What is Retained Marketing, and how does it work?
The short answer: Retained marketing is an ongoing arrangement where a business pays a fixed monthly fee for strategic and practical marketing support. Instead of commissioning individual projects, you work with the same marketing team over time. They get to know your business, work to an agreed strategy and plan, deliver the marketing activity you need, and review what’s working.
For many growing businesses, marketing doesn’t need doing once. It needs someone to keep on top of it.
The website needs updating. Content needs creating. Opportunities crop up. Campaigns need planning. Results need reviewing.
And somewhere amongst all of that, someone needs to make sure the activity is actually helping the business achieve what it wants to achieve.
That’s where retained marketing comes in.
Rather than commissioning individual projects every time something needs doing, you work with the same marketing team on an ongoing basis. They get to know your business, work to an agreed strategy and plan, and keep your marketing moving month after month.
But a good marketing retainer should be about much more than simply having a marketing agency available to do things for you.
First things first, retained marketing isn’t retention marketing
It’s an easy distinction to miss.
Retention marketing is marketing designed to keep existing customers, encourage repeat business and build longer-term customer relationships.
Retained marketing describes the relationship you have with your marketing provider. You pay an agreed monthly fee for ongoing marketing support rather than commissioning individual pieces of work.
You might use retention marketing within a retained marketing relationship, but they’re two completely different things.
How does retained marketing actually work?
There are lots of different versions of a marketing retainer.
Some agencies sell a fixed number of hours each month. Others offer packages of predetermined activity, perhaps a certain number of social media posts, blogs or emails.
At Your Marketing Department, we work slightly differently.
We start with what the business is trying to achieve and build the marketing around that.
That means understanding your business, your customers, your market and your commercial priorities first. From there, we agree the strategy, what needs to happen and where your marketing budget and effort are best spent.
The ongoing retainer is then there to make that strategy happen.
senior strategic marketing input
an account manager keeping activity moving
an agreed marketing plan and priorities
ongoing content, email, social media, campaigns and digital marketing
website optimisation
access to specialist support, such as designers, PR specialists or developers, when required
regular reporting and review
But there’s another important part of the job: continually asking “Is this still the right thing to be doing?”
A retainer shouldn’t mean doing the same list of marketing activities every month simply because they’re in the contract.
Priorities change. Markets change. Businesses change. Your marketing needs to respond.
What does retained marketing look like month to month?
Not every month should look identical.
One month the priority might be improving a poorly performing section of your website. Another might involve developing a campaign around a particular market opportunity.
You might need to prepare for an exhibition, create customer case studies, improve your email marketing or focus on generating leads.
Alongside that, there will usually be consistent activity that keeps the business visible and communicating with its market.
The important thing is that those activities aren’t happening independently.
They should all be working towards the same agreed business and marketing objectives.
That’s the difference between having lots of marketing being done and having a marketing function.
What’s the difference between a marketing retainer and a marketing project?
There are plenty of times when a project is absolutely the right answer.
If you need to answer a specific strategic question, understand your customers better, reposition the business, develop a marketing strategy or complete a defined piece of work, you may not need ongoing marketing support.
A project has a defined problem, scope and outcome.
A retainer makes more sense when the challenge isn’t simply working out what to do, but making sure it actually gets done consistently over time.
And sometimes one naturally follows the other.
We might start by helping a business understand where its growth opportunity lies and develop the strategy to pursue it. The business can then take that strategy away and implement it internally, or we can stay involved and help make it happen.
Both are perfectly valid.
Why do businesses choose retained marketing?
One of the biggest reasons is surprisingly simple: marketing stops falling through the cracks.
In many manufacturing and home improvement SMEs, responsibility for marketing sits with the MD or another senior person alongside everything else they’re responsible for.
It gets done when there’s time.
Then a major project comes in. Recruitment becomes urgent. A client needs attention. Something operational goes wrong. Marketing quietly slips down the list.
And when it starts again, it can feel as though you’re starting from scratch.
That was the position Panthera Accounting found itself in. Marketing had become reactive and was taking increasing amounts of the MD’s time. Putting a strategy in place and having ongoing support gave the business structure and clarity, while someone else took responsibility for keeping the marketing moving.
There are other benefits too.
Because the same people are working with you over time, you don’t have to explain the business from scratch every time you need something.
You can also access a broader mix of marketing skills than you’re likely to find in a single employee.
And, importantly, there is someone looking across the whole marketing picture rather than simply concentrating on their particular specialism.
Is a marketing retainer cheaper than hiring someone in-house?
It can be, but cost shouldn’t be the only consideration.
When you hire one marketing person, you’re buying that individual’s particular skills and experience. They might be excellent at content, digital marketing or campaign management, but it’s difficult for one person to be a strategist, copywriter, designer, SEO specialist, website expert, data analyst and marketing manager all at once.
A retained marketing team gives you access to different skills when you need them, alongside senior strategic input.
