What digital marketing costs a Delhi NCR business, by business type

Every budget we build in Delhi NCR has three parts. Media, which goes to Google or Meta. Management, which is our fee. And creative, which is the videos and pages the media needs to work. Quotes that give one number are hiding two of the three.

Management on paid media is the higher of 15% of monthly media or ₹50,000 plus GST. The rate on the whole budget falls to 10% once media passes ₹20,00,000 a month, 8% from ₹50,00,000 and 4% from ₹1,00,00,000. Search work is flat: ₹50,000 a month for 30 keywords, ₹75,000 for 50, ₹1,25,000 for 80, ₹2,00,000 for two specialists on your account.

Media has a floor too. Below about ₹50,000 a month, a Google or Meta account does not collect enough conversions to learn from, and you are paying for guesswork. That floor is the same in Noida as it is in Mumbai.

Think a salon in Greater Noida, a tuition centre in Indirapuram, a chartered accountant in Connaught Place. The whole job is being found by people within about fifteen kilometres, so the money goes to local search and a small, tightly geofenced paid campaign.

The sensible budget is ₹50,000 a month on search (our Starter tier, 30 keywords), plus ₹50,000 to ₹75,000 of media with management at the ₹50,000 floor. Call it ₹1,50,000 to ₹1,75,000 a month plus GST, all in. If that is too much, drop the paid side first and keep search, because search compounds and paid does not.

The part people skip is the website. A business with a four-year-old site that loads slowly on a phone will lose the enquiry after winning the click. A new build starts at ₹1,00,000, with hosting and maintenance from ₹20,000 a month.

A D2C brand’s cost is set by creative volume, not by management fees. You need new concepts every fortnight, which means UGC in packs rather than one-off films. Twenty videos cost ₹1,60,000, which is ₹8,000 a video.

A realistic monthly shape for a brand doing ₹25 lakh to ₹75 lakh of revenue: ₹2,00,000 to ₹5,00,000 of media, management at ₹50,000 to ₹75,000, a social retainer at ₹1,00,000, and a 20-pack of UGC spread across a quarter. That lands between ₹4,00,000 and ₹7,50,000 a month including media.

Costs on the auction side are rising on their own. Meta’s 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026 reports average price per ad up 12% year on year with impressions delivered up 14%. The brands holding their cost per order flat are doing it with creative, not bids.

Industrial buyers search in long, specific phrases and they search before they enquire. That makes search the main line and paid media the smaller one, which is the reverse of the consumer pattern.

The usual build for a Faridabad or Ghaziabad manufacturer is search at ₹75,000 to ₹1,25,000 a month (50 to 80 keywords, product and application pages), a B2B website from ₹1,75,000, and ₹50,000 to ₹1,00,000 of media on exact-match search terms with management at the ₹50,000 floor. About ₹1,75,000 to ₹2,25,000 a month plus a one-off build.

This is also where answer engine work pays, because technical buyers ask AI assistants before they open ten tabs. Pew Research, tracking 68,879 Google searches by 900 US adults in March 2025, found people clicked a traditional result on 8% of pages with an AI summary against 15% without one. If your specification page is not the one being summarised, you are not in the shortlist.

Property is the most expensive category in NCR and the reason is simple arithmetic: a site visit is worth lakhs, so everyone bids for the same lead. Budgets here start where other categories finish.

A single project launch in Gurugram or Noida needs ₹5,00,000 to ₹15,00,000 a month of media, with management at 15% (₹75,000 to ₹2,25,000) and a creative line on top for walkthroughs and offer films. Anything under ₹5,00,000 of media in this category buys a trickle of leads that a sales team will not take seriously.

The market itself is holding prices rather than volumes. ANAROCK data reported by Business Today on 5 October 2026 puts Delhi NCR’s average primary-market price at ₹9,980 per square foot in Q3 2026, up 12% year on year, with 13,765 units sold, down 1%. Magicbricks’ Housing Sentiment Index for August 2026, from 2,769 prospective buyers, read 112 nationally with Delhi at 128 and Gurugram at 127, and nearly 69% of buyers expecting flat prices or a rise of up to 5%. Demand exists, patience is longer, and lead qualification matters more than lead count.

A clinic in Noida or Vaishali competes inside a three-kilometre circle, and most of the demand arrives through Google’s local results and reviews. So the first ₹50,000 goes to search and the profile, not to ads.

After that, ₹50,000 to ₹1,00,000 of media on treatment-specific terms with management at ₹50,000 is enough to fill a calendar. Total ₹1,00,000 to ₹1,50,000 a month plus GST, which is less than one month of a junior doctor’s salary.

What we do not recommend for clinics is a social retainer in month one. Appointments come from people already looking. Build the search and review side first, then add content once the calendar is full.

Competition density, mostly. The same search term in Noida has more bidders than it does in Lucknow or Indore, so cost per click is higher and the margin for a lazy landing page is thinner.

The second difference is that NCR buyers compare across cities inside one search. Somebody looking for a flat looks at Noida, Greater Noida and Gurugram in one sitting, and somebody looking for an industrial supplier does not care whether you are in Faridabad or Manesar. Geo-splitting campaigns by city without splitting the message is the most common waste we find in audits.

India’s spend is still moving to digital, which means more bidders next year, not fewer. The dentsu-e4m Digital Advertising Report 2026 has digital growing 19% to close at ₹71,621 crore, estimated at 59% of all advertising spend by the end of 2025, and projected to reach ₹84,977 crore by the end of 2026.

Spreading ₹50,000 of media across Google, Meta and LinkedIn at once. Three half-fed accounts learn nothing. Pick one, get it to a known cost per qualified lead, then add the second.

Running paid traffic to a homepage. A homepage answers twelve questions badly. A landing page answers one well, and the difference in cost per lead is usually larger than any bid change we could make.

Counting leads instead of qualified leads. We ask every client to send sales outcomes back into the account, because a campaign at ₹200 a lead that produces nothing is worse than one at ₹900 a lead that fills a calendar.

If ₹1,00,000 a month is the whole budget, spend it on one thing. Either search at ₹50,000 with ₹50,000 held back for the website, or ₹50,000 of media with management at the floor and no creative budget, which only works if you already own usable video.

What we would not do is buy a ₹1,00,000 bundle covering search, social, paid and content. That is ₹25,000 a month per discipline, which buys a report rather than work.

Our digital marketing cost calculator runs on the prices in this post, so you can put your own numbers in before you speak to anyone.