What a marketing retainer should cost a company of your size

A monthly retainer with a competent supplier in the Gulf starts at roughly what one mid-level marketing hire costs. Ours is from USD 3,000 a month for the department, and from USD 5,000 for the fractional tier, where Aziz is personally engaged in the business rather than supervising it.

That is the number. The more useful question is what you are comparing it against, because almost every firm compares it against the wrong thing.

The comparison that matters is not agency A against agency B. It is any supplier against the cost of doing the same job in-house, which is a larger and much less predictable number than most managing directors assume. What follows breaks down both sides. If you want ours without the argument around it, it sits on the pricing page.

Salary is the part everyone budgets for, and it is not the whole cost. The rest moves with the emirate or city, the seniority, the nationality of the candidate and how you structure the role, so treat this as a list of components rather than a total. Anyone who hands you one figure for this has not priced a real hire.

• Salary, plus housing and transport allowances where they sit outside it
• Visa, residency and medicals, including dependants if you are competing for the candidate
• Mandatory medical insurance, and end of service accrual building quietly in the background
• Annual flights, leave, and whoever covers the work while they are away
• Equipment, and the licences a marketer needs: design, scheduling, analytics, email, listening
• Recruitment fee, commonly a share of the first year's salary
• Your own management time, which nobody counts and which is the cost that actually hurts

Then there is the risk, which is the real number. A hire who is wrong takes a season to become obviously wrong, longer than that to replace, and leaves a half-built plan behind. You pay for that twice, and the second time you pay for it with a year of the market gone.

Set the money aside for a moment, because the stronger argument is not about price. The job you are hiring for does not fit inside one person. It needs someone who can set a strategy, someone who can write, someone who can run paid media without burning the budget, someone who understands search in two languages, a designer and a video editor.

No single hire has all six. The good ones have two, are competent at a third, and quietly outsource the rest to freelancers you then end up managing. So the honest in-house comparison is not one salary. It is one salary, plus a freelance budget, plus your time coordinating them. Or it is three salaries.

That is the case for outsourced marketing as a structure. For roughly the cost of one person you get the roles a department needs, already assembled and already used to working with each other. What the department contains is a list of people and responsibilities, not a promise about results.

A retainer should buy accountability for one agreed outcome, plus whatever work that outcome turns out to require. Our rule is short: if you would expect it of an in-house marketing department, we do it. Your own team would not send you a quote for a landing page, so neither do we.

What it should never include is media spend. Money paid to Meta, Google, LinkedIn or Snapchat should be yours, set with you, paid by you, and visible in your own accounts. A retainer that quietly contains the media budget hides the margin and removes your ability to judge either half of it.

It should also not carry a scope list so precise that every extra request becomes a negotiation. Four posts, two articles and a report is not a department, it is a subscription to activity. The shape you want is one outcome and the work it takes, because that is the only arrangement that survives the month when the plan has to change.

For the cost of one mid-level hire you get a department instead of a person. That is the whole pricing argument.

Retainer

Right when the work is continuous and the value compounds: pipeline, search, reputation, a sales team that needs a steady supply of conversations. Wrong when you have one discrete thing to build and nothing after it.

Project

Right for a website, a rebrand, a launch, a piece of research. A defined start, a defined end, a defined thing you can hold at the end of it. Buy it as a project, and resist the conversion into a retainer until you have seen whether it worked.

Hourly

Right for advice and very little else. Hourly pays a supplier for time, so every efficiency they find costs them money. It is a good way to buy two days of a senior person's thinking. It is a poor way to buy execution, because the incentive points the wrong way and you end up policing timesheets instead of results.

Most Gulf firms need a retainer for the continuing work and an occasional project alongside it. Anyone selling you hourly execution is either very confident or has not worked out what the job involves.

There is no honest average cost per lead, and a supplier who quotes one before looking at your business is guessing with your money. It moves with the value of your deal, the length of your sales cycle, how contested your terms are, the strength of the offer and, more than any of those, how fast you follow up.

What you can do is work backwards, which takes ten minutes. Take the margin on one new client. Decide what share of it you would happily pay to win one. Divide that by your conversion rate from enquiry to client. The result is a cost per qualified lead you can afford, and it is the figure a paid media plan should be built against, agreed before the first campaign runs rather than discovered three months later.

Email works the same way. People ask what email marketing costs as though it were a product. It is a line inside a department: the tool costs very little, the list is already yours, and the real cost is the time to write something worth opening. Sold on its own it becomes a deliverable. Inside a plan it is a channel. The wider point is in lead generation is not the job.

From USD 3,000 a month for the department. That is an account manager, a digital manager and strategist, a growth manager and a social media manager on your account, with our paid media, search, design and video teams behind them. From USD 5,000 for the fractional tier, where Aziz is in the business himself.

Media spend sits outside that and is paid by you. There is no charge per deliverable, no setup fee, and no separate invoice when you need a landing page in a hurry.

What moves the number is scope and pace: how many markets, how many languages, how much has to be built from nothing, and how quickly you want it. What does not move it is your revenue. We do not price against what we think a client can afford. It is a bad way to run a business on either side of the table.

Hire in-house when marketing is the business. If you are a consumer brand where creative volume is the whole game, or a software company whose growth runs on a product loop, that capability belongs inside the company and should be built there, even though it will cost more than a retainer.

Hire in-house when you have the management capacity to run a marketer properly. Someone senior has to set direction, review work and make decisions every week. If nobody has those hours, the hire will drift and you will conclude that they were the wrong person when the arrangement was the wrong shape.

And buy nothing at all if your follow-up is broken, if your own people describe the offer three different ways, or if the business is about to change shape. We have said all three to prospects. It costs us a sale and saves them a year. Working out which applies to you is the first job, and the questions to ask a supplier will get you most of the way there.