Pricing
Most marketing agencies make you book a call before they’ll tell you what they charge. We don’t think you should have to.
Orchard & Digital Marketing Pricing
If you’re a mortgage broker, insurance or financial adviser, or wealth planner considering investing in digital marketing, you should be able to understand what it might cost, what you’re actually paying for, what makes the price go up or down, and whether the investment makes sense for your business before sitting through a sales call.
So, we’ll show you.
Most Orchard clients invest between $1,500 and $5,000 per month in management fees, plus an initial setup fee. If you’re running paid advertising, your ad spend is separate and paid directly to the advertising platforms.
Here’s how it all works.
What are Orchard's Prices?
Starter
Single lead generation channel.- Meta Ads or Google Ads
- Landing Pages + Forms
- Marketing Automation & CRM
Growth
Multi campaign lead generations.- Starter +
- Multiple campaigns
- Increased lead volume
Comprehensive
Outsourced lead generation and marketing.- Growth +
- SEO + Content marketing
- Outsourced marketing team
What Are You Actually Paying For?
When comparing marketing agencies, it’s easy to look at a monthly retainer and assume you’re comparing like with like.
Usually, you’re not.
Your total marketing investment can include three different things.
1. Your monthly management fee
This is what you pay Orchard to actually do the work.
Depending on your package, that can include strategy, email marketing, Google Ads, Meta Ads, landing pages, lead magnets, content, SEO, local marketing, CRM management, sales pipeline setup, tracking and reporting.
One month we might be heavily focused on advertising creative. Another month we might build two new landing pages, test new headlines and write video scripts.
We don’t want you worrying about whether every additional task is going to result in another invoice.
That’s why we bundle as much of the work as practical into your monthly retainer.
2. Your initial setup fee
Before we start, there’s a one-off setup fee.
For most engagements, this ranges from $2,000 to $6,000, depending on the level of marketing we’re building.
Why?
Because the first month is usually the most labour-intensive part of the engagement. We’re setting up accounts, tracking, campaigns, CRM systems, sales pipelines, landing pages, advertising creative, email sequences and everything else needed to get the engine running properly.
The setup fee is paid before work begins.
3. Your advertising spend
If you’re running Google, Meta, or other advertising, your ad spend is separate.
That money doesn’t come to Orchard.
It goes directly from your card to Google or Meta etc., which means you retain visibility and control over your advertising spend.
Think of advertising spend as fuel. Our job is to build and operate the engine. If you have a credit card with airports, this can be highly beneficial for you!
How much does it cost to work with Orchard?
In this video, we break down what it costs to work with Orchard, including our management fees, setup costs and the advertising budget you may need.
We’ll also explain what drives those costs up or down, so you can understand the likely investment and decide whether working with Orchard makes sense for your business.
Orchard's Digital Marketing Packages
There are three common ways financial advisers work with us.
Starter
$1,500/month
$2,000 setup fee
Recommended ad spend: from $1,500/month
Starter is our most common package for financial advisers who want a consistent flow of new leads generated under their own brand.
Rather than buying shared leads from a third party, we build and manage your own Meta advertising campaigns, landing pages and follow-up infrastructure. Leads are delivered directly into your Orchard CRM and sales pipeline, ready for you and your team to follow up.
It includes:
- Meta Ads campaign management
- Ad copy and creative
- Campaign-specific landing pages
- Lead forms and conversion setup
- Orchard CRM
- Orchard Sales Pipeline
- Conversion tracking
- Campaign optimisation and management
- Performance reporting
Best suited to: financial advisers who are ready to invest in growing their business and want to generate their own leads, build their own database and strengthen their brand at the same time.
Growth
$3,000/month
$4,000 setup fee
Typical advertising spend: $2,000–$8,000/month
Growth adds active lead generation to your marketing system.
It includes:
- Email campaigns
- Google Ads management
- Landing-page creation
- Mailchimp / Orchard CRM
- Orchard Sales Pipeline
- Tracking management
- Reporting
Best suited to: established advisers who are ready to invest consistently in generating new opportunities and have the capacity to follow those leads up.
