What digital marketing services actually include, and what each part costs

Ask ten agencies in Delhi NCR what digital marketing services covers and you will get ten different lists. Ours has nine parts: search (SEO, plus answer and generative engine work), paid media, social media, content, video and UGC, influencer work, websites, apps, and measurement. Every one of them is sold in a different unit, which is exactly why two quotes at the same number can describe completely different amounts of work.

A retainer is priced per month. A website is priced per build. UGC is priced per pack of videos. Paid media management is priced as a share of what you spend. So when one proposal says ₹1,00,000 and another says ₹1,00,000, the first could be four videos and twelve creatives while the second is a whole website.

The quickest way to read a proposal is to find the unit, then ask what you get per unit. Four videos a month or eight. Thirty keywords or eighty. One shoot day or none. If the proposal will not tell you, that is your answer.

SEO, answer engine work and generative engine work start at ₹50,000 a month plus GST for 30 keywords. Growth is ₹75,000 for 50 keywords, Scale is ₹1,25,000 for 80, and a resource-based engagement with two specialists sitting on your account is ₹2,00,000. Every tier includes monitoring of how you appear inside AI answers, because that is no longer a separate product.

The reason it is not separate is in the click data. Pew Research tracked 68,879 Google searches from 900 US adults in March 2025 and found that when an AI summary appeared, people clicked a traditional result on 8% of those pages, against 15% when no summary appeared. Sessions ended on 26% of pages with a summary, against 16% without one.

Google also retired the FAQ rich result in May 2026, so the old trick of bolting FAQ markup onto a thin page to win extra space has stopped working. What still works is being the page that answers the question in plain words, with a number and a source, high up. That is the work we are paid for.

Performance marketing management costs the higher of 15% of your monthly media or ₹50,000 plus GST. The rate on the whole budget drops to 10% once you spend ₹20,00,000 a month, 8% from ₹50,00,000 and 4% from ₹1,00,00,000. Media is paid separately, straight to Google or Meta.

The percentage exists because the work scales with the spend. A ₹1,00,000 account needs two campaigns and a weekly look. A ₹50,00,000 account needs daily bid and creative decisions, a feed, and someone reading the CRM. Below about ₹50,000 a month of media there is not enough data to learn from, so that is the floor we recommend.

Costs on the auction side keep moving. Meta’s 10-Q for the quarter ended 30 June 2026 reports average price per ad up 12% year on year, with ad impressions delivered up 14%. You pay more per impression each year, which is why the creative you feed the account matters more than the targeting.

Social Essentials starts at ₹1,00,000 a month and covers 4 to 6 videos and 12 static creatives. Social plus AI is ₹1,25,000 and adds two 30-second AI films on top of 6 to 8 videos and 15 creatives. Social plus Production is ₹2,00,000 and includes a shoot day with in-house UGC, which is the only tier where someone turns up with a camera.

Video is where the money has gone. The dentsu-e4m Digital Advertising Report 2026, published on 2 February 2026, puts social media at 29% of India’s digital ad spend (₹21,057 crore) with online video at 28%, and expects online video to reach a 29% share by the end of 2026 after 22.3% growth.

Media spend and creator fees are not inside any retainer. Neither are production costs beyond the shoot day included in the top tier. We say that out loud in the first meeting because it is the single most common reason a budget blows up in month two.

UGC video is sold in packs: 5 for ₹75,000, 10 for ₹90,000, 20 for ₹1,60,000. That last one works out at ₹8,000 a video, which is the cheapest usable creative volume we sell. Brand video runs 10 for ₹1,50,000, 20 for ₹2,75,000 and 30 for ₹3,57,000.

AI video starts at ₹75,000 per 30 seconds, or ₹2,00,000 a month on a retainer that produces 8 to 10 films. It suits a brand that needs a new angle every fortnight and cannot shoot every fortnight.

The honest rule on volume is that the pack should match the spend. If you are running ₹2,00,000 a month on Meta, five videos a quarter will not hold up. Twenty will.

Creator fees are the big number and they are not ours. A nano creator costs ₹10,000 to ₹15,000 a deliverable. Micro sits at ₹30,000 to ₹1,00,000. Macro and celebrity work runs ₹1,00,000 to ₹25,00,000. Our fee for running it is ₹75,000 or 10% of media, whichever is higher.

The category is still small against paid media. EY and Collective Artists Network’s Big Bang Social put India’s influencer marketing industry at ₹2,344 crore for 2024 and projected ₹3,375 crore by 2026, which is a fraction of the ₹71,621 crore digital advertising market dentsu measured. Treat it as one line in a plan, not the plan.

Websites start at ₹1,00,000. A B2B site starts at ₹1,75,000, a corporate site at ₹2,25,000 and ecommerce at ₹2,50,000. The difference is not page count, it is how much of the site has to be built as a system rather than a layout.

Hosting and maintenance from ₹20,000 a month is the line that gets left out of most budgets. A site with no one maintaining it loses speed, breaks forms and quietly stops converting.

Apps are priced by platform. A progressive web app is ₹75,000. Standard is ₹1,49,999. Advanced, meaning native iOS and Android, is ₹2,29,999. Anything custom starts at ₹2,99,000.

Analytics is not a line item we sell on its own. It sits inside every retainer, because without it we cannot tell you which of the nine services paid for itself. A strategy sprint, if you want the plan before the retainer, starts at ₹75,000.

What we set up is the dull version: conversions that match real enquiries, lead source captured in the CRM, and a monthly read that compares cost per qualified lead rather than cost per click. Brand identity and packaging work, when a business needs it before any of this, starts at ₹1,75,000.

Start with one job to be done. If you need enquiries next month, that is paid media plus creative, so the floor is about ₹1,50,000 (₹50,000 management on ₹1,00,000 of media) plus a UGC pack. If you need enquiries next year at a lower cost, that is search, and the floor is ₹50,000 a month held for at least six months.

Most of the businesses we work with in India run two services, not nine. Search and paid. Or social and UGC. Adding a third before the first two are measured is how agencies get fired.

If you want to sanity-check a number before you talk to anyone, our digital marketing cost calculator uses these same prices and prints a range you can take to your board.