How Much Does it Actually Cost to Work with Growth Division? (+ B2C/B2B Budget Breakdowns)

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Based on 100+ proposals sent in the last 12 months.

Price and budget are topics that come up in almost every single conversation with potential Growth Division clients. Normally multiple times, in fact. 

And I’m willing to bet this is also the same experience of every other agency founder out there. So why are we agencies so bad at making this information available? 

Yes, each arrangement is bespoke. Yes, each client is different. But surely a bit of transparency here helps both sides?

This post is an experiment in radical candour. I’ve crunched the numbers on all the proposals Growth Division has sent in the last 12 months to give a clearer picture of how much we charge, and where this money goes.

TL;DR: the cost of working with Growth Division:  

• Our average Phase 1 (month 1) cost is £5,600 
• Our average Phase 2 (month 2+) recurring cost is £5,150 
• The most common number of marketing channels running is 3

Whether you’re interested in working with us or just looking for some up-to-date info on the price of working with a growth marketing agency, let’s dig into the data. 

Our approach to pricing at Growth Division

Before I go deeper into the numbers, here’s a broad overview of how we approach our pricing:

How we calculate the monthly client cost

We assemble your growth team from our expert network of vetted freelance channel managers and Growth Strategists. Each channel manager offers different monthly packages, and we add the best fit for your business into your proposal, plus a portion of time with your Growth Strategist (fractional CMO). 

The fee for the first month (what we call Phase 1) is typically slightly different, as this is a setup and strategy month. But for month 2 onwards (what we call Phase 2), when we’re actually running each marketing channel, the monthly cost remains the same. Your proposal will show an itemised breakdown of exactly where this money is spent, and which channel experts we’ve brought in for your team.

Productised retainers over value-based pricing

Some agencies and freelancers adjust their fee according to how much value they think their work will bring to your business. This is a fair approach, but it’s not the one we take. 

This is partly because we’re a growth marketing agency, and the goal is always to experiment. Even if we’re confident in a channel, we can’t guarantee it will work for your business. And honestly, it’s also partly a simplicity thing: when it comes to pricing, we want transparency and ease for us, our clients, and the experts we work with. 

This pricing approach means that we’ve seen several examples of our B2B clients getting crazy ROI on their spend with us (sometimes from their very first successful sale): 

🎯 Like LUX Rewards, which got a 50,000% return on their total project investment with GD. 

🎯 Or Retain International, which enjoyed a 193% return on investment from just their first sale, and still works with us today. 

🎯 Or Eat Sleep Cycle, where we drove €1,000,000 in new sales (comparing YoY) in the first 6 months of launching with them, driving massive return on our fees.

📕 Find out more: Explore our case studies

So why do I still ask about your budget?

Despite our fixed pricing approach, I will still ask about your marketing budget. Here’s why: 

1. To check you have enough budget to meet a minimum viable marketing spend with Growth Division (I like to establish this early so neither of us wastes any time). 

2. A bigger budget means we can test more channels early on and find your best-performing channels more quickly. You also benefit from economies of scale here; each channel effectively becomes cheaper. 

3. A bigger budget means we can take out more comprehensive packages for channels with a high confidence level. This, in turn, means we can accelerate the performance of these channels by carrying out more activity there each month.

The average monthly cost of working with Growth Division 

I analysed the numbers from all the proposals we sent across the last 12 months (100+). These are the key numbers: 

Phase 1 (month 1): average £5,600 

Range: £1,000 - £20,550

£5,600 is the median cost of Phase 1, with a large number of clients sitting around this point. 

Phase 1 is essentially the setup month; we get your business, martech stack and reporting system to a place we can start testing from, and each expert sets their channel-level strategy, too. 

The mean cost sits a little higher at £6,338. This is due to some bigger pitches that required more setup work (CRM journeys, martech stack refinement, website overhaul, etc).  

Phase 2 (month 2 onwards): average £5,150

Range: £1,000 - £15,450

£5,150 is the median cost of Phase 2, with many of our proposals coming in around this figure. Phase 2 is the name we give to month 2 onwards, where our team is running your marketing channels and carrying out growth experiments to unlock what works. 