What does that mean all-in?
A Growth client investing $3,000 with Orchard and $4,000 in advertising would have a total ongoing marketing investment of approximately:
$7,000/month
The important distinction is that $3,000 pays for the marketing operation and $4,000 is buying the advertising reach itself.
Comprehensive
$5,000/month
$6,000 setup fee
Typical advertising spend: $5,000–$35,000/month
Comprehensive is for firms that want Orchard involved across the wider digital marketing function rather than managing a single channel.
It includes:
- Email campaigns
- Meta Ads management
- Google Ads management
- Landing-page creation
- Lead-magnet creation
- Content strategy
- Content optimisation
- SEO and local marketing
- Mailchimp / Orchard CRM
- Orchard Sales Pipeline
- Tracking management
- Reporting
Best suited to: established, growth-focused firms that have the budget, sales capacity and ambition to operate across multiple acquisition channels.
A Comprehensive client spending $10,000 per month on advertising, for example, would have an approximate ongoing investment of:
$15,000/month — $5,000 to Orchard + $10,000 to the advertising platforms.
What influences the price of digital marketing?
In this video, we break down what it costs to work with Orchard, including our management fees, setup costs and the advertising budget you may need.
We’ll also explain what drives those costs up or down, so you can understand the likely investment and decide whether working with Orchard makes sense for your business.
What Makes Digital Marketing Cost More?
There isn’t a single correct price for digital marketing because there isn’t a single correct marketing strategy.
Several things can increase what you’ll need to invest.
More marketing channels
Managing Google Ads alone is very different from simultaneously running Google, Meta, email, SEO, content and local marketing.
Each additional channel requires strategy, execution, optimisation and measurement.
Higher growth targets
If you want substantially more leads, you generally need to reach substantially more people.
That can mean larger advertising budgets, more campaigns, more landing pages and more creative testing.
More competitive markets
Financial services can be an expensive advertising category. For example, the cost of generating life insurance leads has increased significantly between the end of 2025 and mid-2026.
If you’re competing for high-value keywords or audiences in a competitive location, reaching potential customers can cost more. This can be true in large cities like Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland. But it can also be true in smaller regional centers where the population is smaller and you may be up against another mortgage broker who is actively running campaigns for example.
More of the work being outsourced
There’s a big difference between asking an agency to manage your Google Ads account and asking it to operate most of your digital marketing function.
The more responsibility we take for the result, the more work is involved.
Starting from scratch
If you’ve already got a good website, clean CRM, established database, tracking and strong marketing assets, there’s less to build.
If none of those things exist yet, more work needs to happen before the marketing engine can operate properly.
What Can Bring Your Marketing Costs Down?
More expensive doesn’t automatically mean better.
Sometimes the smartest thing you can do is deliberately make the scope smaller.
Your costs can come down when:
- You begin with your existing database instead of paid acquisition
- You focus on one acquisition channel rather than several
- Your website and CRM are already in good condition
- Your team handles parts of the marketing internally
- You’re targeting sustainable growth rather than trying to scale quickly
- You already have strong creative and marketing assets we can use
Sometimes we’ll recommend that you don’t advertise yet.
If your budget is too small to generate enough data for a campaign to perform properly, we’d rather tell you to invest in your database, referral engine or website first than take your money for a campaign we don’t believe is ready to succeed.
Why Are Some Marketing Agencies So Much More Expensive?
It’s tempting to assume an agency charging twice as much must produce twice the quality.
That’s not necessarily true.
A large agency can have significant overheads. They may have a large creative department, videographers, senior management, expensive offices, equipment, entertainment budgets and layers of account management.
Those costs have to be recovered somewhere. And ultimately, they’re recovered through clients.
This doesn’t mean large agencies are bad. Some have exceptional specialists and capabilities that justify their price. But you’re not necessarily paying only for the person doing your work.
