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What a $3,750 Retainer Actually Buys
"Marketing retainer" is one of the vaguest things a business can buy. You get an invoice, a report, and a general sense that work occurred. Since our prices are published, it seems fair to publish what's behind them.
This is the Growth tier — $3,750 a month, our middle option. Here's where it goes, what month one looks like against month six, and the honest answer on doing it yourself.
Where the time goes
Roughly, in a steady month:
| Work | Share |
|---|---|
| Campaign management — bids, budgets, search terms, negatives, creative | The largest block |
| Content — pages written, existing pages updated, profile posts | Substantial |
| Technical and local SEO — profile work, citations, site fixes, grid tracking | Steady |
| Reporting and analysis — including the part where someone decides what it means | Modest |
| Communication — calls, emails, the questions that come up | Modest |
The proportions shift with what's working. An account where paid is producing and SEO is compounding needs different attention than one where the site is the bottleneck. A retainer that spends identical hours on identical tasks every month isn't being managed, it's being administered.
Month one is not month six
The single biggest misunderstanding about retainers.
Month one is mostly setup and unglamorous: auditing what exists, fixing conversion tracking that's counting the wrong things, getting lead source recorded properly, rebuilding campaign structure, baseline grid scans. Very little of it looks like marketing and most of it determines whether anything later works.
Months two and three are the expensive part of paid media — the learning period, where cost per lead is higher than it will be. Quitting here means paying for the expensive part and leaving before the cheap part.
Months four to six is where SEO starts contributing and paid should be at steady-state efficiency.
That's why there's a six-month minimum, and it's not a retention device. A three-month engagement means paying the setup cost and the learning period and stopping before the return. We'd rather not take that money.
What it doesn't buy
Worth stating plainly, since "full-service" implies everything.
Media spend. Your ad budget is separate and goes entirely to the platform — we take no percentage of it. At the Growth tier a typical business spends $2,000–$5,000 in media on top.
Unlimited scope. More channels, locations or service lines change the fee — +$650 per channel, +$450 per location, +$300 per service line. That tracks real work rather than punishing growth.
A website rebuild. Separate project, and most businesses need one less than they think.
Someone to answer your phone. The thing that most often limits results, and it isn't ours to fix. We'll tell you when it's the bottleneck, which is often.
Guaranteed rankings or lead volume. Nobody controls those, and anyone quoting them is describing something they can't deliver.
Could you do this yourself?
Genuinely, yes — most of it.
Nothing here is secret. The guides are free and ungated and cover the actual methods, and the DIY playbook sequences them. A committed owner working through it will get most of the way.
What you'd be buying instead is time and pattern recognition. The work is perhaps eight to twelve hours a month done properly — but it's eight to twelve hours you'd currently spend running the business, done in a tool set you'd be learning as you go, with mistakes you'd find out about a quarter later.
When doing it yourself is clearly right: under about $500K in revenue, or when you have someone in-house who enjoys this and has the hours. We turn away businesses in the first category regularly.
When it isn't: when the hours genuinely aren't there, when the cost of a slow-discovered mistake exceeds the fee, or when you've been doing it yourself for a year and know it isn't happening.
The tier question
$1,500 (Foundation) — one primary channel, done properly. Right for a business starting out or testing whether this works.
$3,750 (Growth) — multiple channels, active content, real SEO. Where most of our clients sit.
$6,500 (Scale) — multi-location or multi-service, several channels, heavier content.
Buying up too early is the more common mistake. A business that can't yet fund the media budget for three channels shouldn't be paying for three channels to be managed. Start at the tier your budget genuinely supports and move when the first one is capped — same logic as adding a channel.
Full detail on pricing and how we work. If you're weighing agencies, these are the questions worth asking — including of us.
Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Published September 8, 2026.