Straight answers on marketing budgets, agencies versus DIY, why Google Ads stop working, how long SEO takes, and what a marketing system actually is.
Size it from lead value, not revenue. Average sale multiplied by close rate gives what one enquiry is worth; pay a fraction of that to acquire one. A $2,000 sale closing at 25% means each lead is worth $500, so $100-150 to acquire one is rational. The 5-10% of revenue rule only tells you what you can afford.
Retainers typically run from a few hundred to several thousand a month. One-off builds are a fixed project fee. Ours is $1,999 once, with no retainer and no ongoing commitment, and you own everything at the end.
A retainer ties an agency income to time spent, which quietly rewards slow work. A flat fee rewards finishing and caps your downside at a number you decide today. The trade-off is honest: if you need campaigns managed every week indefinitely, a retainer is genuinely the better structure.
Start by calculating what one customer is worth, including repeat business. Until you know that number, any budget is arbitrary. Most owners find their customer is worth far more than assumed, because they only counted the first invoice.
DIY if you have more time than money and a small local market. Hire in-house when marketing is genuinely a permanent full-time job. Use an agency for capability you cannot justify employing. If your offer is not converting the people you already speak to, none of these fix it.
Everything: ad accounts, landing pages, email lists, analytics and content, all in your name. Agencies that retain ownership make switching mean starting over. Ask before you sign, not after.
Three cases. Your offer does not convert, so more enquiries just means more people declining. You cannot handle more work, so raising prices is the better move. Or you cannot measure anything, so you will never know what worked.
Usually everything after the click. Check in order: search terms with no buying intent, clicks landing on your homepage instead of a matching page, slow follow-up, and missing conversion tracking. Ad copy is the last thing to blame and the first thing most people rewrite.
The clicks prove the ad worked. The failure is after it: landing page, offer clarity, or response time. People contact several providers and buy from whoever answers first, so an enquiry answered four hours later is usually already lost.
Fastest to slowest: referrals and past customers, Google Business Profile, paid search, partnerships, then content and SEO. Before adding any of them, fix response time, contact your existing customer list, and check whether your prices are too low.
Referrals and past customers, by a wide margin. Both cost time rather than money and are consistently underused. For local services, asking for a review the moment work is finished is the highest-return unpaid activity available.
Three to six months for meaningful organic traffic, closer to twelve for competitive terms. Local SEO moves faster: a properly completed Google Business Profile can influence the map pack within weeks. Anyone promising rankings in days is describing something that does not exist.
Impressions rise before clicks. If Search Console shows your pages being displayed for relevant searches, even at low positions, the process is working. Three months with no impressions at all means something structural is broken.
Both, for different horizons. Ads produce enquiries within days and stop when you stop paying. SEO compounds and keeps working after the work is done. Treating them as alternatives usually means picking wrong.
A connected path from stranger to customer: attention brings them in, a landing page converts interest into contact, follow-up builds enough trust to buy, and measurement shows which stage leaks. Most businesses have tactics rather than a system, because nothing hands off to anything else.
Custom strategy, landing page, email sequences, ad campaign setup, Google Business optimisation, content calendar and analytics dashboard. Built in 30 days for a $1,999 flat fee, and you own all of it.
We do not quote a number, and anyone who does before seeing your market, margins and capacity is guessing. Results depend on your prices, close rate and follow-up speed, which we advise on but do not control. We build the system; operating it is yours.
Service businesses with a $500+ average sale: law, home services, health, real estate and finance. Below roughly $500 the arithmetic of paid acquisition gets difficult, and we will say so rather than take the money.