You’re paying for the business structure surrounding them. Orchard intentionally operates leaner. We’re a smaller team, our office isn’t in a major metropolitan centre, and we don’t carry the same layers of overhead as a large agency.
That helps us keep our pricing toward the lower-to-middle end of the professional agency market without trying to become the cheapest option.
Why Are Some Marketing Providers So Much Cheaper?
At the other end of the market, you’ll find people offering digital marketing for a fraction of these prices. Some may be perfectly good at what they do.
The biggest difference is often business structure.
A freelancer working from a laptop can have extraordinarily low overheads compared with an agency employing a local team. Other agencies reduce their costs by outsourcing execution to countries where labour costs are substantially lower.
Again, that isn’t automatically bad.
The question to ask is:
Who is actually doing the work on my account, and what am I getting for the price?
Find out whether your work is being completed by the senior person who sold you the service, junior employees, contractors or an offshore team. And find out what’s actually included. A $900 retainer that excludes landing pages, tracking, CRM, creative and email might ultimately be more expensive, and less effective, than a $3,000 retainer that takes responsibility for the whole campaign.
Where Does Orchard Sit on Price?
We’re generally at the lower-to-middle end of the professional agency market.
That’s deliberate.
We’re not trying to build a large agency with layers of management and overhead that clients ultimately have to fund.
But we’re also not trying to be the cheapest agency in New Zealand.
There’s a point where making marketing cheaper starts making the relationship worse.
For example, if you’re investing several thousand dollars every month to generate leads, you’re much more likely to have the motivation and infrastructure to call those leads quickly, follow them up properly and turn opportunities into business. That’s important because marketing can’t fix poor follow-up.
We want clients who are genuinely ready to grow and willing to do their part once the leads arrive.
So if you’re looking for the lowest possible monthly marketing fee, we’re probably not the right fit.
If you’re prepared to invest four figures a month or more into building a genuine growth engine, we should probably talk.
View an example strategy proposal
Click below to view an example strategy proposal for a fictional firm, Harvest Financial.
This is what we present to companies prior to signing. It includes strategy overview, charts and diagrams, investment options, and more.
How Much Should You Spend on Advertising?
One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is asking: “What’s the least we can spend?”
The better question is: “How much do we need to spend to give this campaign a reasonable chance of working?”
Advertising platforms need enough activity and data for campaigns to be properly tested and optimised. Spend too little and you can end up with the worst of both worlds: you’re spending money, but not generating enough data to make good decisions.
Your appropriate budget depends on the channel, audience, service, location and growth goal.
For Growth clients, a common range is: $2,000–$8,000/month
For Comprehensive clients operating across multiple campaigns and channels: $5,000–$35,000/month
Another way to work out budget is to calculate how many leads you need in order to land a new client. You’ll need data like sales close rates and lead costs to help with this number. Take an example of a $50 cost per lead with an historic close rate from similar campaigns/leads of 5%. That would mean you pay $1000 for every new client.
Now as a business you would also look at how much you make off that client on day 1, cross-sells in the future, and likelihood of referrals or new business from this client to weigh up whether this is a net positive gain.
And remember this too: Orchard does not take a percentage of your advertising spend simply because you decide to spend more.
That’s an important question to ask any agency you’re considering. Do their fees increase as the ad spend does?
The Hidden Costs of Digital Marketing Agencies
This is where a cheap-looking proposal can become expensive very quickly. Before signing with any agency, including us, ask exactly what’s included.
1. Percentage-of-ad-spend fees
Some agencies charge a base retainer and then increase their management fee when your advertising budget increases. Others use tiered percentage formulas.
That means scaling a campaign from $5,000 to $20,000 in advertising can suddenly increase the agency fee too.
Ask: “If I double my advertising spend, does your fee change?”
With Orchard’s standard packages, your advertising budget is separate from the retainer rather than automatically triggering a percentage-based management fee.
2. Landing-page fees
Advertising campaigns work best when the page someone lands on directly matches the advertisement they clicked.
For us, campaign-specific landing pages, forms and follow-up journeys aren’t optional extras. They’re part of building the campaign properly.
