u/Lazy-Ear-4038

I often get asked "I'm just getting started, what do I price my marketing services." And to some extent, people ask how do you go about raising prices, and what do you do when you have a bunch of different past/grandfather price points?

Here is how I have gone about it. Keep in mind, im sharing what was the average customer. I also had clients pay more, but far less of them.

This is also showing some of the hires I made that are still here. What it's not showing is the hires that are not here, or didn't work out.

Phase 1 - 2020 to 2022. - this helped get to 30 customers, low friction sales, lots of work and lots of chaos lol. Just me as account manager, google ads specialist, salesperson, website coordinator (worked with a website contractor)

$250/month for a new wordpress website. Typically 10-15 page. Google Ads services that routed to their homepage. No tracking. Also included basic seo optimizations and google business profile manage but at an ultra light level. Monthly Loom Reviews

Also did a lot of "whatever they will pay me for" work like random projects. Website builds, Helping other agencies with their google ads / meta ads, email newsletters, social media postings

Phase 2 - 2023. got to 50ish customers. Allowed me to hire first full time employee. I still mainly focused on organic social media content, sales, google ads management, landing pages, google reviews. First employee primarily helped with website coordination with the website contractor

$500/month - basically same as previous 250.

$350/month Starter pacakage for just google ads or meta ads. Basic landing page, tracking just forms or click to calls.

This is where the clients / businesses started leaning more local service based. the "who" we help became more obvious as well as "who can we actually help" and with what services.

Phase 3 - 2024 to first half 2025. Started separating the services. Hired 2 more people so a team of 4. Existing employee moved into an SEO role. The two new employees focused on google ads, landing pages, and general "assistance" on projects. I still mainly handled organic social media content for the business, sales, account management, still created and managed the google ads but had some support. Still did the monthly loom video reviews

$650/month - for google ads/meta ads. No website build. Included landing pages, call tracking with call rail and got into conversion tracking and reporting with Google analytics.

$1k/month - same as the now 650 package but includes SEO.....and a new website build lol. At this point, we have a dedicated person for SEO

Phase 4. Second half of 2025. Hired 2 CSM's and 1 Google Ads/SEO Support

$1k/month - Same as previous 650, but now we added in WhatConverts for lead attribution. As well as now being able to integrate with client CRMs. A little more technical with our website work.

$1,750/month. The new ads+seo. This is when I finally figured out that doing multichannel marketing is difficult, not easier.

Phase 5 - current 2026. One more recent hire. team of 7 people, plus me we are 8. I mainly focus on organic social media , sales, and trying to build systemized solutions for our team.

$1500- We now charge for websites, instead of including it in the marketing.

$1,250/month - Google Ads/ Meta Ads

$2,250/month - Paid Ads + SEO.

So the question is, how do we manage all these price points, at all these different points in time?

I've kept it quite simple. We go to our clients who are on the lower tier and basically say - if you are happy with the way things are, you are welcomed to stay at that tier. However, here we have this new tier that comes with this new stuff. Some clients stay on the legacy pricing and we keep the legacy service. Some clients upgrade. Some clients we "forced" upgrade simply because it was way out of scope. Some of those agreed, most left.

It ends up looking something like this

Legacy Clients (Paid Ads / Ads SEO): keep it active, no tracking, light touch

Current Pricing Clients (Paid Ads / Ads + SEO): actively try to grow, full tracking, deep dives

This also brings the weirdness of churn. At one point, our most popular packages were the 250 and 350 packages. But since we don't offer those anymore, they naturally age out. Especially if/when a client says hey, what can we do to improve, and we say hey, we can upgrade to the next tier. Some do, some cancel.

The constant changing in pricing is not pretty, but here are the reasons why i recommend this way

1 -In the beginning, you want low friction. Figure out who your customer is, figure out what services you can offer that of value

2 - You build a book of business. The more customers you have, the more opportunity that is possible from that customer base. If you start with higher prices, it's harder to do that (unless you can and want to try, then go for it of course)

3 -The right pricing for your business is not really a known yet. Do you want to be high volume, low touch point. Do you want to be higher touch point and charge a bit more? Do you want a team or do this on your own. Do you want to hire in house or go contractor? Do you want to have a local team, or do you want to hire globally? All of these questions are tied to how you price your service

Last point, is that I didn't really account for my ability to actually be able to go out into the world and be able to attract customers, and close customers. Meaning - I was just trying to pay my rent when i got started. It just so happened to go very well, and so the increase in pricing is me continually trying to improve what we offer, as well as position ourselves a little differently.

What’s your last 3 months with so much happening with agents?

Do you see less demand or actually more demand in your agency work?

Do people actually do more things themselves and just want help with understanding ai?