TL;DR
Most marketing agencies lock you into predefined packages that force you to pay for services you don’t need or constantly negotiate separate projects for services you do need. There’s a better way: pay one fixed monthly cost and gain access to a complete marketing team offering every service, content, video, SEO, PPC, social media, design, branding, strategy. Each month, you simply direct your allocated hours toward whatever your business needs most right now. No upsells, no separate invoices. This approach works because your marketing needs change constantly, but agency packages don’t. This post explains how businesses are finally getting coordinated, strategic marketing without the frustration of rigid service tiers or the expense of building everything in-house.
The Conversation That Happens in Every Growing Business
You’re sitting in a meeting reviewing quarterly performance. Sales are good but could be better. Your website traffic is flat. Your social media presence is inconsistent at best. You’re spending money on Google Ads but you’re not entirely sure if they’re working. And that content strategy you planned six months ago? Still sitting in a Google Doc, untouched.
Someone asks the inevitable question: “Should we hire a marketing agency?”
And that’s when the real frustration begins.
You start researching agencies. They all sound the same. They all promise “results-driven strategies” and “data-backed approaches” and “ROI-focused campaigns.” But when you get to their pricing, you hit the wall that stops most businesses:
Every agency wants to sell you a package.
The SEO package includes keyword research, on-page optimisation, link building, and monthly reporting. Sounds good, except you don’t actually need SEO right now, you need help launching a new product with video content and paid advertising.
The Content Marketing package includes blog posts, social media, and email newsletters. Great, but you already have someone handling social media internally, and what you really need is a complete website redesign with proper conversion optimisation.
The Full-Service package includes everything, but it costs £8,000 per month, which is more than your budget.
So you’re stuck choosing between paying for services you don’t need, hiring multiple agencies that don’t coordinate with each other, or trying to do everything yourself with that one marketing person you hired who’s already overwhelmed.
There has to be a better way. And there is.
What If Marketing Worked More Like a Team and Less Like a Menu?
Here’s a different way to think about marketing support:
Instead of buying predefined service packages, imagine you have access to a complete marketing department. Inside that department, you have strategists who understand your business goals, content creators who can write and produce video, digital specialists who know SEO and paid advertising, designers who can handle everything from your website to your trade show booth, and analysts who track what’s actually working.
Every month, you get a set number of hours from this team. How you use those hours is entirely up to you based on what your business needs most right now.
This month, you’re launching a new product. You direct the team to focus on creating a launch video, designing landing pages, setting up paid advertising campaigns, and crafting email sequences to your existing customer base. The strategist coordinates everything to ensure it all works together. The hours get allocated across these priorities.
Next month, the product is launched and now you need to maintain momentum. You shift focus. The team creates blog content to support SEO, manages and optimises the paid campaigns based on real performance data, designs sales collateral for your team, and develops social media content. Same team, same monthly cost, completely different work based on evolved priorities.
The month after that, you’re preparing for a major industry conference. The team pivots again. They design your booth graphics, create a promotional video for your presentation, build a landing page for conference attendees, develop follow-up email sequences, and prepare sales materials. Everything coordinated, everything strategic, everything working toward your actual business goals.
This is how marketing should work. Not as disconnected services sold in rigid packages, but as a coordinated function that adapts to your business needs month by month.
Why Traditional Agency Models Keep Failing Businesses
Let me be specific about what’s broken in how most agencies operate, because understanding the problem helps explain why a different approach matters.
The Package Trap
Agencies create packages because packages are easier to sell and deliver. They can say “Our Gold Package includes X, Y, and Z for £4,500 per month” and that sounds simple and clear.
But packages don’t match how businesses actually need marketing support.
Your business doesn’t need exactly four blog posts, two social media posts per day, and monthly SEO reporting every single month for the rest of time. Some months you need intensive content creation. Other months you need design work and campaign strategy. Other months you need video production and paid advertising management.
Packages force you into a predetermined allocation of resources that almost certainly doesn’t match your actual needs. You end up paying for blog posts you don’t really need because they’re “included” while simultaneously paying extra for design work that “wasn’t in the package.”
