What Agencies Actually Charge
Published figures across the market:
| Option | Typical monthly fee | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| UK marketing retainer (general) | £1,250 – £3,500 | Across SEO, PPC or social. Not LinkedIn-specific. |
| PPC management (UK average) | ~£1,040 | Management fee only, all platforms |
| LinkedIn Ads specialist | £2,000 – £10,000 | $3,000–$12,000 globally |
| Percentage of spend | 10 – 20% | Common in the US, less so in the UK |
| Offshore flat fee | ~£2,300 ($3,000) | Lower cost, timezone and market-knowledge tradeoffs |
| Freelancer | £800 – £2,500 | Wide variance, single point of failure |
Note that LinkedIn specialists sit meaningfully above the general PPC average. That is not agencies extracting a premium for the word "LinkedIn" — it reflects that LinkedIn campaigns need a larger minimum viable budget to gather data at £2–£3 a click, and that the platform rewards specialist knowledge more than Google or Meta do.
Flat Fee vs Percentage of Spend
The most consequential pricing question, and most buyers never ask it.
Percentage of spend (typically 10–20%)
The problem is structural, not moral. Your agency's revenue rises when your spend rises. Every recommendation to increase budget is also a recommendation to increase their invoice, and every recommendation to cut wasted spend reduces it.
Most agencies on this model are honest. But you are asking someone to advise against their own commercial interest every month, and that is a bad system to design even with good people in it.
It also scales badly. At £50,000 a month spend, 15% is £7,500 — for work that is not five times harder than managing £10,000.
Flat fee
The incentive is neutral. Cutting your wasted spend by 30% costs the agency nothing, so there is no reason not to do it. Budget recommendations can be made on merit.
The tradeoff, honestly stated: at very low spend a flat fee is proportionally expensive. If you are spending £2,000 a month in media, a £2,500 fee is more than your budget. That is a real argument against flat fee at small scale — and usually a signal you are not ready for a specialist agency yet.
The Cost Everyone Forgets: Media
The fee is not the cost. Ad spend is separate and always larger.
The widely quoted floor is $5,000–$10,000 a month in media to gather enough data at $2–$3 a click. In the UK, against smaller audiences, the practical minimum for a genuine full-funnel test is around £3,000 a month. Below roughly £2,000 you cannot run top, middle and bottom of funnel simultaneously — you are running one campaign and calling it a strategy.
Why LinkedIn's floor is higher than Meta's: CPCs are several times higher, B2B audiences are smaller, and sales cycles mean you need months of data before the numbers mean anything. A £500/month LinkedIn test does not produce a small answer. It produces no answer.
What It Actually Costs, All In
| Management | Media | Total / month | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum viable | £2,500 | £3,000 | £5,500 |
| Typical mid-market | £2,500 – £5,500 | £8,000 – £15,000 | £10,500 – £20,500 |
| Scaled programme | £5,500 – £9,500 | £25,000 – £50,000 | £30,500 – £59,500 |
Media is where most of the money goes, which is the point. If your agency fee is a large share of your total, you are paying for management you cannot properly use.
When an Agency Is Not Worth It
Straight answers, including the ones against us.
Under £3,000/month total. There is not enough spend for a specialist to add value beyond their fee. Learn it yourself or hire a freelancer for a few hours a month.
You need one campaign, once. Agencies are built for ongoing programmes. A single launch is a project, and a freelancer or contractor is a better fit.
Your ICP is undefined. If you cannot name the companies you want as customers, no agency can fix that with targeting. That is a positioning problem and you will burn budget discovering it.
Your product is transactional. Short cycles and low deal values usually mean LinkedIn is the wrong platform, whatever anyone charges to run it.
We cover the in-house alternative properly in agency vs in-house vs freelancer.
What We Charge
| Tier | Per month | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| LinkedIn Ads | £2,500 | Full-funnel LinkedIn: strategy, build, creative, TLA content, reporting, bi-weekly calls |
| Full Paid Media | £5,500 | The above plus Google and Meta |
| Paid Media + GTM Outbound | £9,500 | The above plus signal-based outbound off the same dataset |
Flat fee, ad spend separate, no setup fees, no long lock-ins, no line-item invoicing for individual assets. Full breakdown on our pricing page.
We publish this because most agencies do not, and making people book a call to learn whether they can afford you wastes both sides' time.