Should I Do My Own Marketing or Pay Someone in Halifax?

It is 10pm and the ad account is open again.

You can do your own marketing. Plenty of Halifax owners do, and some do it well. The cost is not the $1,200 you did not spend. It is the four hours a week you did spend, and the year it takes to learn what someone else already knows.

That is the answer. What follows is the real cost of each one, and what the money buys if you hand it over.

What doing it yourself actually costs

Not the software. The software is cheap.

Your hours. Building the campaign, writing the ads, checking overnight that nothing ran away, fixing the thing that broke on Thursday. In my experience it runs about four hours a week once you know what you are doing. More while you are learning.

Call it sixteen hours a month. Take what you charge an hour and multiply. For most owners I talk to, that number is larger than the retainer they were trying to avoid.

Then the learning curve. Google does not reward you for trying. It rewards you for having done it before.

You pay for that either way. In fees, or in a year of spend you do not get back.

The part that does not show up on the screen

You will not know what you do not know.

That is not an insult. It is the actual problem. An account can look fine and be losing money in a way the screen you are looking at will never show you.

Broad match quietly buying searches for a service you do not offer. A form that stopped emailing you in March. A landing page converting at 2 per cent when 8 is normal.

That last one is worth doing the arithmetic on, because it is the most common and the most expensive. Halifax clicks run $2 to $10 on Google Search. Say yours cost $6. At 2 per cent, a lead costs you $300. At 8 per cent, the same clicks cost $75.

Nothing about the ad changed. You were not being outbid. You were paying four times over for a page nobody told you about.

What $1,200 a month buys

Mine starts at $1,200 for SEO on its own. $2,000 a month bundled with Google or Meta ads. Three month minimum.

Inside that: strategy, building the campaigns, writing the ads, watching the numbers, fixing what breaks.

The three month minimum is not a lock-in tactic. Nothing meaningful happens in thirty days. Google Ads needs a few weeks of data before the optimisation is anything other than guesswork, and SEO takes three to six months to move. Charging you for one month would be taking money for a result neither of us could see.

I run the strategy. You will not be handed to a junior after the sale. That is the single most common complaint I hear about the agency someone just left.

What the money does not buy

Not your ad spend. That goes to Google or Meta and never touches my account. Anyone quoting you one number who will not split management from spend is hiding one of them. The full pricing breakdown covers how to make them.

Not a guarantee. Anyone selling you one is selling you a story.

Not a fix for an offer nobody wants. If the offer does not convert, a bigger budget makes the problem more expensive instead of smaller. I will tell you if that is what I am seeing, and it will be the cheapest conversation you have that month.

When doing it yourself is the right call

Your budget is under a few hundred a month. At that level a retainer eats the whole thing. I have grown businesses on $10 a day, and $10 a day with your own hands beats $10 a day minus a management fee.

One service, one city, one simple offer. A Bedford dog groomer does not need a strategist. She needs a Google Business Profile that is filled in and one ad that says what she does.

You like it. Some owners do. If you are the person who reads the Google Ads release notes for fun, you will outperform a bored agency every time.

You are pre-revenue and time is the only currency you have. Spend it. Learn it. Hand it over when the hours start costing more than the fee.

You can do it yourself and still get help

Third option. Most people never think of it.

You keep the account. You keep doing the work. You book a Strategy Consultation with me when you are stuck, before you spend on something new, or after a week where the leads stopped and you cannot find why.

Not a retainer. No minimum, no notice period, nothing to cancel. You are buying the one thing a forum thread cannot give you, which is someone looking at your actual account and telling you what is wrong with it.

It suits the owner who likes this work, is reasonably good at it, and hits a wall once a quarter. That is a lot of people, and most of them spend a year getting to an answer that takes an hour.

When paying someone is the right call

You have been at it six months and cannot tell if it is working. Not whether it is good. Whether it is working. If you cannot answer that, you are not running marketing, you are paying for it and hoping.

Your hourly rate is higher than the retainer divided by sixteen. That is the whole calculation. A Burnside contractor billing $95 an hour is spending $1,520 of his own time to save $1,200.

You are spending enough that a small improvement pays the fee. At $2,000 a month in ad spend, cutting your cost per lead by a third pays for the management and leaves change.

Something broke and you cannot find it. Leads dried up in a week and nothing obvious changed. That is a specific job with a specific answer, and it is faster to buy it than to learn it.

How to work it out this week

Open your calendar and count the hours you actually spent on marketing last month. Not the ones you meant to spend.

Multiply by what you charge.

Now put that number beside the retainer. If your hours cost more, you already made the decision, you just have not done the sum.

If they cost less, keep doing it yourself and come back when the number flips. I will still be here, and I would rather tell you to wait than take a retainer you do not need yet.

Book a call if you want someone to look at the numbers with you. I work with businesses across Halifax and Nova Scotia, and a good number in the United States. I will tell you plainly if doing it yourself is the right answer.

Frequently asked questions

Is it cheaper to do my own marketing?

Cheaper in cash, usually not in total. You save the management fee, which in Halifax runs $750 to $3,000 a month. You spend roughly sixteen hours a month instead. If your hourly rate times sixteen is more than the fee, doing it yourself costs you money.

How many hours a month does small business marketing take?

About four hours a week once you know what you are doing, covering campaign changes, writing ads, checking spend and fixing what breaks. Expect considerably more in the first three months while you are learning the platform.

What does a marketing retainer actually include?

Strategy, building the campaigns, writing the ads, watching the numbers and fixing what breaks. Ad spend is separate and goes to Google or Meta, not the agency. Ask any agency to split the two before you compare quotes.

Can I get help without hiring an agency?

Yes. You can book a Strategy Consultation, keep running your own account, and use the time to get a second pair of eyes on what you have built. There is no retainer and no minimum attached to it. It suits owners who are doing the work themselves and want to stop guessing on the one or two things they are stuck on.

How do I know if my own marketing is working?

You should be able to say how many enquiries came in last month and what they cost. If you cannot answer that from your own records, the first job is tracking, not more spend.