Scale the channels that make money. Quietly drop the ones that don't.
Performance marketing run on data, not vibes — paid media, social, SEO, email and the strategy that ties it together.
Digital marketing retainers start at R3,500 a month for social media management, R4,500 a month for paid media on Meta and Google, and R6,500 a month for SEO. A once-off SEO audit is R2,500. Everything is month to month with no lock-in, quoted and reported in rands, and you keep ownership of every ad and analytics account.
- Social management
- from R3,500/mo
- Paid media
- from R4,500/mo
- SEO retainer
- R6,500/mo
- SEO audit
- R2,500 once off
- Contract
- Month to month
Social media setup
one-off · ZARSocial media management
monthly retainerPaid media (Meta & Google)
monthlySEO
ZAREmail / CRM lifecycle
ZARStrategy & advisory
ZARSpend where it works. Cut where it doesn't.
A straightforward loop built around the numbers that actually move revenue.
Audit & goals
I look at where your traffic, leads and spend really go today, and we agree the metrics that matter.
Setup & tracking
Accounts, pixels, conversions and reporting wired up properly — so decisions run on data, not guesswork.
Launch & optimise
Campaigns and content go live, then get tuned against real results — scaling what works, killing what doesn't.
Report & scale
Plain-English reporting on the metrics that move money, with a clear plan for the month ahead.
Performance you can actually see in the numbers.
No vanity metrics — just real, defensible numbers from a decade of shipping and keeping systems alive.
Brands we've built, marketed and kept running.
A decade of work across healthcare, retail, manufacturing, hospitality and professional services — a selection of current and past clients.
— and more being added.
Which channel is right for you?
The honest answer depends on how fast you need leads, how much you can spend, and whether your website can convert the traffic once it arrives. Here is how we actually decide.
Paid media makes sense when you already know who buys from you and you need volume this month. You put money in, traffic comes out, and you can measure the gap between the two within a fortnight. It stops the moment you stop paying. SEO is the opposite trade: nothing happens for a while, then the traffic keeps arriving after you stop spending. Social is neither. It builds familiarity and handles the questions people ask before they are ready to buy. Email is the cheapest revenue in the stack, and almost every business we meet is sitting on a list they have never used properly.
There is a fourth answer we give more often than any of the above: fix the website first. If your site takes eight seconds to load on a phone, has one contact form nobody can find, and no conversion tracking, then every rand you spend on ads is buying you an expensive lesson. We would rather sell you a R2,500 audit than a R7,500 retainer that cannot work.
| Channel | Time to first signal | What it costs monthly | Best when | Skip it when |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads | 3–7 days | From R4,500 management plus your ad spend | People already search for what you sell and you need leads now | Nobody searches the term, or your landing page is broken |
| Meta ads (Facebook & Instagram) | 5–14 days | From R4,500 management plus your ad spend | Visual products, local services, retargeting warm audiences | Long, considered B2B sales with a tiny addressable market |
| SEO | 8–12 weeks for movement | R6,500 retainer, or R2,500 audit then R4,500 on-page as a one-off | Steady search demand exists and you can wait a quarter | You need revenue inside 30 days, or you are testing a new offer |
| Organic social | 4–8 weeks | R3,500 to R12,000 depending on platforms and volume | Trust and recognition matter more than immediate clicks | You expect it to replace paid acquisition on its own |
| Email & CRM lifecycle | 1–2 weeks | R4,500 setup, then R3,500 monthly management | You have existing customers or an unworked list | You have fewer than a few hundred contacts and no way to grow it |
| Fix the website first | Immediate | R2,500 SEO audit · R2,500 speed optimisation | The site is slow, untracked, or does not convert what it gets | Rarely. This is usually the correct first spend. |
What we actually do each month
Retainers get vague fast. Here is what lands in your inbox at each tier, in plain terms, so you can tell the difference between R3,500 and R12,000 before you sign anything.
Social Lite — R3,500/month
One platform. Eight posts a month, written, designed and scheduled. Basic engagement on comments and messages. One monthly snapshot showing reach, follower movement and which posts did the work. Suited to a business keeping one channel alive without pretending it is a growth engine.
