“Half the money I spend on marketing is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.”

This quote is derived from the original by John Wanamaker (the only change is the original used ‘advertising’ instead of ‘marketing’. There have been very large scale studies that show both that a majority of ad spend is wasted and also that nearly 20% of all ads are fraudulent. But that’s just direct costs, right? I’m hiring an agency to make sure I’m in the ‘not wasted’ half!

This pricing table from WebFX gives a sense of what the going rate is for core digital marketing services:

Even if you’re paying only the low end and not doing PPC advertising, that’s $2,500 for a website plus $4,700 a month! If you use the rule of thumb that says you should spend 8% of your revenue on marketing, you basically can’t even get stared until you’re at $700k in revenue!

Full disclosure, I Googled for a representative chart about digital marketing costs and this was on the first page. I don’t know this firm and have never used them so it’s possible they are putting this out there as a straw man to show how low their prices are in comparison. Let’s see if that’s true. We’ll click through to one of the *View our pricing* CTAs and see how they compare:

*Contact sales*. This firm might be *the best SEO services company in the world* and *have the track record to prove it* but neither of those can guarantee you won’t bust your budget before the SEO work starts contributing to revenue. This is just one firm, too. If you’re being responsible and getting 3-5 quotes from providers that’s 3-5 salespeople you’ll be talking to.

This is why Orchestra exists. Proper application of AI combined with digital marketing experts lets us offer an equivalent product with price transparency (and along the way be cheaper than the ranges listed above). Give Orchestra a shot today.