Three quotes for the same social brief in the UK right now: £200/mo, £1,500/mo, £8,000/mo. All real. All selling completely different things.
This is the honest tier-by-tier 2026 breakdown, including the metric trap that makes 70% of agency reports look great while delivering nothing.
The four social-media-agency tiers
1. Freelance scheduler, £200–£500/mo
What you pay: A flat monthly fee, sometimes hourly at £25–£40.
What you get: Someone schedules posts. Usually 8–12 a month, content sourced from stock libraries, captions written by template. No paid management. Reporting in screenshots from the platform's native dashboard, impressions, reach, engagement rate.
Who it's right for: Brand-new businesses testing whether social is worth investing in at all. A month at £200 costs less than a single agency strategy session, and if the platform isn't pulling its weight you've found out cheap.
The trap: This is the tier where most "social isn't working for us" stories start. The freelancer hits the engagement-rate KPI in their report, but the engagement is meaningless because the audience isn't your buyer.
2. Boutique agency, £750–£2,500/mo
What you pay: A monthly retainer, ad spend separate. Our Starter is £750, Growth is £1,200.
What you get: A monthly content calendar, custom-designed posts, strategy review on the call. Light paid management on Meta. Performance reports start to mention conversions, not just engagement. The senior person who designed the strategy is the same one running it day-to-day.
Who it's right for: Most UK SMEs. The cost-to-outcome curve flattens here, spending £4,000/mo isn't 4× better than £1,000/mo; it's maybe 1.5× better.
3. Full-service agency, £2,500–£6,000/mo
What you pay: A larger retainer, usually with a 6–12 month minimum. Our Pro tier sits here at £2,200/mo.
What you get: Multi-platform management, full paid-ads management on Meta and LinkedIn (sometimes Google), A/B testing on creatives, conversion-API set up properly, weekly performance reports, bi-weekly strategy calls. Reporting tied to revenue or qualified leads, not impressions.
Who it's right for: Businesses where social is a real lead channel, usually B2B SaaS doing LinkedIn-led demand gen, or B2C e-commerce running Meta as their primary ad platform.
4. Full London agency, £6,000–£20,000/mo
What you pay: A retainer that covers the agency's office rent, account director, project manager, junior designer, junior copywriter, paid-media buyer, 5–7 people on your account.
What you get: A polished but slow-moving operation. The work is good but your direct contact is two layers from the people doing the work. Above £10,000/mo you're mostly paying for the agency's London office and the structure to handle Fortune-500 clients.
Who it's right for: Brands spending £50,000+/mo on paid alone, where the ad spend justifies a full team to manage it.
The vanity metric trap (and how reporting should actually look)
Most agency reports show four things: impressions, reach, engagement rate, follower growth. Three of these are vanity metrics that don't tell you whether the spend is paying back.
A real social-media report has four numbers and a paragraph:
- Qualified leads or revenue attributed to social (with conversion-API tracking, not modelled attribution)
- Cost per lead or sale for paid; cost per qualified lead for organic
- Top-performing content piece with a hypothesis why
- Worst-performing content piece with a hypothesis why
Plus a paragraph of plain-English commentary on what's changing next month. If your agency's report doesn't show numbers 1 and 2, ask for it, most will route around the request because their tracking isn't set up to deliver them.
Where most UK SMEs land
The £750–£2,500/mo range, on a 3-month minimum then month-to-month. The reasoning:
- Below £750/mo, the work is mostly scheduling with shallow strategy. Diminishing returns.
- Above £2,500/mo, the spend is justified only if social is your primary lead channel and the budget is matched by ad spend on the platform.
- Sweet spot: senior strategist + designer team, fixed scope, monthly reporting tied to leads, ad spend separate so it goes to the platform not the agency.
Where do we sit
Our social media pricing is £750 / £1,200 / £2,200 per month. Ad spend always separate, your money goes directly to Meta or LinkedIn, never through us. Conversion-API set up from week one. Monthly one-page reports with the four-number format above.
Book a 20-minute call for a quote. We won't pitch you on £4,000/mo if your business doesn't need it, most UK SME briefs sit at £750 or £1,200.