How Much Does Inbound Marketing Cost In 2025?

Answering the question “How much does inbound marketing cost” is like asking, “How long is a piece of string”? Inbound marketing pricing, if outsourced, varies vastly based on factors like the scope of services, technology used, and level of expertise required.

This isn’t even taking into account the internal costs of inbound marketing such as building a team, existing marketing campaigns, software licenses and how much marketing is expected to play in overall company growth.

But first - let’s take a breath. The inbound marketing landscape can be tough to navigate and overwhelming when you’re either:

• Getting started with inbound marketing
• Understanding if you’re overspending on inbound marketing

This article answers, in the most primitive way, the average inbound marketing pricing models and money pits you can avoid to get the most bang for your buck and understand whether embarking on your inbound adventure is worth the effort.

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Then download our Pricing Guide. We keep our pricing as transparent as possible so you know our inbound marketing pricing works and what you can expect from your investment.

How Much Does Inbound Marketing Really Cost?

As you will know, there isn’t a set price for inbound marketing services or building a marketing team. However, the problem lies with the vast array of prices you receive which makes it difficult to understand truly how much inbound marketing costs.

Below, we break it down to make it easier for you to understand the costs involved in inbound marketing.

Inbound Marketing Agency Costs

According to research published by AdZooma, the average inbound marketing pricing, per service, in the UK is as follows:

SEO

Services included in study: On-page optimisations, off-page SEO, technical SEO - Please note this does not include content creation or content marketing.

• £901.50 per month (Retainer-basis)
• £1,556.25 per project (One-Off Project-basis)

Organic Social Media

Services included in the study: Day-to-day running of social media accounts, social media strategy, creating social media content and campaigns. There is no reference to other social media marketing activities such as personal brand management.

• £1,120 per month (Retainer-basis)
• £400 per campaign (Project-basis)

Paid Social Media

Services included in the study: Building and executing paid campaigns across social channels, managing paid campaigns, and managing advertising budget.

• £587.50 per month (Retainer-basis)
• £266 per campaign (Project-basis)

It is noted that, although these indicative figures are cheaper than organic social media services, this figure doesn’t include the paid social media budget needed to execute. Expect to pay around 15% of your total advertising budget on agency fees.

Content Marketing

Services included in the study: Creating a content strategy/calendar, blog copywriting, and keyword research.

• £817.90 per month (Retainer-basis)
• £325 per post/article/blog

Search Advertising/PPC

Services included in the study: Keyword research, paid budget management, ad creation, ad optimisation, ad management.

• £1040.90 per month (Retainer-basis)
• £1061.60 per campaign (Project-basis)

As with paid social media, you need to factor your advertising budget into this figure. Numerous reports suggest that inbound marketing agencies are often 15% of your advertising spend and you need to incorporate this into your inbound marketing costs.

Email Marketing

Services included in the study: Email marketing strategy, automated inbound nurture strategy, email copywriting, data segmentation, and email personalisation.

• £1,580.85 per month (Retainer-basis)
• £237.13 per email (Project-basis)

The report by Flowium does make a distinction that this varies based on agency size and low to high-end retainers.

This is all well and good if you’re looking for a one-off marketing solution. But if you’re interested in inbound marketing pricing, then it’s piecing these services together into an end-to-end strategy.

If we consider what a basic, traditional, inbound marketing strategy looks like, then we’re probably looking at the following deliverables:

• X4 Blogs OR x4 short videos per month
• X1 Premium content asset (Gated content usually, but could be a pillar page)
• Ongoing Social Media promotion of assets
• X1 Email nurturing sequence
• X4 Emails per month

Totalling this up, just for the pure cost of the deliverables, this would cost roughly on average £4,500 per month. However, this doesn’t take into account the administrative costs applied when working with a marketing agency. These include:

• Onboarding
• Inbound strategy creation
• Weekly/Bi-Weekly Calls
• Any extra revisions requested

And potentially more.

If we say this comes to about 20% of the overall retainer per month (£911.40), the standard, overall, average inbound marketing price would be around £5,500-£6,500 per month depending on variability with the admin costs.

Freelancing Cost

Inbound marketing pricing is tough to guage with freelancers, as every project and professional comes with a different pricing structure.

Twine reports that the freelance digital marketing rate varies between £19.70 - £394.06 per hour based on a number of different factors.

