How to Price SMM Services: Retainers, Scope, and the Discount Trap

The question "what should I charge?" has no useful general answer, because the number depends on your costs, your market, and what the client can actually make back. What does generalise is the method for arriving at it — and a floor below which the engagement will fail regardless of how badly you want the logo.

Start with your floor, not the market rate

Before looking at what anyone else charges, work out what an account costs you to run. Most agency owners have never done this, which is why they discover the problem at month three rather than during the proposal.

1. Count the real hours: content planning, shooting or sourcing, writing, scheduling, community management, reporting, and the client call. Include the admin nobody counts.
2. Multiply by what an hour of your time needs to be worth — your target annual income divided by realistically billable hours, which is rarely more than half your working year.
3. Add direct costs: scheduling tools, stock or design subscriptions, ad spend management overhead, contractor fees.
4. Add a margin for the unbilled reality — revisions, the client who sends notes at 11pm, the month the shoot gets rescheduled twice.
5. That total is your floor. An engagement below it is a loss you are funding, not a foot in the door.

What the market actually supports

Retainer ranges vary more by market than by service. The figures below are the bands we see used for local SMM retainers in each market, and they are deliberately wide because a single-location salon and a four-location clinic are not the same engagement.

Where you sit in the band is decided by category and location rather than by how good your work is, at least initially. A med spa in an affluent suburb and a café in a small city will not pay the same for identical deliverables, because the value of an additional customer differs by an order of magnitude. Our market pages break the bands down further by city.

Three tiers, not a menu

Offering endless configurations makes the client do design work they are not equipped for, and the usual outcome is that they defer the decision entirely. Three tiers works because it converts "should I buy this?" into "which of these?"

Price the middle tier at what you actually want to sell. The lowest tier exists to make the middle look reasonable and to catch businesses that genuinely are not ready. The top tier exists because a meaningful minority of clients will take it, and its presence reframes the middle as moderate rather than expensive.

Price the outcome, describe the deliverable

A proposal that leads with "twelve posts and four reels per month" invites the client to divide your fee by sixteen and compare the result to a freelancer rate. That comparison is unwinnable and you invited it.

Lead instead with the arithmetic of their business. If their average customer is worth £400 and a retainer is £1,200, the engagement pays for itself at three additional customers a month. That is a sentence the owner can evaluate against their own experience, and it moves the decision from cost to return.

Your average treatment is around £350. At £1,200 a month, this needs to bring in roughly four extra bookings to break even, and anything past that is margin.

Based on what your Google reviews suggest about your current volume, four is not an ambitious number — it is a rounding error on your existing footfall. The deliverables are below, but that is the number that actually matters.

You still list the deliverables. They just arrive after the client has already accepted the frame, rather than becoming the frame.

The discount conversation

A discount request is usually not about price. It is about risk — the client is uncertain whether this will work and is trying to reduce their exposure. Responding with a lower number answers a question they did not ask and permanently establishes your rate.

• Reduce scope instead of price. One channel rather than two at a lower fee keeps your effective hourly rate intact and gives them a genuine smaller commitment.
• Offer a shorter initial term rather than a lower rate. A one-month pilot at full price addresses the risk concern directly.
• Trade the discount for something with value to you — a longer commitment, a testimonial, photography rights, an introduction to a peer business.
• Never discount silently to win a logo. The client who negotiated hardest is statistically the one who will demand the most and leave first.

Raising prices on existing clients

Most agencies carry at least one client priced at what they charged two years ago, and quietly resent it. The increase is easier than it feels, provided it is tied to something the client can see.

1. Give real notice — sixty days is respectful and removes the sense of ambush.
2. Anchor it to delivered results, not to your costs. The client does not care that your software got more expensive.
3. Offer the current rate for a longer commitment, which converts the increase into a choice.
4. Accept that some will leave. If nobody ever leaves over price, you are underpriced across the whole book.

The clients most likely to accept an increase are the ones getting the most value, which is also the group you most want to keep. The ones who leave are usually the accounts that were already unprofitable. Both outcomes improve the business.

For the mechanics of keeping those accounts once they are priced properly, see our guide to client retention.