How much does digital marketing cost? Every agency website answers "it depends", which is true and useless. So here are the actual 2026 numbers for the UK and Germany — by service, by band, with what each band buys — and then the part the pricing pages leave out: the 25–40% of spend that sits outside the retainer.
The short answer
Across the 2026 UK pricing guides we reviewed, most SMEs pay £1,500–£5,000 a month for an agency retainer. Single-channel work (SEO alone, PPC alone) starts around £500–£1,000 and runs to £3,500. Full-service multi-channel retainers run from roughly £3,500 to £10,000+, and enterprise accounts go well past that. One research firm reports UK retainers up more than 30% since 2023, which matches what we see in proposals.
Germany prices in euros but lands in the same place. In our experience, a Berlin agency charging €90–€150 an hour produces retainers of €2,000–€6,000 a month for the same SME scope, with Munich and Hamburg at the upper end and London above all of them.
Cost by service, 2026
SEO and content: £1,000–£5,000 / month
At £1,000 you get hygiene: crawl fixes, meta tags, a couple of articles, a monthly report. At £2,000–£4,000 you get content-led SEO — pages built to win specific queries, digital PR, technical work that actually moves rankings. Above £5,000 you're buying an editorial operation. Standalone content, researched and expert-reviewed at 1,500–3,000 words, runs £300–£800 an article. Anything under £150 per article is a template with your company name find-and-replaced in.
PPC management: £400–£2,000 + 10–20% of spend
Two numbers to watch here. The management fee, and the ad spend it manages — which is a separate cheque to Google or Meta. A common structure is a base fee plus 10–20% of spend. On £10,000 of monthly ads, that's £1,500 in management plus the £10,000 itself. For context, WordStream's 2026 benchmark study puts the average search cost per click at around $5.42 and the average cost per lead at roughly $67, with B2B conversion rates well below the cross-industry average — which is why B2B paid search needs weekly management, not a monthly glance.
Social media: £800–£3,000 / month
£800 buys scheduled posts. £3,000 buys a strategy, community management, creative and paid amplification. The £800 tier is where most "we tried social and it didn't work" stories come from — because posting is not marketing.
Email and automation: £500–£2,500 / month
A newsletter at the bottom, lifecycle automation (onboarding, nurture, win-back) at the top. Email remains the cheapest channel per pound of revenue for almost every business that has a list. Most don't use it because it's unglamorous.
Websites and platforms: £3,000–£50,000+, project-based
A template site from a freelancer: £1,500–£5,000. A properly designed and built business site: £8,000–£25,000. A custom platform — a portal, a marketplace, a bespoke LMS — £35,000 and up. We've written about why the cheap option costs more by month three.
What the pricing pages leave out
The retainer is not the budget. One UK guide estimates total programme spend runs 25–40% above the headline retainer once you add what's missing:
- Ad spend. The single biggest omission. A £2,000 PPC retainer with £0 of media budget is a very well-managed empty account.
- Tools and licences. CRM seats, email platform, SEO tooling, analytics add-ons: £200–£1,500 a month depending on the stack.
- Creative. Photography, video, design beyond "a graphic for the post". Often billed per project on top.
- Your own time. Approvals, briefings, sign-off. An agency that needs eight hours a week of your attention has moved a cost, not removed it.
What you should get for the money
Price bands only mean something against deliverables. Our rough rule for a full-service SME retainer:
- £1,500–£3,000: one or two channels, run competently, monthly reporting. No strategy work to speak of. Fine for testing whether a channel works for you.
- £3,000–£6,000: a written strategy, two to three channels coordinated, a senior person who actually looks at your account, and reporting on leads and cost per lead — not impressions. This is the band where results begin.
- £6,000–£10,000: full-funnel — positioning, paid, content, email, conversion work on the site — with a named lead and quarterly planning. Right for firms with a real growth target and a sales team that can handle the leads.
If a proposal in the £3,000+ band has no written strategy and no named senior contact, you are paying mid-band prices for bottom-band work. Our 12 questions for choosing an agency will surface that in the first meeting.
London, Berlin, and the remote question
London agencies sit at the top of the UK bands, and honest ones admit the premium is rent and salaries, not results. Berlin is 20–30% cheaper for equivalent seniority. Since delivery happens on a screen either way, a growing number of UK firms buy senior agency work from outside London and keep the difference as media budget — we covered this in what to expect from a B2B agency in London. Whatever you decide, the useful comparison is never "London vs elsewhere" but "who is actually on my account, and what does an hour of their time cost".
The short version
Budget £1,500–£5,000 a month for a serious SME retainer in the UK, €2,000–€6,000 in Germany, plus 25–40% on top for ad spend and tooling. Below £1,500 you're buying activity; from £3,000 you should be buying strategy and a senior person; above £6,000 you should be buying the whole funnel. And if you still don't know how much digital marketing costs for your business, that's a scoping conversation, not a pricing page.
Contact us or email info@bsadoes.it with what you're trying to grow and roughly what you can invest — we'll tell you what that buys, and what it doesn't. We work with clients in Berlin, London, and remotely worldwide.