When calculating freelancing costs though, consider their:

• Scope of Work – More complex projects requiring advanced capabilities generally cost more.
• Experience and Expertise – Marketers with extensive experience and specialised skills typically charge higher rates.
• Industry – Rates vary by industry, with highly competitive sectors often demanding greater expertise.
• Geographical Location – While this guide is general, regional cost-of-living differences can influence pricing.
• Project Duration – Long-term projects may qualify for discounted rates, while short-term or urgent tasks often come at a premium.

With all of these options, it’s important to take stock of the requirements of your project and understand what works best for your business. A freelancer based in the US, if you’re based in the UK, may work well as work gets completed when you’re asleep, but it would require them to be completely self-sufficient with limited opportunities to call each other and check-in.

Building an Internal Marketing Team

We’ve written about building an internal marketing team before and, being completely transparent, this is probably optimal for a lot of larger SME’s and enterprise companies.

Sure, you may outsource for specific projects that your team may not have the expertise to complete, but on the whole, it’s the accepted norm that once you scale, building an internal team is the way to go.

But this is the more costly way to go. We researched this a while back and found the following is the average for specific wages for individual marketing team roles:

• Marketing Manager – £44,405
• Content Creator – £28,448
• Brand Strategist – £58,551
• SEO Specialist – £32,813
• Data Analyst – £40,799
• Public Relations Manager – £41,878
• Website Developer – £35,016
• Designer – £35,336
• Ads Specialist – £41,832
• Social Media Manager – £35,145

Inbound Marketing Software Costs

In this day and age, we can’t talk about how much inbound marketing costs without talking about the ever-growing tech stack you need to scale and be successful.

According to ClickUp, the essential components of a marketing tech stack are:

• CRM - Costs range from free versions with basic features to advanced systems costing £50 to £300 per user per month.​
• Marketing Automation - Prices vary widely, from £40 per month for basic tools to over £2,500 per month for comprehensive platforms.​
• Email Marketing - Entry-level plans start around £10 per month, with advanced features and larger contact lists increasing costs to £200 or more monthly.​
• SEO and Keyword Research tools - Basic tools may be free, while premium tools range from £80 to £400 per month.​
• Online Advertising Platforms - Costs are highly variable, depending on ad spend and platform fees, typically starting from £100 per month.​
• CMS - Open-source options like WordPress are free, but premium versions or additional features can increase this cost substantially.​
• Data Visualisation Tools - Pricing varies, with some tools offering free basic versions and others charging £10 to £50 per user per month.​
• Customer Engagement Tools - Costs range from free basic plans to £30 per user per month for advanced features.
• Sales and Marketing Alignment Tools - Pricing varies, with some tools offering free basic versions and others charging £30 to £75 per user per month.

Like the other expenses above, this varies widely depending on your scope and how you plan to use the software.

However, there are tools like HubSpot (hint, hint) which centralise all these into a single platform. The obvious drawback of using an all-in-one platform like HubSpot is the initial investment, with plans starting at a higher price than using a cost-effective Martech stack. It’s important to note that 75% of HubSpot users say it increased the amount of revenue their company generates and that figure is very similar with alternative platforms.

To get your marketing software spend right, you just need to evaluate the scope and needs of your project now, and how that looks once you scale further. If it’s more cost-efficient in the future to use an all-in-one platform, we would always recommend doing that.

Protecting your Inbound Marketing Investment

Hopefully, that has given you more of an insight into what a typical inbound marketing pricing model would look like.

However, pricing is only part of the equation - making the right investment is just as crucial. Not all agencies and freelancers deliver the same level of value, and the wrong choice can lead to a wasted budget and disappointing results.

To ensure you get the best return on your investment, keep these key considerations in mind:

1. Definition of a Good Result

Let me tell you a story about this one.

I once worked on an in-house team that worked with an outsourced freelancer that promised our company 100+ leads a month; bearing in mind that we were only generating 25 high-quality B2B leads a month in a hyper-competitive industry. He had a background in the industry we worked in and had good reviews on his website so we thought “Why not?”.

Here’s why we shouldn’t have. We didn’t define what a lead actually looked like for us, and whether their idea of what a lead matches up to that.

Surprise - it didn’t. This ‘partnership’ resulted in 100+ unqualified, uninterested, low-intent leads per month that:

• This caused problems for the sales team who had to call them up
• This caused problems for the marketing team who had to try and qualify them
• Blocked up our database full of leads that weren’t interested

Unfortunately, this is probably one of the most prevalent ‘smoke and mirror’ examples we can give to where you may be over investing in inbound marketing without getting an ROI.

