How Much Does Digital Marketing Cost In 2024?

Businesses are increasingly turning to digital marketing to boost their revenue and brand awareness. Pre-Covid, some business sectors could make do without a great deal of online presence because business was booming.

But the pandemic changed the way we live, work and consume forever. Since then, the need for a fully functional, engaging website and a coherent digital strategy has grown steadily with each passing year.

Here, we’ll explore the cost of digital marketing in 2024. Perhaps more importantly, we’ll also discuss the value of digital marketing, delving into the kind of benefits you’re likely to see when you work with a digital agency.

The exponential growth of digital marketing

Those long-forgotten, and now utterly surreal, years in lockdown prompted a massive paradigm shift.

While brick-and-mortar businesses were brought to their knees, digital and e-commerce witnessed unprecedented growth and demand.

In July 2021, UK online sales broke the £10 billion barrier for the first time, with 56% more spent online YoY compared to 2019. That same year, Shopify recorded its first billion-dollar quarter.

Right at the outset of the pandemic, nearly 30% (29.7%) of mobile users in the US started consuming an extra 1-2 hours of social media each day.

As a result, 85.7% of American marketing professionals started leveraging social media posts more, with video content cited as an important tool by more than nearly two-thirds (65.6%).

Digital marketing is more important than ever

Despite the fact that we’ve been able to leave our houses and mingle in shops, bars and restaurants for some time now, many of the digital practices born out of those darker days remain in practice today.

For instance, the amount of UK ad spend earmarked for the Social Media Advertising market is forecasted to reach $10.1 billion in 2024.

Meanwhile, according to The State of Video Marketing 2024, an annual survey of marketing professionals conducted by Southport-based animated video production company Wyzowl, 91% of businesses now use video as a marketing tool – an all-time high since they started tracking this data in 2016.

The point is: digital marketing is more important than ever. And it’s here to stay.

How much does digital marketing cost in 2024 in the UK?

You’re probably aware that most digital marketing agencies don’t tend to splash their prices around the internet.

This is generally because no two clients or projects are the same, which means pricing tends to be bespoke – albeit based on whatever tried-and-tested pricing structure the agency in question uses.

Taking inflation into account, the average cost of digital marketing per month is £2,200. But of course, what you will pay depends specifically on the services you need and the market niche your business occupies.

The average monthly retainers for digital marketing services are as follows;

• Marketing Strategy: £1,000
• Content Marketing: £1,200
• PPC: £1,600 (excluding media spend)
• SEO: £1,200
• Social Media Marketing: £2,400
• Website Maintenance & Support: £200

The average cost of a website in the UK worked out at £6,600.

Taking the plunge and investing in digital marketing

“You have to speculate to accumulate as the saying goes. You can generally expect to get more out of your business the more you put in. It’s almost impossible to make money without investment. If you simply have nothing to invest, then you need to be realistic about your returns,” says Resident North Co-Founder and Creative Director, Linzi Hunter. “As an agency we are very confident about getting results for our clients so we tend to work towards value based pricing. We align our goals with our clients’ goals and our pricing is appealing for its ROI focus”.

Linzi continues “We work hard to find niches and untapped opportunities for our clients and take advantage of their natural strengths as a business. We of course appreciate that it can be a daunting prospect investing in digital marketing, especially for smaller businesses – but a good digital marketing agency will quickly prove its worth in ROI. When you’ve got talented digital marketing experts who truly care about your business, the sky’s the limit in terms of the growth and success your business can achieve”.

Resident North are also based in Liverpool which allows us to offer more competitive rates than our Southern competition. You can read more about how an SEO agency in Liverpool compares to London.

How much should you spend on digital marketing?

According to Deloitte, marketing comprised roughly 13.6% of a company’s total budget in 2023. That’s up 3.9% from the two previous years.

Many marketers expect their annual budgets to increase in 2024.

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So let’s say your annual revenue is £250,000, then at 13.6%, your marketing budget for the year should be £34,000. This works out to be £2,833 per month.

We generally tend to advise our clients to be ringfencing at least 10% of their annual revenue for digital marketing.

If you’re weighing up the next steps for your business online, or maybe you’re venturing out there for the first time, then please don’t hesitate to get in touch for a chat. You can also request a quote from us.