How much should social media marketing cost a small business in Australia?
There is no single price, but there is a sensible range. Here is what the market actually charges in 2026, the four ways to buy it, and how to set a budget you will not regret.
Written for Australian small businesses. Last reviewed August 2026. All figures in AUD.
The short answer
For a typical small local business in Australia, ongoing social media help usually lands somewhere between a few hundred dollars a month for light freelance support and several thousand a month for a full agency. Most owners who want it genuinely handled end up spending in the low thousands per month.
That figure is for the work of running your social media: strategy, content, posting and reporting. It does not include money you choose to put behind ads, which is a separate budget you set and control.
A useful rule of thumb: decide what an hour of your own time is worth, then work out how many hours a month you are quietly losing to this. That is your real starting budget.
The four ways to buy it, and what each costs
Almost every option falls into one of four buckets. They are priced very differently because they solve the problem very differently.
Do it yourself, roughly $0 plus your time
Free in cash, expensive in hours. The tools are free. The cost is the two to five hours a week it takes to plan, film, edit, write captions and stay consistent, on top of running the business. This is where most owners start and most quietly give up.
A freelancer or virtual assistant, about $300 to $1,500 a month
Affordable, but you still do the thinking. Hourly rates commonly sit in the tens of dollars per hour. Great for scheduling and simple posts, but you usually still supply the ideas, the footage and the direction, and quality swings with the person.
A social media agency, about $1,500 to $6,000+ a month
Full service, full price. Retainers for small-business social management commonly run from about fifteen hundred dollars into several thousand a month, and often more if video and ad management are included. You get a team, but you also pay for their overheads and account managers.
A productised, done-for-you service, about $1,000 to $2,000 a month
A fixed scope for a fixed price. A newer middle option: a set deliverable, for example a fixed number of finished videos each month, at a flat rate with no long contract. You give up bespoke campaign strategy and gain predictability and a much lower price than a traditional agency.
Social media manager rates in Australia
Most owners comparing quotes are really comparing three different ways of buying the same hours. It helps to know which one you are looking at before you judge the number.
Hourly
Common for freelancers and virtual assistants. Rates sit in the tens of dollars per hour and vary widely with experience and whether the person is local. Hourly suits a defined job, for example scheduling a month of posts you have already written. It suits ongoing content poorly, because the hours creep and you carry the planning.
Monthly retainer
The standard way agencies price. A fixed fee each month buys a loosely defined bundle of strategy, content and reporting. Small-business retainers commonly start around fifteen hundred dollars a month and rise from there. The risk is that what you receive in a quiet month is not what you receive in a busy one, because the scope is described in words rather than in counts.
Packages, priced per deliverable
The most comparable option. A package states a number: this many finished posts or videos, every month, for this price. Because the deliverable is countable, two quotes can actually be compared. This is how productised services are priced, usually around one to two thousand dollars a month for a video-led package.
If you are collecting quotes, convert every one of them into a cost per finished post before you compare. A fifteen hundred dollar retainer that produces four static photos is more expensive per piece than a package producing twelve videos, even though the headline number is lower.
What actually drives the price
When two quotes are hundreds of dollars apart, it is almost always one of these five things.
Video
Short video costs more to make than photos, and it is the format that reaches new people
Volume
Four posts a month versus twelve is a real difference in labour
Strategy
A custom, campaign-led plan costs far more than a steady content service
Ad spend
Management of paid ads, and the ad budget itself, sit on top of everything else
The single biggest swing is video. It is more work to produce than a photo, which is why cheap packages avoid it, and it is also the format the apps push hardest to people who do not follow you yet. If you are weighing whether video is worth the premium at all, we set out the sourced case for it in why your business needs reels.
What you should insist you are paying for
Price only matters next to what you get. Before you commit to any monthly figure, make sure it buys all of the following, because a cheap plan that skips them is not actually cheaper.
Consistency, not bursts. A predictable number of posts every month beats a flurry followed by silence. The apps reward showing up.
Content made for your business. Generic templated posts blend into everyone else's. It should sound like you and speak to your customers.
A human who is accountable. Someone should check the work for accuracy and tone before it goes out, especially for clinics and any regulated advice.
No lock-in you cannot escape. Month-to-month terms let you leave if it is not working. Long contracts protect the agency, not you.
A realistic budget for a small local business
If you run a clinic, a trade or a cafe and you want social media genuinely handled rather than half-done, a sensible planning number is somewhere around one to two thousand dollars a month for the content and management, kept separate from any ad spend you decide to add later.
Spend much less than that and you are usually buying either your own unpaid hours or a thin, templated service. Spend a lot more and you are often paying for agency overheads you do not need at your size. The goal is not the cheapest quote. It is the lowest reliable price that still buys consistency, real video, and a person standing behind the work.
What most quotes will not tell you
Cheap monthly packages are often photos and re-shared links, not video. Video is the part that reaches new customers, and it is the first thing budget plans cut.
Ad spend is almost always quoted separately from the management fee. Ask exactly what the number includes before you compare two prices.
You are frequently paying for the account manager and the sales process as much as the actual posts. Simpler, productised services strip that out.
No one can honestly promise you a viral hit or a fixed number of new customers for a set fee. Anyone who does is guessing, or selling.
Common questions
How much does social media marketing cost per month in Australia?
For a small local business, roughly three hundred to fifteen hundred dollars a month for a freelancer, one to two thousand for a fixed-scope package, and fifteen hundred to six thousand or more for an agency retainer. Ad spend sits on top of all three.
Is it cheaper to hire someone in-house?
Rarely, at small-business scale. Once you add superannuation, leave and equipment, even a part-time coordinator lands above what a freelancer or a fixed-scope package costs, and you still need someone who can shoot and edit video. In-house starts to make sense when social is a primary sales channel, not a support one.
How much should I put behind ads?
Treat it as a separate decision from the management fee, and start small enough that you can afford to learn nothing. There is no point boosting posts until you have content worth boosting, which is why we suggest fixing the content first.
ReelMonth turns a 15 minute questionnaire into twelve branded reels a month, scripted, voiced and reviewed by a human, at a flat monthly rate. It is the predictable middle option in the table above, built for local businesses.
Ranges, not quotes: the dollar figures above are general market ranges for the Australian small-business market in 2026, drawn from publicly advertised freelancer rates, agency retainer guides and productised-service pricing. They are a planning guide, not a quote for your specific business.
Management versus ad spend: across every option, the fee to produce and run your social media is separate from any money placed behind paid promotion, which you set and control yourself.
Why video costs more: short video takes more production time than static photos, which is why it is priced higher, and it is also the format the platforms surface most to non-followers.
ReelMonth pricing: current ReelMonth rates and inclusions are shown on the relevant niche page linked above.