Every agency website has a pricing page. Almost none of them have prices.
They have a page called pricing that says “every business is unique,” then asks for your email, your phone number, your revenue range, and roughly the same amount of personal information as a mortgage application. All so a man named Chad can call you Tuesday and say “great question, it really depends.”
It does depend. It also has a number. Here’s the number.
The short answer
For a small business on the Grand Strand in 2026, ongoing marketing management typically runs $1,000 to $5,000 a month, depending on how many services you’re buying and how competitive your category is.
One-off projects sit outside that. A professional website is usually $2,500 to $10,000. A local SEO catch-up sprint might be a few thousand once. Ad spend is separate from ad management, and if anyone blurs those two lines on a proposal, that’s not a rounding error. That’s a strategy.
That’s the whole range. You can stop reading now if that’s all you came for. Everything below is why the range is that wide and how to figure out where in it you land, which is admittedly the useful part. But I’m not going to pretend you owe me eleven minutes for a number I could have put in the first sentence. So I did.
The three pricing models, and what each one is hiding
Retainer. A flat monthly fee for an ongoing set of services. Most common, most predictable, easiest to budget. What it hides: whether you’re buying work or buying availability. Ask what happens in month four when the setup is done. If the answer is vague, you’re funding someone’s Tuesday.
Project. A fixed price for a defined deliverable. A website, a rebrand, a campaign build. Clean, bounded, no surprises. What it hides: everything after launch. A website with nobody driving traffic to it is a very expensive business card with a domain name.
Percentage of ad spend. Usually 10% to 20% of what you spend on ads. Standard in the industry. What it hides: an incentive problem so obvious it’s almost charming. Your agency’s revenue goes up when your spending goes up. Not when your return goes up. Those are different sentences.
None of these three is wrong. The flat-fee retainer is what we run, because I’d rather be told to cut a budget that isn’t working than quietly benefit from it. But a percentage model with an honest operator beats a flat fee with a lazy one, every time. The model isn’t the character. It’s just the shape of the temptation.
What actually moves your number
Six things, roughly in order of how much they matter.
How many services. Local SEO alone is one number. Local SEO plus Google Ads plus social plus reputation management is a different number, and it should be. That’s four disciplines and four sets of hours.
How competitive your category is. Ranking a Pawleys Island bookkeeper is not the same job as ranking a Myrtle Beach personal injury attorney. One of those categories has firms with television budgets. Competition is priced in because competition costs hours.
How many areas you serve. A business targeting Myrtle Beach proper is one thing. A business that needs to show up in Surfside, Murrells Inlet, North Myrtle, and Conway is doing four local SEO jobs stacked in a trench coat.
What shape your site is in. If your website is slow, invisible, and last updated during a different presidential administration, some of month one is triage. That’s not an upsell. That’s the plumbing.
Whether you need content produced. Somebody has to write the words and shoot the photos. If it’s not us, it’s you, at 11 pm, describing your own business in the third person and hating it.
How fast you want it. Speed costs money in every industry, and this one is not special.
Where the money goes, honestly
When you pay a marketing agency, you’re paying for four things. It’s worth knowing which one you’re short on before you buy all four.
Strategy. Deciding what to do, which is mostly deciding what not to do.
Production. The actual making of things: pages, ads, posts, copy.
Distribution. Getting those things in front of humans.
Measurement. Knowing what worked, so next month is smarter than this one.
Most businesses that feel burned by an agency bought production without strategy. They got twelve posts a month and no idea whether any of it produced a phone call. That’s not necessarily a bad agency. That’s a bad purchase, and a good agency should have talked them out of it.
What “too cheap” actually costs
There is a price below which the math stops working, and I want to be specific about why rather than just wagging a finger.
At $300 a month, an agency can afford roughly two to three hours of attention on your account. Not two to three hours of strategy. Two to three hours total, including the report they send you. In practice that buys you scheduled social posts and a monthly PDF with some green arrows on it. Nothing on that list changes your revenue.
The tell isn’t the price. The tell is what the price implies about hours. Ask any agency how many hours a month your retainer buys. A real one will answer. The answer is the product.
What “too expensive” looks like too
Also real, less discussed. If you’re a two-truck plumbing operation in Conway and someone is quoting you $8,000 a month with a dedicated account team and a quarterly brand summit, you are buying an org chart. Your business does not need a summit. It needs to appear when someone in Conway searches “water heater repair” at 6am on a Saturday.
Pay for the outcome you need. The outcome you need is usually smaller than the proposal.
The one number that makes this decision easy
Forget benchmarks and percentages for a second. Answer this: what is one new customer worth to you?
Not revenue for the year. One customer. Average job value times how many times they come back.
Once you have that number, agency pricing stops being philosophy and becomes arithmetic. If a customer is worth $400 and a $1,500 a month retainer brings you six more of them, the retainer paid for itself and bought lunch. If a customer is worth $8,000, like a legal case or a roof or a full home system, then the entire pricing conversation changes shape, and haggling over $500 a month is like negotiating the tip on a car.
We had a client put $8,000 into Local Services Ads and close $31,000 in business off it. That’s a 3.9x. That number is not a promise and it’s not a coupon. It’s specific to a category where one closed case is worth thousands. But it’s the right kind of math. Spend, close, multiple. Everything else is decoration.
If you don’t know what a customer is worth to you, that’s the actual first project. Not the website.
Our version, since you’re wondering
Flat monthly pricing, quoted before we start, month to month, no long-term contract. Not because contracts are evil. Because we’d rather earn November than have November pre-signed in March. It keeps us honest in a way that a twelve-month agreement structurally does not.
You can see what we actually do and what it produced for other Grand Strand businesses. Southern Charm Limos at #1 with double the peak-season bookings. Angwin Academy doubling enrollment inquiries in a semester. Real names, real numbers, no stock photos of people high-fiving in a conference room.
Before you get a single quote
Do this first, because it costs nothing and it changes what you’re shopping for.
Get a free Visibility Scorecard. We’ll look at your website, your Google presence, and the competitors currently eating your lunch, then send you a plain-English read on where you stand. Inside 24 hours, no call required, no packages presented.
Then go get three quotes, ours included. You’ll be able to tell which one is priced to the problem and which one is priced to the proposal template.
That’s the whole trick. Know what’s broken before you ask what it costs to fix.
Keep it flyt. 馃殌