Content marketing agencies are outside teams you pay to plan, write and publish content for your business. They're not all the same job. Some only write. Some set strategy. Some move into your team. Retainers run from about $2,000 to over $50,000 a month. Sort them by what they do before you compare prices.
In short: Content marketing agencies fall into three kinds: production shops, strategy-plus-execution agencies and embedded teams. Pick the kind first, then test two or three agencies of that kind with the same five questions.
I write for blogwriter.pro, which writes blog posts and nothing else on this list. Weigh what I say about it that way. Most of this post doesn't depend on it.
Why two agencies can sound the same and be nothing alike
Every agency says "content marketing" on its homepage. One of them means ten blog posts a month. Another means a researcher, a designer, a video editor and a monthly report on pipeline.
That gap is why quotes are so hard to compare. You aren't comparing the same thing at different prices. You're comparing different jobs.
The three kinds
Column Five, itself an agency, describes its market by scope rather than by label. I've grouped its ranges below into three kinds. Treat the prices as an agency describing its own market, not a quote. Its pricing guide and its choosing guide give slightly different ranges, so the numbers are only a rough guide.
| Kind | Rough monthly price | What you are buying |
|---|---|---|
| Production shop | $3,000 to $8,000 | Written articles and basic SEO. You supply the plan |
| Strategy plus execution | $10,000 to $25,000 | Planning and several formats, such as articles, video and design |
| Embedded team | $25,000 to $80,000 | A dedicated strategist, writers, designers and video people working as part of yours |
Source: Column Five's guide to choosing an agency, read on 22 September 2026.
Its 2026 pricing guide says what the money buys. The entry tier, $2,000 to $5,000 a month, is execution only: blog posts, social updates and email drafts, with no strategy. From $5,000 to $15,000 you add editorial calendars, keyword research and performance reporting. Above that come video, data visualisation and interactive content.
At the bottom you pay for words. Higher up you pay for someone to decide which words go in, in what order and for which reader. That decision is the expensive part, because a good writer can't fix a bad plan.
The first question isn't which agency. It's which row you're in. If you already know your audience, your topics and what a good post looks like, a production shop may be all you need. If you don't, a production shop gets you a lot of competent words pointed nowhere.
Telling them apart before the call
Read the agency's own site for four things.
- Who is named. A real team page with senior people beats a page of stock photos. Column Five lists "named senior talent, not junior staff" as a selection criterion.
- Case studies in your field. One of its red flags is having no relevant case studies in your industry.
- How it prices. Column Five calls per-word pricing a red flag, because "content is not a commodity measured by the pound." That's one agency's view, and a fair freelancer may still quote that way. But if an agency sells strategy and quotes by the word, the two don't match.
- What it says about measuring. Look for a plain answer, not a promise.
Be careful with that last one. In the Content Marketing Institute's 2025 B2B report, 56% of 980 B2B respondents said they find it hard to attribute ROI to their content. The survey ran from 25 June to 16 August 2024, mostly in North America. Those doing the work in-house struggle to prove it. So an agency that guarantees a rank or a revenue figure is guessing.
Five questions to ask each agency
Ask every agency on your shortlist the same five, in the same order, so the answers can be compared. I go deeper on the first three in what to check before you pay for SEO blog writing.
- What happens before you quote? Column Five lists "no discovery process" as a red flag: a price on the first call without a single question about your business.
- Who writes and who edits? Ask where AI is used, and who reads the result.
- Where does one number come from? Pick a figure in a sample post and ask for its source. If they can't show it, they can't show you the rest.
- How will we know it's working? A good answer names what they can measure and what they can't.
- What do we own if we leave? Get the posts, the research and the calendar assigned to you in writing.
Then get a count of what arrives each month: posts, pages, emails, reports.
Do you need an agency at all?
Sometimes the honest answer is no.
If you need posts and already have a plan, a freelancer is the other route. The Editorial Freelancers Association 2026 rate chart, based on more than 1,100 members surveyed from November 2025 to mid-January 2026, puts blog posts at 25 to 40 cents a word for ghostwriting and 25 to 45 for work-for-hire. On a 1,500-word post that is about $375 to $675, by my arithmetic. A freelancer writes. They won't plan your quarter or build your reports unless you pay for that separately.
A writing tool is a third route, if you have the plan and just want drafts. blogwriter is a Mac app that reads your site, researches, drafts, and checks every figure against a source. It won't ship a number it can't trace, though traced to a source is not the same as guaranteed correct. Nothing goes live until you publish it. Plans start at $19 a month for up to 30 posts, which is about 63 cents a post at the cap, by my arithmetic. That leaves out your own Claude subscription and your time to read each draft. There is also a $499 a month plan where a person reads every post for you.
It does no strategy, video, social or email. It promises no rankings or traffic. It needs macOS 11 or later.
Every plan begins with five posts free and no card. See the plans or download the app.
How to choose
- No plan, no audience research, no idea what to publish? Look at the second or third kind of agency, and judge it on the five questions.
- A clear plan and only writing to buy? A production shop, a freelancer or a tool, compared on the same 1,500-word post.
- Not sure? Ask two agencies of the same kind for a sample and a named source for one figure in it.
Whatever you pick, get the deliverables in writing before you pay.
