How Much Does Digital Marketing Cost in 2024?

Cost of Digital Marketing by Business Size

A significant influence on your digital marketing pricing is the size of your company. If you’re a small-to-midsized business (SMB), your digital marketing costs won’t touch the budget of an international corporation.

The size of your business typically influences the type of professional marketing agency you partner with too. The scale of their services and their prices often reflect their target audience, which means it’s unlikely you’d partner with a digital marketing agency that serves the world’s biggest brands.

For your business, as well as Internet marketing strategy, it’s also beneficial to partner with a digital marketing agency that focuses on your specific company size. Our agency, for example, offers tons of expertise when it comes to building digital marketing strategies for mid-sized businesses.

In most cases, your digital marketing budget influences how complex your strategies become. If you’re investing a significant amount in an aggressive PPC campaign, for instance, you can expect to have higher digital marketing costs.

Why?

An aggressive strategy requires more work from your digital marketing team — a PPC campaign also requires a bigger spend, as it’s a form of paid advertising. In short, you’re paying more because you’re buying more.

The same concept would apply if you invested in an integrated set of digital marketing strategies. For example, if you invested in SEO and PPC, as well as content marketing and email marketing, you could expect higher digital marketing prices due to the quantity of services.

Cost of Digital Marketing by Industry

The fact is that industries like non-profit agencies or niche products are going to have less organic search competition for revenue-driving keywords than industries like SaaS, Healthcare, or Home Services.

Here’s an estimate of how the cost of digital marketing services may vary based on industry:

PPC advertising costs $100 to $10,000 per month on average in 2024 (45% of respondents).

PPC advertising is another popular digital marketing service. Like SEO, PPC also focuses on your online visibility. Unlike SEO, however, PPC improves your visibility in search results through paid advertisements.

These advertisements appear above organic search results and feature a green-outlined box that says, “Ad.” Unlike traditional advertising, the only time you pay for your ad is when a user clicks on it. This makes PPC a cost-effective option for many businesses.

On average, businesses make $2 for every $1 they invest in PPC — if you use Google Ads for your PPC campaign, that return on investment (ROI) increases to $8. That’s an impressive return, and one you can use to reinvest in your digital marketing or your day-to-day operations.

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Content marketing costs $5001 to $10,000 a month on average (58% of businesses) — larger businesses often exceed that rate.

Content marketing offers an astounding ROI — it earns 54% more leads than traditional marketing — making it an asset to your digital marketing strategy. Content marketing improves your brand awareness, conversions, and revenue through user-friendly content.

That content can include everything, from guides to blog posts to infographics. While different in their appearance, each type of content provides users value. A blog post, for example, may offer guidance on how to clean a BBQ smoker, while a guide may include a list of recipes to try.

Like SEO, content marketing is an ongoing strategy.

While it can double your website’s conversions, it doesn’t happen overnight.

That’s why, when considering online marketing’s cost, you need to think about the duration of those services. For content marketing to work, you need to produce quality content on a routine basis, as well as continue to optimize it. If you make it a one-time investment, you won’t see the results you expect.

That is why it’s essential to partner with a trusted agency for your digital marketing services, like WebFX. We can explain our different Internet marketing services in-depth, as well as provide guidance on which services offer the most value to your business.

If you’re interested in content marketing, pricing for this digital marketing service depends on the size of your business.

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Social media marketing costs $100 to $5000 per month on average (52% of respondents).

Social media marketing is a digital marketing service that continues to grow in popularity. This service focuses on increasing your online presence, brand awareness, and brand loyalty — benefits that can all lead to increased conversions and company revenue.

For businesses today, social media offers a massive opportunity. Only 26% of companies use social media in their business strategy, providing your company with an easy opening for touting your USPs.

If you invest in a competitive social media strategy, your business can offer more value to users. You can respond to questions and comments, for example, and even help users access their account or make a purchase through a chatbot, which is a feature available on Facebook.

Even if you’re a business-to-business (B2B) operation, social media marketing is valuable. Just through Facebook, more than 40% of B2B marketers have earned clients. Overall, 80% of B2B leads from social media come from LinkedIn.

The most influential factors on social media marketing costs are the number of social networks, which can range from one to five, and the preferred ad spend.

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Email marketing costs $51 to $1000 a month on average (60% of respondents).

Some additional factors that can influence the price of email marketing include email design, as well as the number of monthly emails.

One of the most cost-effective and time-tested digital marketing services is email marketing. This service also focuses on building brand awareness and brand loyalty, which lead to increased conversions and sales.

That is why email marketing offers an unparalleled ROI of $44 for every $1 invested.

It’s essential to partner with an experienced digital marketing agency for that kind of return. WebFX, for instance, offers more than 28 years of experience. We also feature an email marketing platform, EmailMarketingFX, for maximizing your results.

The best part about email marketing is that it also coordinates with other digital marketing services. If you’re investing in email, content, and video marketing, for instance, you can repurpose your videos and content to use in your email marketing campaign.

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Web design costs $501 – $5000 per year  on average (53% of respondents).

Web design is one service that businesses often overlook when investing in digital marketing. Your website, however, has a significant influence on the success of your Internet marketing strategy. It can impact your rankings in search results, as well as the first impression of users.

A brand-new website — or website redesign — also offers a noteworthy ROI. For example, if you invest in user experience (UX) testing, you can expect a $100 return for every $1 you invest. The best part about that statistic? More than 85% of shoppers are happy to pay for a better user experience.

In most cases, web design is a one-time investment.

It’s essential, however, that your business maintains that investment, which is where website maintenance comes into use. That is why you want to plan for this expense in your company’s overall budget.

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On average, you can expect to pay anywhere from $1000 – $145,000 on web development, with most businesses typically paying $1001 – $10,000 per year (50% of respondents).

Web development goes hand in hand with web design.

Web development includes elements such as website security and ongoing maintenance, interactive multimedia, ecommerce functionality, and more.

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Voice search optimization costs $600 to $2000 a month on average in 2024.

A digital marketing service that’s growing in demand is voice search optimization. This service focuses on earning the featured snippet for keywords relevant to your company and audience. While featured snippets appear in regular search results, they’re critical to voice search.

Why?

Because voice assistants, like Siri and Amazon Echo, use the featured snippet to answer a voice search. If someone asks, “how often should you clean your gutters,” for example, voice assistants would respond with the featured snippet shown below.

With almost 50% of adults using voice search each day, this service is becoming more valuable to companies. Like social media marketing, investing in voice search optimization can set your business apart from your competitors and allow you to connect with new consumers in your target audience.

Video marketing typically costs  $1200 to $50,000 on average. The price of video marketing often depends on the scope of the project, which is why it has such a wide price range.

Another service that can influence digital marketing’s pricing is video marketing. This service is like content marketing, as video marketing increases brand awareness, conversions, and sales by creating valuable and informational content for users.

Like content marketing, video marketing is also an ongoing strategy. Investing in it can improve your conversions by more than 85%. That can lead to new leads and clients, which increases your revenue.

With video marketing, you can also improve your overall digital marketing strategy. If you have a content marketing strategy, for example, you can create videos to complement your content. A how-to, for instance, could feature instructional text and video.