The plain definition, and what it excludes
A digital marketing agency sells you marketing capacity you haven't hired: a group of specialists who run your online channels on a recurring fee, and report on what happened. That's the whole thing. Everything else on the website is packaging.
It's worth naming what an agency is not, because the three nearest neighbours get sold interchangeably. A freelancer is one specialism and one person's calendar. A consultant sells a plan and a review cadence, then leaves you to execute it. An in-house team is fixed cost you control and have to keep busy. An agency is variable cost with a range of skills, and its main structural advantage is that it has seen your problem on forty other sites.
The main structural disadvantage is the mirror image: your account is one of many, and attention is the scarce resource. That's not a flaw to be shocked by — it's the trade you're making, and the contract is where you set its terms.
Who's actually on the account, and whose name is in the SOW
A working digital marketing team has five roles. On a small retainer, one person plays three of them. That's fine. What isn't fine is not knowing which.
- Account lead or strategist — owns the plan and the number you agreed. This is the name you should be able to say out loud.
- Channel specialists — paid media, SEO, social, email. Usually where most of your delivery hours actually sit.
- Content and creative — writers, designers, video editors. The line item that quietly gets cut when a bigger client escalates.
- Analyst — tracking, dashboards, attribution setup. Often shared across every account in the building.
- Account manager — coordination, approvals, meeting notes. Necessary; not the same as delivery, and shouldn't be billed as if it were.
Three ways they charge, and what each one quietly rewards
The billing model shapes behaviour more than any values slide ever will. Read this as a map of incentives, not of ethics — decent agencies exist under all three.
| Model | How it's billed | What it rewards | Watch for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly retainer | Fixed fee, ₹30,000–₹3,00,000 a month, ex-GST | Continuity and long engagements | Coasting in months 4–9, when the setup work is done and nobody's watching |
| Project or one-off | Fixed fee against a defined scope and end date | Shipping the deliverable | Zero incentive to care what happens after handover — retainer versus project covers the trade properly |
| Percentage of ad spend | Typically 10–20% of media, sometimes with a floor | Higher spend, not better returns | Advice to scale spend arriving slightly before the evidence does |
What an Indian agency contract actually says
Most Indian agency agreements are three to six pages and follow the same shape. These are the clauses that decide how the next year goes.
- Term and notice. A three-month minimum is reasonable — nothing meaningful ships in six weeks. After that, month-to-month with 30 days' notice. A 12-month lock-in with a 90-day exit is a revenue protection device.
- Deliverables, with numbers. "Content support" means nothing. "Four articles of 1,200+ words, published, per month" means something. If a line can't be counted, it can't be enforced.
- Reporting cadence. Monthly written report and a call is the norm. Insist the report opens with the number you agreed, not with traffic.
- Ad spend handling. Whether media is billed through the agency or paid directly by you, and whether there's a markup. Ours has none — spend is billed separately at cost.
- Asset ownership. Ad accounts, GA4, Search Console, GBP, domains, content and creative files in your name from day one. Agencies that hold assets hostage rarely announce it in advance.
- GST and TDS. 18% GST sits on top of the quoted fee. Most companies deduct TDS on agency invoices; which section applies depends on how the work is characterised, so agree it with your CA before the first invoice rather than in month three.
- What happens if it doesn't work. Usually blank. That blank space is the single most informative part of the document.
Four questions that expose a weak agency
Not gotchas. These four are answerable in a sentence each by anyone who has actually run accounts, and they're unanswerable by anyone selling from a deck.
1. "What's my baseline, and how will you measure it?"
The right answer names a source and a window: trailing 90 days of qualified leads from organic, pulled from your CRM. A weak answer talks about growth in general terms. If nobody wrote down where you started, nobody can prove you moved — and nobody can be blamed for not moving.
2. "How many other accounts does my specialist carry?"
There's no universally correct number, but the answer should be one they know instantly. Hesitation means nobody is tracking load, which means your hours are the ones that flex when somebody else shouts.
3. "Show me last month's actual output for a client of my size."
Redacted is fine. You're looking for volume, quality and consistency across the month — not a highlight reel from 2023. An agency that can't produce last month's work either didn't do much or isn't proud of it.
4. "How do I leave, and what do I take with me?"
Notice period, handover process, asset transfer, and whether they'll do an exit call. An agency confident in the work answers this cheerfully. It's the question that separates the field, mostly by how uncomfortable it makes the room.
How we're set up, and why it's structured that way
We run three channels — SEO, organic social and content, and performance media — and refuse everything else. SEO starts at ₹75,000 a month, ₹40,000 for smaller sites. Social is ₹30,000 / ₹50,000 / ₹70,000. Performance is ₹40,000 / ₹75,000 / ₹1,50,000. Bundles start at ₹99,000. All ex-GST, media billed at cost.
The contract runs month-to-month after the first quarter with 30 days' notice, and every asset stays in your name throughout. We freeze your trailing-90-day qualified organic leads on day one; if we haven't beaten that number in 90 days we keep working free until we do. Not a ranking promise — nobody controls Google's index — a promise against your own starting line.
That's also why we cap at three new clients a month. The full breakdown sits on the pricing page, and if you want the internal view of where a retainer's money goes, read how a digital marketing agency works.