Three quotations, three numbers, and no way to compare them.
We do not publish a price, and you should be wary of anyone who does before asking what you sell. What we can do is explain what moves the number, so you can read a proposal and see what is missing from it.
What you are paying for
Almost every quotation is really three things bundled.
There is the retainer for people's time — strategy, management, reporting. There is the money that leaves your account and goes to Google or Meta, which is not the agency's income and should be stated separately. And there is production: the pages, videos, creatives and copy that the media budget spends against. A proposal that gives you one number for all three cannot be compared with one that separates them, and the cheaper-looking one is usually the one hiding production.
Ask for the three split out. An agency that cannot split them has not planned the work.
What moves the number
Six things, in roughly the order they matter.
How long your sale takes
A same-day purchase needs advertising. A four-month industrial sale needs content, follow-up and a CRM, and costs more to run for longer before anything shows.
How many buyer types
One offer to one buyer is one set of messages. Three segments is three, and the cost scales close to linearly.
Whether the site can convert
Sending traffic to a site that does not convert is the most common way an Indian SMB wastes a marketing budget. Sometimes the honest first invoice is a website one.
Competition in your category
Cost per click is set by who else is bidding. Legal, real estate and education cost multiples of what a niche manufacturer pays.
What you already have
A business with a working CRM, a photo library and a person who answers enquiries needs far less setup than one starting from a WhatsApp number.
Who does the doing
Strategy alone is cheaper than strategy plus execution. Most quotations that look inexpensive are strategy, and the execution arrives as a second invoice.
Before you sign
What a proposal should tell you, and usually does not.
What will exist at the end that does not exist now — the artefacts, not the activities.
What is measured, from what baseline, and on what date you will see it.
What happens to the work if you stop: whether the accounts, the content and the data are yours.
Which named person does the work, as against which agency signs the contract.
What is excluded. The exclusions tell you more about a proposal than the inclusions.
Questions
Why will you not give a price range?
Because a range wide enough to be honest is too wide to be useful, and one narrow enough to be useful would be wrong for most readers. A retainer for a single-city clinic and one for an exporter selling into three countries are different orders of work. We scope it in the free audit and put the fee in writing before anything begins.
Is a percentage of ad spend a fair way to charge?
It is common and it has a problem worth knowing about: it pays the agency more when you spend more, which is not always when you should. We do not charge that way. If a proposal does, ask what happens to the fee when the right answer is to spend less.
What is the cheapest useful thing we could start with?
Usually an audit, because the most expensive mistake is spending twelve months on the wrong channel. After that it is normally whatever unblocks the enquiries you already get — follow-up, the website, or the way leads are routed — before anything that creates new ones.
Should we hire someone instead?
Often, eventually. A single marketing hire costs a salary and covers one skill set; an agency costs a retainer and covers several but knows your business less well. The usual answer is an agency to build the system and a hire to run it, in that order.
Talk to us
Tell us what you are trying to grow.
A short note is enough. We will come back with a straight answer about whether we can help, usually within one working day.
- No obligation and no sales script
- A reply from someone who does the work
- Your details are never sold or shared