In last week’s blog post, we explained how you can determine an appropriate jewelry marketing budget and plan your marketing spend based on your current circumstances and goals. If you’re struggling to imagine how that money will be spent, then you’ll definitely want to read this post, which explains how much you can expect to pay for various types of marketing services when enlisting the assistance of an outside consultant or agency.

Please consider the following as general guidance only, since prices for marketing services can vary based on many factors, including your geographical location, your individual goals, the amount of work that needs to be done, consultant/agency experience, and more. However, if you encounter a service that costs significantly less or significantly more than the ranges I provide here, then you should be wary and move forward with caution. In those cases, the service provider may be inexperienced or unqualified, or they could be trying to swindle you.

You should also know that you can probably outsource many of these marketing services to an overseas freelancer, who can perform the work at low cost. However, before you decide to do that, you should consider the headaches involved with language barriers and cultural differences. Furthermore, the very nature of freelance work means the contractor is likely delivering your finished product on a piecemeal, as-needed basis, so that person will never have the chance to become intimately familiar with your brand. As a result, the deliverables may be inconsistent and require multiple revisions; the quality may suffer. Developing a long-term relationship with a consultant or agency who can invest the time, effort, and expertise in your brand will help you ensure that the job gets done right the first time and that the work is consistent with the professional image you want to present to your customers.

Below, you’ll find approximate pricing for content marketing, search marketing, social media marketing and advertising, influencer marketing, email marketing, event marketing, branding, and ecommerce optimization, all common marketing services that today’s jewelry brands need.

Content Marketing

Content marketing involves two major components: content strategy and content creation. To hire a professional who can create a content strategy, you should expect to pay a one-time fee of $500 to a few-thousand dollars, depending on how many channels you’re using and how multifaceted the strategy will be. For written content like blog posts, which would be created to support your content strategy, you can expect to pay between $150 to $700 per piece, depending on the word count, the amount of SEO optimization desired, the amount of research involved, and more. Of course, you can always source cheap content from sites like Fiverr, but the result will probably look cheap. If you’re thinking about adding video to your content marketing mix, you can expect to pay between $1000 and $3000 per finished minute when working with a semi-professional video production company. Yes, video is expensive!

Search Marketing

How much should you be paying for assistance with search engine optimization? You can definitely get started on your own for free by executing some quick wins. Paid tools like Moz and SEMRush, which can support and streamline your search engine optimization efforts, cost between $79/month and $400+/month. Hiring a consultant or an agency will cost between $500 and $5000 per month depending on the scope of the work. The process of optimizing a website for search engines involves many moving parts, so you’ll want to get crystal clear on what the agency is promising before you agree to any service offerings or packages.

Social Media Marketing and Advertising

Of course, social media marketing can cost nothing (excluding your time) if you do it all yourself. However, you’re probably going to have to spend some money on high-quality product and lifestyle photography. Hiring an agency to handle your social media marketing can cost as little as $500/mo. for very basic planning and posting on one platform like Instagram (with little-to-no original content creation, so you have to provide all the content) and can cost up to $4000 for very comprehensive management. On the high end, a consultant or agency would be managing multiple social media platforms, developing a strategy with a plan and goals, creating and posting original content according to the strategy, monitoring KPIs, interacting and engaging with potential customers, and more.

In addition to organic social media marketing, you may want to add paid social media advertising campaigns to your marketing mix. I highly recommend hiring a professional to handle social media advertising for you, since setting up and executing successful advertising campaigns take skill and expertise. In addition, since you’ll be spending money on the ads, you’ll want to feel confident that your money is being spent efficiently. To be frank, advertising platforms like Facebook Business Manager and Google Ads are not very intuitive to use; all the clients I know who have tried navigating these platforms themselves end up feeling very frustrated and defeated. They may be able to figure out how to initially set up the campaign, but they’re ever quite sure they’ve done it correctly or are spending their money the right way. Furthermore, they may not understand how to interpret the results.

Without factoring in the actual advertising budget, a consultant or agency will cost you an initial setup fee and then a monthly maintenance fee that’s usually a percentage of the monthly ad spend. The setup fee can be between $250 and $1000. Typically, when it comes to brands with larger advertising budgets, an agency will charge a maintenance fee that amounts to 10-20% of the monthly ad budget. Or they may opt to charge a set monthly retainer or flat fee. For the ads themselves, my small business clients usually invest about $200 and $500 per month. However, some Facebook ad experts will argue that you need to spend a few thousand per month on ads to get the data you need to iterate effectively and to see any results.

Influencer Marketing

A number of factors will impact how much an influencer charges for his or her services: follower count, reach and engagement, how you’d like the influencer to feature your product, the amount of work involved, the number of channels being used, and more. In addition, if you’re communicating with the influencer via an agency, then that agency will also charge a premium. To give you a general idea, mid-tier Instagram influencers (with 50,000–500,000 followers) typically charge $500 to $5000 for a single Instagram post. For more specific information and to learn more about the going rates for influencer marketing and various platforms, check out a regularly-updated resource like Influencer Marketing Hub or reach out to some influencers yourself – most would be happy to send you information about their pricing.

Email Marketing

The cost of email marketing depends on factors like: how many subscribers you have, how often you send emails, your email marketing goals, and more. First, you’ll need to consider the operating costs of your email marketing platform. For example, Mailchimp offers a free plan that allows you to maintain 2,000 contacts on one list. After you exceed 2,000 contacts, the pricing ranges from $9.99/month to $299/month. Working with a consultant or agency to help you manage and execute your comprehensive email marketing strategy can cost you $500 per month or more, depending on how frequently you email your subscribers and how sophisticated you want to get with tactics like automation, personalization, and segmentation.

Event Marketing

Of all the services on this list, event marketing varies the most, since events can be scaled from very small and intimate with mostly DIY elements to very large and elaborate. Furthermore, most events are now being held virtually, so the cost of a physical location is no longer a variable. Instead, brands need to worry about costs associated with technology and paid social media promotion. Theoretically, virtual events can be executed for free, minus any costs to promote the event. Professionally produced in-person events can cost as little $5000 and be as expensive as a few hundred thousand dollars.

Branding

Working with a graphic designer to refine your branding definitely requires a significant investment, but your brand is a long-term commitment that can make or break your business. An original logo will cost between $750 and $5000. A complete brand identity and style guide will cost you $3000 on the low end but can cost as high as $20,000 depending on the designer’s experience and level of involvement. Most independent graphic designers I know will charge between $3000 and $6000 for the following comprehensive branding services: brand kickoff workshop, mood board presentation, branding directions/brand system, and a brand style guide.

Ecommerce Optimization

How much can you expect to pay a professional to set up your ecommerce website? First, you’ll have to consider the technology costs. A platform like Shopify will cost you $29/month on the low end and $299/month on the high end. Website hosting will cost about $5/mo. If you purchase a pre-built premium Shopify theme, that theme will cost you approximately $180, but you’ll likely have to customize it to make it work for your brand. You can hire a developer to customize the pre-built Shopify theme for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending on the complexity of your requirements. For a completely customized Shopify store, you can expect to pay a design agency between $5000 and $20,000.

Do any of these numbers surprise you, or do they match your expectations? Do you feel comfortable investing the money into the marketing services that you need? What reservations do you have?