Straight answers
How much does a marketing agency cost per month?
For local service businesses, agency fees typically run somewhere between $500 and $5,000 per month, plus your ad budget on top. Where you land depends on how many systems are being run, how much is being built versus maintained, and whether a real human is managing your account daily or you have been dropped into a template.
What you are actually paying for
Fees vary because the work varies enormously. A one-channel setup that gets reviewed monthly is a fundamentally different service from ad management plus follow-up automation plus a CRM build plus local SEO, actively managed. Both get called "marketing."
- Ad management only: lower fee, but it assumes everything downstream of the lead already works.
- Build projects (website, CRM implementation, automation): usually a one-off cost, sometimes spread.
- Ongoing systems management: the recurring fee, and the part where daily attention actually matters.
- Ad spend: always separate, always paid from your own account to the platform.
Questions that expose a bad deal
- Do I own the ad account, the CRM, the domain, and the creative? (The answer must be yes.)
- Is ad spend separate from your fee, and can I see it in my own account?
- What is the contract length, and what happens if it is not working in month two?
- What will you actually report — impressions, or cost per booked job?
- Who does the work, and will I speak to them?
The real question is not the fee, it is the return. A $3,000 monthly fee that produces $20,000 of booked work is cheap. A $500 fee that produces nothing is the most expensive marketing you can buy, and it is far more common.
Why we do not publish a price list
Because we would be making it up. It depends on your market, your ticket size, and which of the systems you actually need — and quite often the honest recommendation is fewer of them than you expected. Here is how we think about pricing, and the free call ends with a specific number rather than a range.
Related reading
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Book a Free Strategy CallOr reach Kai directly: (272) 394-5885 · kai@sallesmedia.com