Some agencies charge for every page individually. A seemingly small $500 charge becomes frustrating when you discover you’re paying it every time an existing landing page is duplicated and modified for another campaign.
Ask what’s included before you sign.
3. CRM and software fees
Does the quoted price include the systems needed to manage the leads? Or will you discover another software bill after signing? Find out what CRM, email, reporting and tracking technology is required and whether those costs are included.
4. Tracking and campaign setup
Conversion tracking isn’t an optional extra if you want to know whether your marketing works. Ask whether tracking, forms, analytics and account configuration are included in your setup fee.
5. Contract exit costs
This is a big one. A low monthly price doesn’t help if you’re trapped in a long agreement that’s producing poor results.
Before signing any agency agreement, understand:
- How long is the contract?
- When can it be reviewed?
- What happens if you leave early?
- Is there a notice period?
- Is there a buyout?
- How much is it?
Be particularly careful when a sales process feels focused on getting your signature before an arbitrary deadline.
The salesperson selling the contract may not be the person delivering or managing the work. Understand the agreement you’re actually entering, not just the promises made during the sales process.
How do Orchard's Payments Work?
We keep this fairly simple.
Setup fee
Your setup fee is due before work begins. For our standard packages that’s currently:
- Starter: $2,000
- Growth: $4,000
- Comprehensive: $6,000
Larger or custom builds may require a different setup fee, but we’ll show you that explicitly before you agree to anything. We don’t begin work until the setup invoice has been paid.
Monthly retainer
Your ongoing management fee is invoiced monthly in arrears.
For example, work completed during May would be invoiced on June 1, with payment due June 7.
Advertising
Advertising is paid separately and directly to the relevant advertising platform.
Financing
We don’t currently offer financing. We believe a business investing in an ongoing marketing programme should be financially ready to make that commitment rather than financing the monthly marketing cost.
Initial Price vs. What Marketing Actually Costs Over Time
The setup fee often gets disproportionate attention because it’s the first invoice.
But it isn’t the number you should use to decide whether marketing is worthwhile.
Look at the entire investment. For example, a Growth client might invest:
- Setup: $4,000
- Management: $3,000/month
- Advertising: $4,000/month
Over 12 months, that’s approximately:$88,000 total first-year investment.
That’s a much more useful number than asking whether a $4,000 setup fee is expensive.
The next question becomes: What would the marketing need to produce for an $88,000 annual investment to make commercial sense?
That’s the conversation we believe businesses should have before starting. Marketing shouldn’t be judged by whether the monthly invoice feels cheap. It should be judged by whether the economics work.
Is Paying a Digital Marketing Agency Actually Worth It?
Sometimes, no.
If you don’t have the cash flow to sustain the investment, don’t do it. If you don’t have the capacity to call and follow up leads, don’t spend thousands generating them. If you’re expecting an agency to solve fundamental problems with your sales process or service, marketing probably won’t fix them.
And if your team already has the expertise and time to run your campaigns properly internally, hiring an agency may not be necessary.
But an agency can make a lot of sense when you have a proven service, capacity for more clients, money available to invest in growth, and no desire to hire an internal team covering advertising, CRM, email, landing pages, tracking, content and strategy.
That’s the calculation. Not: “Is $3,000 a month expensive?”
But: “What would we need this $3,000, plus our advertising, to produce for it to be a good investment?”
That’s the question we’d rather help you answer.
What Does a Typical Engagement Look Like?
Once we’ve agreed we’re a good fit:
- Your setup fee is paid.
- We run a Digital Strategy Workshop to map out the plan.
- Accounts, tracking, CRM and pipeline systems are configured.
- Campaigns, creative and landing pages are built.
- Campaigns launch.
- Leads feed into your Orchard CRM and sales pipeline.
- We measure performance, test, optimise and report.
- You follow up the opportunities and turn them into business.
There’s an important point in number eight.
We cannot sell your services for you. We can generate an opportunity. We can build the systems. We can help you understand what’s working.