This is like being forced to buy a meal deal when you’re not thirsty for a drink or don’t want crisps. You’re paying for things you don’t want while still not getting exactly what you need.
The Coordination Problem
When you hire different agencies for different services, nobody’s coordinating the overall strategy.
Your SEO agency is optimising for keywords they think are important. Your content agency is creating articles about topics they believe will engage readers. Your paid advertising agency is driving traffic to landing pages that may or may not align with what your SEO is targeting. Your designer is creating graphics based on one brief while your video producer is working from a different creative direction.
Everything exists in isolation. The messaging is inconsistent. The strategy is fragmented. And you’re the one stuck trying to make it all work together while running your actual business.
This isn’t anyone’s fault, exactly. It’s just the natural result of hiring specialised vendors who each optimise for their own piece of the puzzle without seeing the complete picture.
The Billing Complexity
I’ve watched business owners open monthly invoices from three different marketing vendors and try to reconcile what they’re actually paying for and whether it’s worth it.
One agency bills for “content creation and distribution” at £2,200. Another bills for “search engine optimisation and technical improvements” at £1,800. A third bills for “social media management and engagement” at £1,400. Then there are additional project-based invoices for “website updates” and “ad creative development.”
When the CFO asks “What are we spending on marketing?” the answer becomes “Well, it’s complicated…” You can’t easily track total marketing spend, you can’t clearly attribute results to specific investments, and you definitely can’t make informed decisions about where to allocate budget.
Complexity is expensive. Not just in the actual costs, but in the cognitive overhead of managing it all.
The Learning Curve Tax
Every time you hire a new agency or freelancer, you pay for them to learn your business.
Who are your customers? What makes your product different? What’s your brand voice? What are your business goals? What have you tried before? What worked and what didn’t?
You answer these questions in the kick-off meeting. Then six months later when you hire someone to handle a different marketing function, you answer them all again. And again when that contractor leaves and you find a replacement. And again when you expand to a new service.
You’re constantly paying people to climb the learning curve about your business instead of paying them to apply knowledge they’ve already developed.
This is wildly inefficient, but it’s the inevitable result of working with disconnected vendors on project-by-project basis.
How the Full-Service Model Actually Works
At Greenlight Web, we built something different. Not because we’re geniuses, but because we got tired of watching businesses struggle with the same problems over and over.
Here’s how it works in practice:
You choose a service tier based on how much marketing capacity you need. Each tier gives you a set number of hours per month and access to our complete team, strategists, content creators, video producers, SEO specialists, paid advertising experts, designers, and analysts.
The Full-Service Starter gives you 25 hours per month for £2,000. This works well for smaller businesses or companies with straightforward marketing needs who want professional support without a massive investment.
The Full-Service Growth tier provides 45 hours per month for £3,500. Most businesses find this sweet spot gives them enough capacity for meaningful, multi-channel marketing while remaining budget conscious. You get priority scheduling and faster turnaround on requests.
The Full-Service Scale tier delivers 75 hours per month for £5,000. This is essentially a complete outsourced marketing department. You have the capacity to run sophisticated campaigns across multiple channels, produce substantial content, and maintain a comprehensive marketing operation without the overhead of building it internally.
The hours are yours to use each month however your business needs. You don’t choose a “package” of predefined services. You have access to everything we offer, content marketing, video production, SEO, paid advertising, social media, design, branding, website development, strategy, and analytics and you simply direct where the hours get focused based on your priorities.
One crucial point: hours are use-them-or-lose-them each month. We don’t allow banking or rollover because marketing needs to be consistent to be effective. This might sound restrictive, but it’s actually liberating. It forces businesses to actually use their marketing capacity rather than postponing important work. Think of it like a gym membership; you have access every month but getting value requires actually showing up.
At the end of each month, you receive transparent reporting showing exactly how hours were allocated, what work was completed, and how campaigns are performing. You’ll know precisely where your investment went and what results it’s generating.