Again, the mean sits a little higher here: £6,126. And again, this is down to a handful of bigger projects skewing the figures (one project required running 11 marketing channels, for example, when we more typically run 3-6). 

An extract from a typical proposal for a B2B client

This is a real example from a proposal I sent within the last 12 months for a B2B business. 

Number of channels: 4

Phase 1: £5,600 

Phase 2: £5,000/month

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📕 Find out more: The Bullseye Framework explained

I’d consider this a pretty classic example of a B2B play for a startup or early scale-up client: outbound-led, demand-gen heavy, with email nurture (email is under the channel ‘customer engagement’). An extract from a typical proposal for a B2C client

And this is an example from a proposal I sent within the last 12 months for a B2C business. 

Again, I picked this because it felt like quite a classic B2C example: organic social, paid acquisition, lifecycle email, and design support baked right in.  

Channels: 4 + a Growth Strategist & design support

Phase 1: £5,600

Phase 2: £5,350/month, broken out as follows: 

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📕 Find out more: What to expect from your first 90+ days with Growth Division

Average cost per channel

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We typically run between 3 and 6 marketing channels at once for most of our clients, with 3 being the most common. 

Broadly speaking, the more channels you are running, the cheaper each one works out. For businesses running just 1 channel, the average monthly cost was £1,859. This drops to about £1,400 per channel when you get to 9+ channels. 

Ultimately, though, the type of channel(s) has a much bigger impact on the overall cost. Direct outreach, customer engagement (CRM) and community building (via LinkedIn) tend to be more expensive, while GEO, paid social, and SEM are comparatively cheaper to run. 

📕 Find out more: The exact process I’ve used to choose the marketing channels for 200+ startups

Average cost of a Growth Strategist: £2,400

Range: £1,000 - £6,000+ 

Your Growth Strategist is there to act as your fractional CMO. At a basic level, that means helping set the overall marketing strategy (including targets), and coordinating all the channel managers around this. They’re your first point of contact, and someone you can bounce ideas off at any stage. 

The range for the Growth Strategist may seem large, but that’s because the role is designed to work around your in-house hires. Some teams require more of a Growth Strategist’s time, while others already have an in-house Growth Lead or Head of Marketing. Many of our clients have a base Growth Strategist cost of £1,000/month, while some more complex pitches bring the median figure up to £2,400/month. 

What would make my package more expensive than the average?  

If your proposal comes out more expensive than the average figure, it’s probably down to one or more of the following factors: 

1. It’s a more expensive channel mix. We have several expert options for each channel, but some are simply more expensive than others. 
2. We’re running more than 3-4 channels. The average number of channels suggested in our proposal was 3-4. If yours includes more than this, it will naturally be more expensive. 
3. You’ve got some add-ons. We might suggest add-ons such as design support or recurring time with myself or another one of our Growth Advisors. This will always be clearly written out in your proposal. 

How does Growth Division make money?

Growth Division as a business makes money (and covers its costs) by adding a small markup to the base cost of our experts’ packages. We’re a fully remote, very agile team, which allows us to keep this markup small and our prices competitive. 

📕 Find out more: How much should a startup budget for marketing?

Growth Division’s pricing vs competitors

Because it’s so hard to find pricing information for growth marketing agencies, it’s hard to know exactly how Growth Division stacks up against other competitors on price. But I believe we’re considered good value compared to others (quite a few of our Clutch reviews mention this, and we’re also rated 4.6 for cost). The general wisdom seems to be that £5,000 is the minimum you should expect to spend with a marketing agency each month. 

If you’re comparing us to alternative options (like hiring one generalist, or working with 1-2 fractional marketers), Growth Division may feel more expensive, but we bring different value at a different stage.  

📕 Find out more: Freelance vs agency vs in-house: my thoughts on how to structure your startup growth team

Next steps

Of course, these figures are only averages, and the range just goes to show how much one client’s needs can differ from the next. 

🎯 If you’d like to learn more about Growth Division’s process, the channel mix I’d recommend for your GTM strategy, and how much it might cost, the first step is to book a short discovery call with me. 

From there, we’ll have a Bullseye Strategy Session together, and I’ll build out your bespoke proposal.

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