THE LIBRARY · A PLAIN GUIDE
What does a marketing agency actually do for a small business?
The invoice comes in on the first of the month, and the report comes with it. Impressions are up eleven percent. There's a line chart that climbs gently to the right, a pie chart of traffic sources, and a paragraph that says the campaign is "gaining momentum." You read it twice. If someone asked you over dinner what the agency did for you last month, you'd have to guess.
That's usually when the search starts (Google, ChatGPT, or a friend who has an agency too), with the questions the report should have answered: what got done, what it cost, and whether any of it is working.
Short answer? An agency does some mix of about seven jobs. Where they differ is which ones, how often, and whether you ever get to see the work. So we'll go through all seven the way they'd show up in an ordinary month, with the prices agencies publish themselves. At the end there's a check you can run on any agency you pay, including us.1
What are the jobs, and what does a month of each look like?
Agencies sell these jobs under a lot of names: "SEO," "local search," "reputation management," "content." Whatever the proposal calls it, most of what gets sold as digital marketing comes down to one of these seven.
The table shows what a month of each looks like when someone's actually doing it. The third column is the one to keep handy. It's what you should be able to point to at the end of the month on your own, without asking anyone to pull a report.
- Whatever the nameone of the seven
| The job | A month of it, in tasks | What you'd see if it was done | How often a small business needs it |
|---|---|---|---|
| The website | Fixing what's broken, rewriting a weak page, adding a page for a service people ask about | The changed pages, with dates | A little every month, more in the first quarter |
| Search | Writing or improving the pages that answer what customers search for; fixing what stops Google reading the site | New or rewritten pages; a short list of fixes | Steady, slow, measured in quarters |
| Google Business Profile | Posts, new photos of real work, answers to questions, category and hours checks | The posts and photos on your Profile | A few times a month |
| Reviews | Asking happy customers at the right moment, replying to every review | Review requests sent; replies posted | Every week |
| Paid ads | Adjusting search ads, Local Services Ads or Meta ads around what's bringing calls or orders | A list of changes and why each was made | Weekly while ads run |
| Writing and sending to the customers you already have | The emails, in your sent folder | Once or twice a month | |
| Social | Posting, mostly photos of work and people | The posts | Varies more than any other job |
The website
- A month of it, in tasks
- Fixing what's broken, rewriting a weak page, adding a page for a service people ask about
- What you'd see if it was done
- The changed pages, with dates
- How often a small business needs it
- A little every month, more in the first quarter
Search
- A month of it, in tasks
- Writing or improving the pages that answer what customers search for; fixing what stops Google reading the site
- What you'd see if it was done
- New or rewritten pages; a short list of fixes
- How often a small business needs it
- Steady, slow, measured in quarters
Google Business Profile
- A month of it, in tasks
- Posts, new photos of real work, answers to questions, category and hours checks
- What you'd see if it was done
- The posts and photos on your Profile
- How often a small business needs it
- A few times a month
Reviews
- A month of it, in tasks
- Asking happy customers at the right moment, replying to every review
- What you'd see if it was done
- Review requests sent; replies posted
- How often a small business needs it
- Every week
Paid ads
- A month of it, in tasks
- Adjusting search ads, Local Services Ads or Meta ads around what's bringing calls or orders
- What you'd see if it was done
- A list of changes and why each was made
- How often a small business needs it
- Weekly while ads run
Email
- A month of it, in tasks
- Writing and sending to the customers you already have
- What you'd see if it was done
- The emails, in your sent folder
- How often a small business needs it
- Once or twice a month
Social
- A month of it, in tasks
- Posting, mostly photos of work and people
- What you'd see if it was done
- The posts
- How often a small business needs it
- Varies more than any other job
You'll notice reporting isn't on the list. That's deliberate. It sits on top of all seven, and it's the one job that produces a document every month whether or not the other six happened.
A report can look busy in a month when nothing got done, which is a big part of how an effectively useless month goes by without anyone noticing.
(We'll come back to what a report should tell you further down.)
As for how many of the seven you need... most small businesses need two or three, done well. Which ones you need depends on how customers find you.
- A roofer lives on search ads and reviews.
- A restaurant with regulars gets more from email and its Business Profile.
- A clinic usually needs the website and reviews before anything else.
The next section walks through a month of each.
Before we get to that, let's be clear... the math matters.