Every six months, we have a comprehensive review. We evaluate what’s working, what isn’t, and whether your current tier still makes sense for your business. If you’ve consistently been maxing out your hours, we’ll suggest moving up. If you’re consistently underutilising capacity, we’ll suggest moving down. Our goal isn’t to maximise what you pay us, it’s to find the sustainable fit where you’re getting maximum value from your marketing investment.
What You Can Actually Request (And Why It Matters)
Let me get specific about what “access to everything” actually means, because vague promises don’t help you evaluate if this approach fits your needs.
In content marketing, you can request anything from detailed blog posts and case studies to sales collateral and email campaigns. If you need someone to write the copy for your new website, we do that. If you need a white paper to support enterprise sales, we create that. If your sales team needs leave-behind materials after prospect meetings, we design those. The work can be as technical or as consumer friendly as your business requires.
For video, we handle everything from short promotional clips for social media to longer explainer videos for your website. Product demonstrations, customer testimonials, company culture videos, training content, conference presentation videos; if it needs to be filmed, edited, and published, it falls within scope. We even handle the scripting, storyboarding, and platform-specific optimisation to ensure the video actually gets seen and drives results.
Our SEO work goes beyond just “ranking higher on Google.” We conduct comprehensive keyword research to understand how your customers actually search for solutions like yours. We optimise your website’s technical foundation so search engines can properly crawl and index your content. We develop content strategies that target the entire buyer journey from early research to ready-to-purchase. We build the kind of authoritative backlink profile that establishes your domain as trustworthy in your industry. And we’re already deep into generative search optimisation, ensuring your business appears when someone asks ChatGPT or Claude to recommend solutions in your category.
When it comes to paid advertising, we manage campaigns across Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. But management doesn’t mean just setting up campaigns and letting them run. We’re constantly testing ad creative, refining audience targeting, optimising bids, analysing conversion paths, and adjusting strategy based on what the data reveals. If an ad isn’t performing, we don’t wait for the monthly review, we catch it in real-time and fix it.
Social media work can mean anything from developing your overall social strategy to creating daily content to managing community engagement to running paid social campaigns. We can handle one platform or all of them depending on where your audience actually spends time. And we don’t just post content into the void, we analyse what resonates, adjust the approach, and build genuine engagement that actually contributes to business goals.
On the design side, we cover everything from complete brand identity systems and website design to individual marketing assets like email templates, infographics, and trade show graphics. Whether you need a single landing page or a new logo or just a consistent set of social media templates, it’s all within scope.
The strategy and analytics component is perhaps the most valuable, even though it’s often the most invisible. This is where we ensure everything connects to actual business goals. We’re not just creating content for content’s sake or running ads because that’s what businesses do. We’re asking: What are you trying to accomplish? Who needs to take what action? How do we measure success? What’s working and what isn’t? This strategic layer is what transforms disconnected marketing tactics into a coordinated growth engine.
The key insight: you’re not limited to requesting specific services from a predetermined menu. You’re working with a team that understands your business and can apply whatever combination of skills and tactics will drive the results you need. Some months that might mean 100% focus on content and SEO. Other months it might mean 100% focus on paid advertising and conversion optimisation. Most months it’ll be some intelligent combination based on your current business priorities.
The Real-World Impact: How This Changes Your Business
Let me walk you through what this actually looks like when a business makes the switch. I’m going to use a real example from a client we worked with last year, though I’ve changed identifying details per our agreement.
They’re a professional services firm, think consulting, not products. They’d been working with various freelancers and small agencies on a project basis. They had one person managing SEO (£1,200/month), another creating occasional blog content (£400-600 per piece as needed), a designer they’d call when they needed graphics (project rates), and they’d tried running Google Ads themselves with mixed results.
Their total marketing spend was unpredictable but averaged £2,500-3,500 per month when you included everything. More importantly, nothing was coordinated. The blog content wasn’t optimised for the keywords the SEO person was targeting. The Google Ads they were running sent people to pages that hadn’t been designed for conversion. Their social media presence was erratic because nobody owned it as a responsibility.