Social Growth — R6,500/month
Three platforms, 12 to 16 posts a month, plus community management so questions get answered the same day rather than next week. A monthly performance report with commentary, not just a screenshot of the dashboard. This is the tier most Cape Town SMEs land on.
Social Pro — R12,000/month
Four platforms, daily content, short-form video coordination, ongoing strategy input and full reporting. You get a content calendar planned ahead of the month, not assembled the night before. Appropriate when social is a primary acquisition channel rather than a shopfront.
Paid Starter — R4,500/month
Management of a modest monthly ad spend across Meta and Google. Campaign upkeep, budget pacing, negative keyword work, creative rotation and monthly reporting. The R2,500 setup and audit happens once, before anything goes live.
Paid Growth — R7,500/month
Larger budgets, with structured A/B testing, landing page optimisation and bi-weekly check-ins instead of a monthly email. At this level we are changing the page as often as the ad, because the page is usually where the money leaks.
SEO retainer — R6,500/month
Ongoing content production, technical upkeep, internal linking, link building and reporting. Every month has a written plan attached to it, so you know what was worked on and why. If you would rather start smaller, the R2,500 audit and R4,500 on-page optimisation are available as one-off jobs with no retainer attached.
Retainers run month to month with 30 days' notice. No annual lock-in, no cancellation penalty. You own the ad accounts, the analytics and the content.
Marketing in South Africa is different
Playbooks written for American or European markets miss things that decide whether a campaign works here. These are the differences that change what we build.
WhatsApp is the default business channel
South Africans message businesses on WhatsApp before they email, phone or fill in a form. A campaign that drives people to a contact form and nothing else is leaving leads on the table. We route ad traffic to WhatsApp where it fits, put a visible WhatsApp option on landing pages, and make sure somebody is actually on the other end. A click-to-WhatsApp ad with a slow reply is worse than no ad at all.
Mobile data costs money, so page weight is a budget line
Most South African traffic arrives on a phone, on mobile data, and the person paying for that data notices a heavy page. A 6MB landing page with three hero videos does not just load slowly, it costs the visitor real money to load. We build landing pages light: compressed images, no autoplay video on mobile, fonts kept to what is needed. Speed optimisation is R2,500 as a one-off, and it usually pays for itself in ad efficiency inside a month.
Load shedding affects timing and support expectations
Traffic patterns move with the schedule. Running your heaviest ad budget into a block when half your suburb is dark is money spent on impressions nobody sees. We check the schedule against campaign pacing, and we treat hosting reliability and uptime monitoring as a commercial risk rather than an IT detail. A site that goes down during a promotion is a promotion that did not happen.
Rand budgets, rand reporting
Everything is quoted, spent and reported in rands, excluding VAT. Costs per lead are stated in rands so you can compare them to what a customer is actually worth to you. If a platform bills in dollars we show the exchange effect rather than hiding it inside a blended number.
Takealot is a channel, not a competitor to ignore
South Africa's dominant marketplace has a real third-party seller economy, and for some retail products it is a faster route to first revenue than a standalone store. It also competes with you for your own branded search terms. We factor that in when planning e-commerce campaigns rather than pretending the marketplace does not exist.
Search here is close to a Google monopoly
Google takes roughly 92% of South African search, Bing around 7%. That shapes where the SEO effort goes and where the paid search budget sits. It does not mean Bing is worthless for some B2B accounts, but it does mean nobody should be splitting a modest budget evenly across both.
How we measure, and what we refuse to call a result
An impression is not a result. Neither is a like, a reach figure, or a follower count. A result is a lead, a sale, a booked call, or a rand of revenue you can trace back to something we did.
Before any spend goes live we install the plumbing: Google Analytics 4, Search Console, the Meta pixel and conversion API where relevant, and conversion events for the actions that actually matter to your business. A form submission, a phone tap, a WhatsApp click, an add-to-cart, a completed checkout. If we cannot measure it, we say so upfront rather than reporting a proxy and hoping you do not ask.
On attribution, we will be straight with you. Multi-touch attribution is imperfect everywhere, and it is worse in a market where a large share of buying conversations finish on WhatsApp or over the phone, off-platform and untracked. Platform-reported conversions are almost always more generous than reality, because every platform claims the same sale. We report platform numbers next to what your own analytics and your own sales records say, and where those disagree we tell you which one we trust and why. Asking new enquiries how they found you is unglamorous and still one of the more reliable signals available.