As our Managing Director, Ian Guiver, says about generating inbound marketing ROI:

It requires having clear definitions, understanding your goals and the metrics you're managing. And crucially, it requires data to be centralised.

Make sure your lead qualification stages are clearly defined, with obvious criteria to meet before moving on to the following stage. This defends you against overinflated lead numbers and disappointment when passing them over the fence to sales.

Another point to add, if you’re stricter about what counts as a lead, an agency, freelancer or internal marketer will challenge you back. If they stick to a lead target which seems impossible based on your lead classification, usually, it is.

A good marketer will work with you to set expectations, lead and revenue targets and give you a realistic, suitable time frame to hit their goals.

2. Time and Expectations

No matter what people try to sell you, inbound marketing is not a quick fix.

Sure - there are quick wins you can do to drive a short-term result but on the whole, inbound marketing is a long, sustainable marketing play.

We would always recommend waiting twice the length of your sales cycle before trying to see a return on your investment. This gives you enough time for your strategy to ramp up and generate demand and enough time for those leads to convert into customers.

For instance, if your sales cycle is one month, a well-executed strategy could begin delivering results within two months. On the other hand, with a six-month sales cycle, it may take up to a year to see a meaningful return on investment.

Understanding this means you can protect yourself from investing in an outsourced solution that promises a quicker return on investment. Knowing your sales cycles and lead conversion rates is integral before buying into any “get leads quick” schemes.

3. Channels

It’s not uncommon for agencies, freelancers and marketers to have specialisms to lean into.

But, as the decision maker, you need to do your due diligence to make sure the channels you’re investing in will actually be effective. Some channels work especially well for certain industries, but not necessarily yours and that’s on you to make the right decision.

Take manufacturing as an example. Industrial is still a very ‘face-to-face’ industry so investing in events and exhibitions are still a good spend of marketing investment.

For SaaS or technology, however, LinkedIn ads and investing in digital may be a much stronger investment due to the number of decision-makers using social media to gather information. This is exemplified by industry leaders reporting up to a 78% increase in qualified lead generation through strategic social media marketing.

Now, this isn’t to say that you can’t see success by switching the two. SaaS has some very strong events at which you can foster business relationships, and manufacturing has ‘untapped’ digital potential with a lack of competition. But, you need to protect your investment and understand which channel will yield the best return on investment.

One way to do this is to look at first-party data and see where you’ve been successful in the past. If there’s a clear ‘winner’ that outperforms other channels, invest more heavily in that and ensure you have a clear idea of how much you’re going to invest, and how quickly you make a return on that spend.

4. Price

There’s an old saying; sometimes ‘it’s too good to be true’.

The truth is, however much your inbound marketing costs, you get what you pay for. If you employ a freelancer that charges a lot less than the others, then more likely than not you’re going to get a sub-par result. Likewise, if you choose to hire a junior marketer, don’t expect to get marketing director-level results.

The key to making sure you invest properly lies with experience and ensuring you can see a track record of results. When employing a marketing agency, make sure you see a body of work that’s relevant to your industry and companies similar to yours. This can be in the form of:

• Testimonials
• Case Studies
• Use Cases

Likewise, however, make sure you don’t overpay for marketing services. The best way to do this is to follow the tips we have put above. Ensure the channels you’re targeting are relevant to driving revenue, not just ‘leads’, the timelines aren’t misleading and unrealistic and that you’re on the same page when it comes to defining what a successful result looks like for you.

5. Transparency

Finally, make sure you know what you’re paying for in deliverables.

I’ve been there before - promised the world and almost 24/7 work on your brand. However, in reality, I saw very little happening with my marketing strategy and no progress.

Make sure that you have bi-monthly or weekly checkups with your employees or outsourced marketing team and request to see the deliverables. This way, you can be sure that work is happening and that your money isn’t being wasted.

How Axon Garside Can Help You

Hopefully, you have a better idea of how much inbound marketing costs, the pitfalls to avoid when protecting your spending and how to actually generate a return on your inbound marketing investment.

Not to toot our own horn, but the marketing playbook we use at Axon Garside is tailor-made to help businesses generate revenue with transparency at every stage of their journey with us. This even goes as far as our pricing guide labelling the exact cost for each deliverable and service to preserve that transparency for our prospects and clients.

If you’re interested in learning what that looks like for you, then download our pricing guide today to see how we can support you with your inbound marketing goals.