There are also the wider costs of employment to consider, including recruitment, salary, National Insurance, pension, training, software and management time.
However, an internal hire can absolutely be the right answer for some businesses, particularly where there is enough work and internal expertise to support them.
The question isn’t simply “Which option is cheaper?”
It’s “What marketing capability does our business actually need?”
How much does retained marketing cost?
There isn’t one standard price for a marketing retainer because what’s included varies enormously.
A relatively small monthly retainer providing advice and limited implementation is very different from an outsourced marketing department taking responsibility for strategy, planning, content, campaigns, digital activity and reporting.
So if you’re comparing marketing retainers, don’t compare the monthly fee alone.
Look at the level of expertise involved, the amount of delivery included, the breadth of support available and, crucially, what the provider is actually taking responsibility for.
It’s also worth checking what isn’t included. Things such as advertising spend, PR, design,
photography, video production or significant website development may sit outside the monthly fee.
What should a good marketing retainer include?
This will depend on what your business needs, but there are some useful questions to ask before signing a retainer.
Who is setting the strategy?
Is there genuinely senior marketing input, or are you mainly paying for delivery?
Who will actually work on your business?
Make sure you know who you’ll deal with after the initial sales conversation.
How are priorities decided?
Are you buying a predetermined package of activity, or can the plan change according to what the business needs?
How will results be measured?
Good reporting shouldn’t simply give you a collection of numbers. It should help you understand what’s working, what isn’t and what you should do next.
What isn’t included?
Understand whether specialist services, advertising spend or larger projects will involve additional costs.
How often will you communicate?
For an outsourced team to make good decisions, they need to understand what’s happening inside your business, not just what’s happening in Google Analytics.
What are the contract and notice periods?
You should be clear about the commitment you’re making and what happens if your circumstances change.
When doesn’t a marketing retainer make sense?
Retained marketing isn’t automatically the right answer.
If you have one clearly defined problem to solve, a project may be more appropriate.
You might already have a capable internal marketing team and simply need occasional strategic or specialist support.
Or you might not have enough ongoing marketing activity to justify paying for a team every month.
It’s also worth being wary of taking on a retainer because you feel you should be doing more marketing without first working out what you’re trying to achieve.
More marketing activity isn’t necessarily better marketing.
Sometimes the most useful first step is to stop, look at the business and work out where marketing can actually make a difference.
How long does retained marketing take to work?
This is probably one of the hardest questions to answer because different types of marketing work at different speeds.
A change to your website or email marketing might produce useful information relatively quickly.
SEO, positioning, content, relationship building and marketing into longer B2B buying cycles can take considerably longer.
That’s why we don’t think the first few months should simply be about chasing short-term numbers.
Initially, you should expect to see the foundations getting stronger: a clearer strategy, better understanding of your customers, agreed priorities, more consistent activity and useful data about what is and isn’t working.
Over time, the focus should increasingly be on commercial impact.
CN Glass is a good example of what a longer-term retained relationship can achieve. Our work has evolved with the business, from website and SEO improvements through to campaigns, exhibitions and commercial lead generation.
Over the relationship, leads increased from around one or two a day to four to six a day, turnover doubled and the business shifted from predominantly residential work towards a much stronger commercial focus.
The important point isn’t that every business should expect those exact results.
It’s that retained marketing gives you the opportunity to learn, adapt and build on what works, rather than treating each piece of marketing as an isolated project.
Is retained marketing right for your business?
Retained marketing tends to make sense when you’ve reached the point where marketing needs ongoing attention, but you don’t necessarily want or need to build a complete in-house marketing department.
Perhaps marketing is still sitting with the MD.
Perhaps you have someone internally who can handle some of the implementation but needs more strategic direction.
Or perhaps you’ve tried several different suppliers and ended up with plenty of activity but nobody looking at the whole picture.
In those situations, retained marketing can give you something that’s difficult to achieve through disconnected projects: continuity, accountability and strategic direction.
But rather than starting with:
“Do we need a marketing retainer?”
Start with:
“What does our business need marketing to achieve?”
Once you’re clear on that, it becomes much easier to decide whether you need a one-off project, an internal hire, specialist support or an outsourced marketing department.
How retained marketing works at Your Marketing Department
At Your Marketing Department, our retained relationships are designed to feel less like having an agency and more like having your own marketing department.
We bring the strategic thinking, keep the plan moving and coordinate the different elements of marketing needed to support the business.
Most importantly, we take the time to understand the business properly.
Because the better we understand where you’re trying to go, who your customers are and what’s happening commercially, the better decisions we can make about your marketing.
And if you’re not sure whether you need ongoing retained marketing or simply some help answering a particular marketing question, book a free call and we can talk through what would make most sense.
Your Marketing Department specialises in outsourced marketing services for ambitious SMEs. We combine strategic thinking with hands-on execution to help growing businesses build sustainable, profitable marketing that actually works.
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