Nobody publishes prices, so every call starts with guessing. Here are ours, and what the money is actually spent on.
Written by Dmitrii Z., founder of Castells Media, Roseville, California.
Why nobody tells you the price
Look up ten marketing agencies and you will find ten contact forms and no numbers. The reasoning is always the same: every business is different, so we need a call first. Some of that is fair. Most of it is a sales tactic, because once you are on the call it is harder to walk away.
The cost of that tactic is your time. You sit through four calls to learn that two of them were never in your range.
What we charge
Running one channel for you, whether that is Google, Meta or Yelp, is $590 a month. That covers building the campaigns, launching them, checking them every week and sending you a report you can read without a glossary.
Running several channels together, plus your Google Business Profile and reviews, is $1,490 a month.
A website is one-time work, from $1,750, depending on how many pages you need and whether we also write the text and handle photos. Setting up a CRM so calls and forms stop getting lost is from $1,500.
The part that is not our fee
The ad budget is separate, and it should never touch our account. You pay Google, Meta and Yelp directly from your own card. You see every dollar in your own dashboard, and we take no percentage of it.
This matters more than it sounds. When an agency runs the budget through its own account, you cannot check what was actually spent, and you cannot leave without losing the history.
How much budget you actually need
That depends on your city and your trade, and anyone who gives you a number before asking those two things is guessing. What we can say is how to think about it: your budget has to be big enough to buy a meaningful number of clicks in your service area every week. If it is so small that your ads run for three days and stop, the data never adds up to anything and nobody learns anything.
Tell us your city and your service, and we will say plainly what a starting budget looks like there, and whether it makes sense to start with ads at all or fix the site first.
What to ask any agency before you sign
Is there a contract or a minimum term? Ours is month to month, and you can stop in any month.
Whose name is on the ad account? It should be yours, on day one.
Is there a setup fee on top of the monthly price? Sometimes there is, when there is a lot to build first, but you should hear the number before you pay anything.
What happens if we stop working together? Everything built for you, the accounts, the site, the CRM, the data, should stay with you.
Castells Media Inc, 1298 Antelope Creek Drive, Roseville, California