But your team still needs to pick up the phone, follow up quickly and deliver a good sales experience. The best Orchard relationships are partnerships where both sides take responsibility for the result.
Do We Guarantee Results?
No.
And be cautious of an agency that guarantees you a specific number of new clients without deeply understanding your business. There are too many variables outside an agency’s control.
We can influence lead volume and quality.
We can’t control whether your team calls a lead five minutes later or five days later. We can’t control your sales conversations, pricing, capacity or service delivery.
What we can do is model the economics before you commit, measure the right numbers and make decisions based on business outcomes rather than vanity metrics.
If we don’t believe the numbers have a reasonable chance of working, we’d rather tell you before you spend the money.
What is it like working with Orchard?
In this video, we break down what it costs to work with Orchard, including our management fees, setup costs and the advertising budget you may need.
We’ll also explain what drives those costs up or down, so you can understand the likely investment and decide whether working with Orchard makes sense for your business.
Digital Marketing Pricing FAQs
We know choosing the right marketing partner is a big deal. These FAQs should clear things up, and if not, we’re just a message away.
Why don't you offer one fixed price for everyone?
Well we do in many cases, but because different firms need different levels of marketing pricing will vary.
An adviser nurturing an existing database doesn’t need the same resources as a multi-adviser firm running Google, Meta, email, SEO and content simultaneously for example.
Our three standard levels give you a starting point without pretending every business requires exactly the same thing.
Is advertising spend included in your fee?
No.
Advertising is paid separately and directly to Google, Meta or the relevant platform.
Will your fee increase if we increase our ad spend?
Not automatically. Our standard retainers aren’t calculated as a percentage of your advertising spend.
If increasing spend substantially changes the complexity or scope of the work required, we’ll discuss that with you rather than quietly adding a percentage to your invoice.
What's the setup fee for?
The beginning of an engagement involves a disproportionate amount of work: strategy, account creation, tracking, CRM setup, pipelines, creative, copy, landing pages, forms and campaigns. The setup fee covers that initial build.
Are landing pages extra?
For campaigns where landing pages are required, they’re incorporated into the scope of our packages rather than treated as an unexpected per-page charge.
Do you offer financing?
No
When do I pay?
Your setup fee is paid before work begins. Monthly management invoices are issued in arrears and are due seven days after invoicing. Advertising spend is paid directly to the advertising platform.
What if my budget isn't high enough yet?
We’ll tell you. Sometimes your next best investment isn’t paid advertising. It might be cleaning your database, improving your follow-up, strengthening referrals or fixing your website first.
How quickly should I expect results?
That depends on the channel, starting point, budget and market. Paid campaigns can begin generating data and leads relatively quickly, but meaningful performance should be judged over enough time and volume to make good decisions rather than a handful of days.
Do I still need to follow up the leads?
Absolutely. Generating the lead is only part of the process. Fast, consistent follow-up is one of the most important factors in turning marketing opportunities into revenue.
Have a more specific question?
Orchard Team
A strategic duo driving adviser growth, together we deliver online solutions that work for financial advisers.
Orchard Team
A strategic duo driving adviser growth, together we deliver online solutions that work for financial advisers.
People we've worked with
We’ve partnered with a variety of mortgage, insurance, and financial advice firms helping them grow and generate consistent leads with confidence.
Work out your estimate
You don’t need to decide today whether Orchard is the right agency. First, decide whether this level of marketing investment makes sense for your business. Use the estimator to get your likely range.
If the numbers look sensible, book a conversation and we’ll work through your goals, budget and potential return together. If we think you should spend less, we’ll tell you.
If we think you’re not ready yet, we’ll tell you that too. And if we believe there’s a genuine opportunity to grow your business together, we’ll show you what we’d do next.
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We partner with financial advisers to simplify marketing, scale sustainably, and grow with confidence. Ready to see what’s possible?
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We partner with financial advisers to simplify marketing, scale sustainably, and grow with confidence.
Ready to see what’s possible?