They came to us frustrated. Not because the individual contractors were bad at their jobs, but because the whole thing felt fragmented and they couldn’t tell if it was actually working.
We started them on the Full-Service Growth tier, 45 hours per month at £3,500. Here’s how the first six months played out:
Month one was almost entirely strategy and foundation work. We conducted a comprehensive audit of everything they’d done, interviewed their best clients to understand the buyer journey, mapped out a coordinated strategy, and began fixing technical issues with their website. We used nearly all 45 hours just getting the foundation right. No sexy campaigns, no viral content, just the necessary work of understanding their business and fixing what was broken.
Month two, we shifted to execution. We rewrote their core website pages with proper messaging and SEO optimisation, created a content calendar aligned with how their prospects actually searched for solutions, set up proper analytics tracking, and launched a targeted Google Ads campaign focused on their highest-value service offering. We used about 40 hours between content creation, technical implementation, and campaign setup.
By month three, we’d established a rhythm. We published two substantial blog posts targeting specific buyer questions, optimised five existing pages for better search visibility, managed and refined the Google Ads campaign (which was now generating qualified leads at a reasonable cost), created social content that actually drove traffic back to the optimised website, and designed a new sales presentation for their team. We used all 45 hours and they asked if they should upgrade to Scale tier.
We told them to wait. Let’s see if 45 hours remains sufficient once we’re in pure optimisation mode rather than build mode.
Month four was where things got interesting. Their managing partner was speaking at an industry conference. We pivoted. Instead of the normal content and SEO work, we used hours to create a compelling presentation, film a promotional video, design a landing page for conference attendees, develop a follow-up email sequence, and create leave-behind materials. We still maintained the Google Ads campaign and published one blog post, but the majority of effort went toward supporting this business development opportunity.
This is the power of the model. A traditional agency with a rigid SEO package would have said “conference support isn’t in your package, that’ll be a separate project.” We just reallocated hours to the highest-value opportunity.
Month five returned to normal marketing operations, but now we had momentum. The conference had generated serious leads. The blog content from previous months was starting to rank. The Google Ads were consistently profitable. We used hours to nurture those conference leads with targeted content, create a detailed case study, continue SEO content development, and redesign their service pages for better conversion.
By month six, they were getting 3-4 qualified inbound leads per month from organic search (up from essentially zero), the Google Ads were generating 5-7 leads per month at a cost that made sense, and they’d closed two new clients who’d found them through content marketing, worth about £85,000 in annual revenue.
Here’s what changed compared to their previous approach:
Everything was coordinated. The blog content supported the keywords we were targeting in SEO. The Google Ads sent people to landing pages designed to convert. The social media reinforced the thought leadership position established in the content. When opportunities emerged (like the conference), we could pivot quickly without renegotiating contracts.
The investment was predictable. They knew they were spending £3,500 every month. No surprise invoices, no project overruns, no complicated reconciliation of what they were actually paying for.
They had strategic partnership instead of vendor management. Instead of managing three different contractors who each needed to be briefed separately, they had one team that deeply understood their business and was thinking strategically about how to drive growth.
The learning curve only happened once. By month six, we knew their industry, their competitors, their sales process, and their ideal clients better than any of their previous contractors ever had. Every month we got better at knowing what would work for their specific business.
This is what the model enables. Not just marketing services, but strategic, coordinated, adaptable marketing that actually functions like an extension of your business rather than a vendor you manage.
Why the Six-Month Commitment Actually Protects You
You might have noticed that our service tiers specify a six-month minimum commitment. This probably feels like a red flag if you’ve been burned by agency contracts before. Let me explain why it’s actually there to protect you, not trap you.
Marketing doesn’t work in one month. It barely works in three months. Real marketing results, the kind that actually impact your business, take time to develop.
If you’re investing in SEO, search engines need time to crawl your updated content, evaluate your site’s authority, and determine where you should rank. This process takes months, not weeks. If you’re creating content, you need time to build a library of resources that demonstrate expertise. One blog post doesn’t establish authority; a year of consistent, valuable content does. If you’re running paid advertising, you need time to gather conversion data, test different approaches, and optimise for performance.