The report arrives either way. The work may not have happened.
One fee, split seven ways
- $2,000 ÷ 7 jobs = under $300 a job
An agency that sells all seven to a business with five employees is splitting one fee seven ways. At $2,000 a month, that's under $300 a job, which buys a few hours of each. That may not be enough focused time to make an impact.
If a proposal covers everything, ask which two or three they'd put first, and what they'd drop.
What does a good month look like?
Simply put, it looks like a list with a bunch of completed items on it. Every item on it has a date, and a place you could go and see it. Here's what that list might look like for one month at three very different businesses.
Take a roofing company in its busy season, when it's running more of the seven than usual. The ads get adjusted twice a week around which searches turned into real calls. Two sets of job photos go up on the Business Profile. Every finished job gets a review request within a day. And the storm-repair page gets rewritten, because people keep calling to ask whether the company does it.
A restaurant with a loyal lunch crowd has a quieter list. One email goes out announcing the fall menu. The menu itself gets updated on the site and the Profile the same day (a regular who orders off last spring's menu will tell you about it). New photos go up, and the holiday-party page goes live in October instead of December.
For a physical therapy clinic, ads may not be part of the month at all. Maybe the booking page drops two of its seven form fields (an effort to increase submissions), then a page goes up answering the question patients ask most on the first call, and every review gets a reply that mentions what the patient actually wrote.
Task for task, those three businesses have almost nothing in common. What their lists share is that you could check every line yourself: in the ad account, on the Profile, on the site, in your sent folder. Try writing that list for your own agency's work last month. If you can't, ask them for it.
- The ad account
- The Business Profile
- The site
- Your sent folder
What does it cost?
Let's start with the distinction that confuses the most invoices. If an agency runs ads for you, you're paying two different bills. Ad spend goes to Google or Meta and buys the clicks (or, with Local Services Ads, the leads). The agency's fee pays someone to decide where that spend goes.
How that fee is set varies. Some agencies charge a flat fee that stays the same whatever you spend. Others charge a share of your spend, or a fee that steps up as spend grows. One contractor-focused agency explains its rising fee plainly: more spend means more to manage.
That's fair.
It's also true that under either of those last two models, the agency earns more when you spend more. None of them is wrong, but know which one you're signing, because it shapes what the agency has a reason to recommend.
Here's what a few agencies publish themselves:
- That same agency lists Google Ads and Local Services Ads management starting at $2,000 a month, scaling with scope and ad spend. It also says most of its clients put $5,000 to $8,000 a month into search, paid ads and their website (it doesn't say whether that includes the ad spend).
- A large national agency lists search packages from $2,900 to $9,200 a month, each on a six-month commitment.
- A low-cost provider for home-service businesses manages Google Ads for $149 the first month and $249 a month after, not counting the ad budget, and recommends at least $775 a month in ad spend. Its own comparison table puts other agencies at "$3,000 - $10,000+" a month.
Plenty of agencies don't publish prices at all and quote after a call, so published numbers like these are worth having. Put together, they show a wide spread. At the low end, a single packaged service runs a few hundred dollars a month. At the high end, an agency doing most of the seven jobs runs several thousand. Ad spend comes on top of all of it.
The other number to read is the minimum, and terms vary a lot. One large firm typically asks for twelve months on its marketing technology and services like search, though its ads usually run month to month. The national agency above asks for six months on search. The low-cost provider uses no contracts at all. A minimum protects the agency's first few months, while it's learning your business and before results arrive. It costs you whatever you'd have saved by stopping sooner. So add up the fee through the whole minimum, plus the ad spend, before you compare two agencies.
When you're weighing the price, compare it with the professional alternative. Doing it yourself costs nothing on paper and an evening a week in practice, probably more if you've never done this work before. The fairer comparison is a part-time marketing hire: the salary, the tools they'd need, and the time you'd spend managing them.
- One large firm, search: 12 months
- The national agency, search: 6 months
- The low-cost provider: no contract
Add the fee through the whole minimum, plus the ad spend.
What's in the report, and what isn't?
In November 2026, we sat down and read the websites of 71 marketing providers. Nearly all of them said they were transparent, and almost every one pointed to a dashboard as the proof.
A dashboard is worth having, you won't get an argument from us on that one. It tells you whether calls, orders and bookings are moving, and in the end, that movement is what you're paying for.