Reporting is monthly for most retainers, bi-weekly at Paid Growth and above, and written in plain English. Every report answers three things: what we did, what it produced, and what we are changing next month. If a channel is not working we say it in the report rather than burying it, because continuing to bill for something that does not work is a short business.
How long before it works?
Paid media can signal within days. SEO compounds over months. Anyone promising you page one in 30 days is selling something other than SEO.
| Work | First signal | Meaningful result | What gates it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google Ads on existing demand | 3–7 days | 4–6 weeks once the data is enough to optimise on | Budget, conversion tracking, landing page quality |
| Meta ads, cold audience | 1–2 weeks | 6–8 weeks after creative testing settles | Creative volume and how fast you approve it |
| Technical and on-page SEO | 2–6 weeks | 3–6 months | Site condition, competition, crawl and indexing speed |
| Local SEO for a Cape Town service business | 3–8 weeks | 2–4 months | Business profile completeness, reviews, local competition |
| Email lifecycle flows | Days | 1–2 months | List size and how warm it is |
| Organic social | 4–8 weeks | 3–6 months | Posting consistency and whether the content is worth watching |
Two things move these numbers more than anything we do. The first is how quickly you get us content, approvals and access. Most delays we see are not development delays. The second is the state of the site we are sending traffic to. Speed, structure and clarity of offer decide whether a good click becomes a lead. That is why we would often rather start with an audit than a retainer, and why the audit is R2,500 rather than a sales call dressed up as one.
Month-to-month retainers put the pressure where it belongs. If a campaign is not going to work, you will hear it from us before you work it out from the invoice.
Areas we serve around Cape Town
We are Cape Town based and have been since 2016. Most work is done remotely, but being in the same city and the same time zone matters more than people expect.
A good share of our clients sit in and around the Cape Town CBD and Century City, where the businesses tend to be professional services and B2B, and where search intent is competitive enough that paid media and SEO usually need to run together. Out along the Atlantic Seaboard, in Sea Point and Green Point, the mix leans towards hospitality, retail and personal services, where local search and social do most of the heavy lifting and a slow mobile site costs you the booking. Woodstock and Observatory bring smaller, newer businesses that need a site and a first channel rather than a full stack.
Through the Southern Suburbs, in Claremont and Constantia, we mostly work with established service businesses where the goal is steady enquiry flow rather than a growth spike, and local SEO earns its keep. The Northern Suburbs are a different job again. Durbanville and Bellville have a strong base of trade, manufacturing and supply businesses, and Milnerton and Table View add retail and coastal services. For those, we tend to build around Google Ads on high-intent search terms plus a properly set up business profile, because the buyer is looking for a supplier today, not researching for a quarter.
Further out we work with businesses in Somerset West, Stellenbosch and Paarl, where the winelands and agricultural economy brings its own seasonality and a real need for campaigns that flex with the season instead of running flat all year. Wherever you are, the first consult is free, we reply within one business day, and you get a fixed scope and a fixed price before anything starts.
Marketing — the usual questions.
How much does SEO cost in South Africa?
An SEO audit is R2,500 once off, on-page optimisation is R4,500, and a monthly SEO retainer is R6,500. Paid media management starts at R4,500 a month. Everything is quoted and reported in rands.
Do you lock me into a long contract?
No. Month-to-month, no retainer traps u2014 you stay because it's working, not because you're stuck.
What's the minimum ad spend?
It's flexible. During the free consult I'll suggest a realistic starting budget for your market and goals.
Is your fee separate from ad spend?
Yes. You pay the platforms directly for media; my fee covers strategy, setup, management and reporting.
Which channels do you run?
Meta & Google paid, SEO, email/CRM lifecycle and organic social u2014 focused on the ones that fit your funnel, not all of them at once.
How soon will I see results?
Paid can show signal within days; SEO and lifecycle compound over weeks to months. I set honest expectations up front.
Do I keep ownership of my accounts?
Always. You own every ad and analytics account u2014 I just run them well and report transparently.
Tell me what you need — I'll reply within a day.
Send a quick enquiry below, or book your free first consult. No retainer traps, no jargon — just a clear scope and a fixed price.