The businesses that fail with marketing almost always fail because they quit too early. They run SEO for six weeks, see minimal movement, and declare it doesn’t work. They publish five blog posts, notice traffic hasn’t tripled, and abandon the content strategy. They run ads for a month, see imperfect results, and shut down the campaigns before optimisation can happen.
The six-month commitment exists to prevent this pattern. It ensures we have enough time to do the work properly, to build the foundation, implement the strategy, gather performance data, optimise based on results, and actually generate meaningful outcomes.
But here’s the key protection for you: six months isn’t that long, and the commitment is enforced by results, not legal threats. If we’re doing good work that’s driving value for your business, you’ll want to continue. If we’re not, six months isn’t an unreasonable period to have given it a fair shot before moving on.
We’ve never had to legally enforce a six-month commitment because if a client is unhappy, we want to know immediately so we can fix it. The commitment exists to establish realistic expectations about timeframes, not to trap anyone in a relationship that isn’t working.
The relationship continues because it’s delivering value, not because you’re contractually locked in.
The Questions You're Probably Asking
How do you decide which tier is right for my business?
The honest answer is: we don’t know until we understand your business. The tier depends on how much marketing work you actually need done each month, which depends on your growth goals, your current marketing maturity, your industry, and your competitive landscape.
During our discovery conversation, we’ll ask about your goals and current situation. Then we’ll give you an honest recommendation about which tier makes sense as a starting point. About half our clients start at Growth tier because it provides enough capacity for meaningful multi-channel work. Some start at Starter to test the relationship before committing to larger investment. A few start at Scale because they have ambitious goals and need substantial capacity immediately.
The tier isn’t permanent. After a few months, we’ll know if you need more or less capacity and can adjust accordingly.
What happens if we run out of hours before the month ends?
We’ll tell you when you’re approaching your hour limit, usually when you’re at about 80% usage. At that point, you have options: you can decide which work to pause until next month, you can add overflow hours at our standard hourly rate, or you can upgrade to the next tier if this is a consistent pattern.
We’re not going to surprise you with “you’re out of hours” when you have urgent work that needs completing. We track usage carefully and communicate proactively so you can make informed decisions.
What if we need less than 25 hours per month?
Then this probably isn’t the right model for you, and we’ll be honest about that. The full-service model works for businesses that need consistent, ongoing marketing support. If you only need occasional project work, you’re probably better off hiring freelancers or agencies on a project basis.
We’d rather turn down business that’s not a good fit than take your money for a service model that doesn’t serve your actual needs.
Can we specify which team members work on our account?
You’ll have a dedicated account strategist who coordinates everything and serves as your main point of contact. The specific specialists who work on different tasks (writers, designers, video producers, etc.) will vary based on availability and expertise match.
We don’t assign individual contractors to clients because that creates single points of failure. If someone’s unavailable, someone else steps in seamlessly. You’re working with a coordinated team, not a collection of individuals.
How do you track time and ensure accuracy?
We use project management software that tracks time in 15-minute increments. Every task gets logged with a description of work completed. At the end of each month, you receive a detailed report showing how hours were allocated.
We’re not nickel-and-diming you on communication. Quick email questions or brief status calls don’t get tracked. But if we have a two-hour strategy session or spend significant time on planning, that uses your hours because it’s real work that has value.
What if we're not happy with the quality of work?
Tell us immediately. If something isn’t right, we want to know right away so we can fix it. We do revisions until you’re satisfied, that’s part of the service and doesn’t consume additional hours (within reason).
If there’s a persistent quality issue or we’re consistently missing the mark, that’s a much bigger problem that suggests we might not be the right fit for your business. We’d rather have an honest conversation about that than continue taking your money while delivering work you’re unhappy with.
Do you work with businesses in our industry?
We work across many industries, professional services, e-commerce, SaaS, manufacturing, healthcare, education, and more. The fundamentals of effective marketing apply regardless of industry. What changes is the specific messaging, channels, and tactics.