As a record of the work, though, it's thin. Remember the eleven percent from the top of this piece? Impressions can climb in a month when nobody touched anything, just because it's the busy season. They can also drop in a month of really good work, because a competitor doubled their ad budget.
A chart can't tell those two months apart.
A list of the work can.
So ask for both.
Alongside the numbers, a good agency can give you a dated list of what it did, what it's doing next, and what's waiting on you (photos to approve, say, or a question about pricing). There's no industry rule that says they have to, and plenty don't. But the ones that do make it easy to tell early on whether results are likely to follow, and that's worth a lot when you're three months into a six-month minimum.
| When | What |
|---|---|
| Nov 3 | Paused two searches that brought calls for work you don’t do |
| Nov 10 | Six new job photos on the Profile |
| Next | Rewrite the storm-repair page |
| Your turn | Approve two photos |
Sample entries.
It tells you whether calls, orders or bookings are moving, and how this month compares with last. It shows that something changed.
- Nov 3
- Paused two searches
- Nov 10
- Six job photos on the Profile
- Next
- Rewrite the storm-repair page
It tells you what was done to move those numbers, and why this month looks the way it does. It also tells you what to keep doing, and what to stop.
What can't an agency do for you?
A handful of things, and they're worth knowing before you sign, because each one can make a good agency look bad.
The website. It can't fix a website by sending more people to it. If the site doesn't turn visitors into calls, orders or bookings, more traffic just means paying for the click and then losing the customer anyway. If that sounds like your site, the work starts there. Our piece on whether your website needs a redesign covers how to tell.
The phone. It can't answer your phone, either. An ad that rings a phone nobody picks up has still been paid for.
Happy customers. Reviews are the same story. An agency can send the requests and write the replies, but the customer has to be happy first, and that part's on you. Our guide to getting more Google reviews goes through the asking.
AI answers. Nobody can guarantee that ChatGPT or Google's AI answers will name you, agencies included. We explain why in our piece on showing up in AI search. What an agency can do is make sure your site and your Business Profile state the facts plainly, in text, because that's what those systems read.
Your business. And it can't know your margins, your busy season, or which customers you'd most like more of unless you tell it. Plan on about an hour a month of your own time. If an agency never asks for that hour, it's filling in those answers with guesses.
1hour a monthYour margins, your busy season, the customers you want more of.
Is it worth it?
It can be. It's worth it when the jobs in that table are ones you'd otherwise leave undone, when the business could take more customers, and when you can see the work getting done. It isn't worth it when the fee buys activity you can't check, or when the real problem is the website or the phone.
You also don't need an agency for everything. Keeping your Business Profile current, getting in the habit of asking for reviews, and sending your customers a short email every month or so cover a lot of ground, and you can do all three yourself. Our piece on the Business Profile and your website is a good place to start.
Yes, when the jobs would otherwise go undone, the business could take more customers, and you can see the work getting done.
Not yet, when the fee buys activity you can’t check, or the real problem is the site or the phone.
Where we fit
We sell this work too, so here's ours in short. Marketing Monthly is $2,500 a month for one ad channel, your Business Profile and reviews, one email and one test or page change each month. Ads Monthly is $750 a month for one ad channel on its own, after a $1,500 launch. Either way, you pay Google or Meta directly for the ad spend, and you get a note from us every Friday and a log you can open any time. Here's what both look like.
- AMarketing Monthly
- Price
- $2,500 a month.
- Each month
- One ad channel, your Business Profile and reviews, one email and one test or page change.
- Ad spend
- Paid to Google or Meta directly.
- What you see
- A note every Friday and a log you can open any time.
- BAds Monthly
- Price
- $750 a month, after a $1,500 launch.
- Each month
- One ad channel on its own.
- Ad spend
- Paid to Google or Meta directly.
- What you see
- A note every Friday and a log you can open any time.
On the call, we'll tell you if you don't need us yet. If your site doesn't turn visitors into calls, we'd fix that first (we build those too). If referrals already fill your calendar, we'll say so. And if you'd rather have that question answered in writing, that's what the Marketing Plan is for.
Not sure you’re ready? That’s what the call is for.
Fifteen minutes about your business and how jobs come in today. We’ll tell you whether Marketing Monthly fits, whether a Plan should come first, or whether you don’t need us yet.
