A marketing specialist will analyse your business and advise which channels to develop your company presence. The strategist will design a plan to increase awareness of your business and sales conversions.

Using an agency digital marketing strategist should cost roughly £850 per month, while a one-off project will cost £2,500.

PPC

PPC, short for Pay-Per-Click, is where a company lists a digital advert and pays every time a web user clicks on it. It’s a very effective form of marketing because the company only pays when someone is already interested in engaging with their brand.

There are two costs involved in PPC: paying the agency – at an average of £1,100 per month – and paying the advertising platform (eg, Google, Facebook, eBay). Depending on how competitive your search terms are (think “new trainers” versus “silver polish”), you will have to outbid your competitors to get the advertising space.

Content marketing

Content marketing is a standard digital marketing service and broadly involves creating and promoting articles, videos, and other media to stir up interest in your business. For example, shooting a video or doing a photoshoot for a product, and creating social media and blog posts about it.

On average, content marketing pricing costs just £350 per project, and £1,050 per month with a monthly retainer.

The one-off cost is much lower than most other types of digital marketing because content projects can be very small, relating to just one piece of content, for instance. A blog article written by Title Media costs £300 plus VAT, for example.

SEO

Search engine optimisation, known as SEO, is a method of updating websites so that search engines list them higher up on the results pages. It mostly relates to improving website content by focusing on ‘keywords’ that web users are typing into search bars on Google, Bing, and others.

This could involve adding in headings and product descriptions based on keyword research in their target market.

The average SEO monthly retainer fee in the UK is £1,000, but costs vary widely for this particular service. SEO is a worthwhile service to invest in – just make sure that you are clear on what the agency will, and will not, achieve for you.

Paid social media

Paid social is a very wide term and refers to paying for a post, video or product placement to appear on a social media channel. For example, when you’re scrolling through Instagram and suddenly see a post from Amazon, even though you don’t follow their account, that’s a form of paid social digital marketing.

The advantage of paid social is targeting your advertisement content to a very specific audience.

Just like PPC, there are two costs involved in paid social: paying for the content creation and paying for the content placement. The average monthly retainer fee for paid social is £600, but that doesn’t include advertising fees for content placement.

You should set a spending cap on how much you’re willing to pay each social media channel, which you should adjust according to how successful your content is at generating conversions. A digital marketing agency specialist will do this for you in exchange for a monthly retainer.

Organic social media

Organic social media services refer to the day-to-day running of a business’s social accounts. This includes creating and launching social media campaigns without paying for them to appear in feeds, and strategising how to maximise reach without spending on paid placements.

The key advantage of organic social media marketing is that it costs less than paid marketing, since you don’t need to bid for an ad spot, you only need to pay the agency for its services. Businesses can expect to pay £1,200 per month for organic social. If you only run one social channel, you’ll likely pay less, but most businesses operate across at least two or three.

Website building

If you don’t already have a business website, then you can hire a digital marketing service to create one to send leads to. The cost of building a website through an agency is around £5,500 on average, while website maintenance costs £50 to £100 per month, depending on how much work needs to be done.

A cheaper way to create a website is by doing it yourself with a website builder. Most website builders cost £10 to £200 per month, although this doesn’t factor in the cost of time spent building and maintaining them yourself.

How Much Should Companies Spend on Digital Marketing?

A digital marketing budget should not be more than 10% of the total annual revenue of a business.

The latest data from Statista indicated that in 2022, UK businesses spent 9.3% of their annual revenue on digital marketing, although unfortunately, more recent stats aren’t yet available.

Digital marketing agency SQ Digital notes that most of their SME clients benefit from investing between £750 and £4,000 per month into digital marketing. We agree that this is a typical range within the industry. In fact, full content marketing services start at £750 per month with Coast360, a travel and tourism digital marketing agency.

Digital Marketing Agency Costs for Small Businesses

A small business can expect to pay between £1,000 to £2,000 per month for a digital marketing package from an agency.

Lower-cost digital marketing services are available for small businesses just looking to make a start in digital marketing. For example, The Good Marketer, one of the few agencies to publicly advertise its pricing, offers a £825 per month Starter Package for small businesses.

Another popular option for small businesses, which doesn’t advertise its fees, is The Small Biz Expert.

Factors That Affect Digital Marketing Cost

Although there are averages you scope for general guidance, these figures won’t narrow down your specific costs. Reason being, there are a fair few variables that will affect your final price quote from a digital marketing agency. Some of these factors include the following:

• The niche or market you are in: medical and legal services are more likely to be quoted a higher fee than a non-profit safehouse group, for instance.
• Your location: Londoners, or those in UK cities, may face a premium due to a perception of greater turnover compared with rural businesses.
• Where you currently stand in search engine ranking: if you’re a new business with hardly any online presence, it’s going to take between six months and two years of focused SEO optimisation to build up domain authority and rank well on SERPs.
• How competitive the agency is: well-established digital marketing agencies don’t need to try too hard to win business, so they may quote high fees without any expectation you’ll haggle. Fledgling agencies, however, may quote surprisingly low rates to win your custom.
• Your timeline for getting results: if you’re ambitious and want to rollout a product launch with a bang, you can expect to pay more for a bigger slice of your agency’s time.

Agencies will either take a role of training and educating your staff, or take everything into their own hands. So your ongoing costs depend on how much work your in-house team is willing and able to do. This will hinge on whether or not you pick up some digital marketing skills during your agency collaboration.

Overall, it’s best to leave your online advertising to dedicated professionals who have their ears to the ground on the latest digital marketing trends and demands. To stand a chance of competing in your niche, you should save time and in-house resources by outsourcing your digital marketing.

What to Look for When Researching Digital Marketing Costs

Of course you want to get your money’s worth, so digital marketing agency pricing needs to be linked to the services provided. Clear communication is a must; you need to ensure you agree with the deliverables expected of the agency you’re hiring. This can come in the form of setting goals based on return on investment (ROI), return on advertising spend (ROAS), or the specifics of campaign delivery, such as the number of emails sent or tweets posted.

The agency’s reputation is also a key factor, and looking into customer reviews on a range of platforms will give you a good overview. After all, you need to get a sense of whether your investment will be worth it. This can be a tough one as newer companies are so small that they may not have customer ratings available to see online. In these cases, don’t hesitate to ask for the contact details of recent clients.

Some agencies offer generic pricing packages with a set number of services delivered. It’s not easy to tell if these will be right for your particular business. If you’re a medium-sized company looking to scale and grow, it’s advisable to steer clear of tiered pricing like this. The reason for this is because it’s not a tailored enough service for you to spread your wings as a business and adapt to changing needs as they arise.

Social media engagement can convert to ecommerce sales so long as you have the right digital marketing strategy.