What we care about isn’t whether we’ve worked in your exact industry before. It’s whether we can learn your business deeply enough to market it effectively. During discovery, we spend significant time understanding your industry, competitors, and customers. By month two or three, we should sound like we’ve been working in your space for years.
How quickly can we expect to see results?
It depends entirely on what you’re trying to achieve and what your starting point is.
If you need a landing page designed, you’ll see results (the completed page) within a week or two. If you’re running paid advertising and your tracking is already set up, you might see qualified leads within the first month.
If you’re investing in SEO from a standing start, you probably won’t see significant organic traffic increases for 3-4 months. If you’re building a content marketing program to establish thought leadership, you’re looking at 6-12 months before it meaningfully impacts how prospects perceive your authority.
We set realistic expectations during discovery and throughout the engagement. Marketing isn’t magic. Its strategic work applied consistently over time. Some tactics deliver quickly; others compound gradually. The businesses that win are those that commit to the long game while celebrating the short-term wins along the way.
Why Greenlight Web Built This Model
We didn’t invent the concept of outsourced marketing departments or flexible service delivery. But we did spend considerable time figuring out how to make it actually work in practice rather than just sound good in marketing copy.
Most agencies fail at this model for a simple reason: it’s operationally harder than selling packages. Packages are predictable and scalable. You can systematise delivery when every client gets the same thing. When every client gets something different based on their evolving needs, you need more sophisticated systems and more adaptable team members.
We built those systems because we kept seeing the same pattern: good businesses with real growth potential were being underserved by the traditional agency model. They couldn’t afford to build complete marketing departments internally. They couldn’t get good results from disconnected freelancers. And they couldn’t stomach paying for rigid packages that included services they didn’t need.
There was clearly a gap in the market between “hire it all in-house” and “manage a dozen different vendors” and “pay for predetermined packages whether they fit or not.”
We filled that gap by creating a delivery model that actually adapts to how businesses need marketing support: strategically coordinated, fully flexible, and financially predictable.
Is it perfect? No. Some businesses need more hours than even our Scale tier provides, at which point they really should be building in-house capability. Some businesses need so little support that paying for 25 hours monthly doesn’t make sense, they’re better off with project-based help.
But for the substantial middle ground of businesses that need real, professional, ongoing marketing support without the overhead of building it internally or the fragmentation of managing multiple vendors, this model consistently delivers better outcomes than the alternatives.
The Choice You're Actually Making
Here’s what this decision actually comes down to:
You can continue managing marketing the way you have been, hiring specialists for individual tasks, coordinating disconnected vendors, paying for packages that don’t quite fit your needs, or trying to do it all yourself with limited resources and expertise.
Or you can work with a team that functions like your marketing department, strategically coordinated, fully adaptable, deeply knowledgeable about your business, and focused on driving actual results rather than delivering predefined service packages.
The first approach might be cheaper in the very short term, especially if you’re comparing to a month or two of service. But it’s dramatically more expensive in opportunity cost, coordination overhead, and suboptimal results over any meaningful timeframe.
The second approach requires committing to a fixed monthly investment and trusting a team to actually deliver value over time. That might feel riskier if you’ve been burned by agencies before. But it’s how the businesses that are winning in your market are approaching marketing, as a strategic function rather than a collection of tactical tasks.
We’re confident enough in the model that we’re happy to have a candid discovery conversation where we determine together whether this is the right fit. About 30% of those conversations end with “this isn’t right for you right now” from one side or the other. That’s fine. We only want to work with businesses where we can genuinely drive results.
If you’re tired of marketing that feels fragmented, expensive, and disconnected from your actual business goals, let’s talk about whether the full-service model makes sense for your specific situation.
Because in 2026, marketing shouldn’t be a vendor relationship you manage. It should be a strategic capability your business has access to, coordinated, adaptable, and relentlessly focused on driving growth.
That’s what we built. And that’s what we deliver every single month for businesses that are ready for a different approach.
Let’s see if you’re one of them.
