It's responsible for getting you customers and keeping them, using tools you probably don't handle yourself or don't have time to use. In practice that means: writing the copy on your website, taking or editing photos and videos of your business, posting on social media, running paid ads on Instagram or Google, and checking every week whether all of that is actually bringing in customers.

A barbershop had spent months posting haircut photos to Instagram and nobody was booking from there. The problem wasn't a lack of content — it was that there was no clear button to book an appointment and no one answering messages quickly. At About Agency, that's exactly the first thing we check before suggesting any ad spend.

Not always. If you're already busy serving the customers you have and can't take on more right now, hiring marketing will only bring you more demand than you can handle, and that creates more problems than sales.

It does make sense when you have the capacity to sell more, but people can't find you, or find you and don't trust you enough to buy.

A food delivery business had plenty of kitchen capacity and drivers to spare, but their Google profile only had three reviews from two years ago. Before thinking about paid ads, the first thing we worked on with them at About Agency was getting fresh reviews — that alone changed how people saw them.

Advertising is paying a platform, like Instagram or Google, to show your ad to more people. Marketing is everything else: what your brand says, how it looks, what you post for free, and how you treat the customer once they arrive.

The most common mistake is paying for ads without having solved everything else first. It's like paying for more people to walk past a shop window when the inside is a mess.

Someone was paying for ads to drive traffic to their website, but the page took eight seconds to load and looked bad on mobile. The ad was never going to work, no matter how much money went into it. At About Agency we always check that first.

As a point of reference, the range runs from $400 USD a month for the most basic option up to $15,000 when the business needs the complete system. We work in dollars because it's a stable reference: if we quoted in local currency, the price would have to be adjusted every few months just because of inflation or devaluation, and that has nothing to do with the work being done. In dollars, you know exactly what you're paying regardless of what the local currency does that month.

Now, here's why the range is so wide: not every business needs the same thing. If your website already works well, it makes no sense to pay to rebuild it. If all you're missing is consistent content, you don't need a whole system. And if you truly need everything — website, content, reviews, advertising — that's when the number goes up, because the work involved is much bigger.

The problem is that many agencies overcharge for solving just one part, without telling you that everything actually works as a connected process. And some agencies focus on just one thing, which isn't wrong, but it's not what most people are looking for: most people want someone to hand them a complete, solved system — not to go hiring separate services on their own.

That's why we built an investment estimator where you can see an average based on what you already have and what's missing, so you get a real idea before talking to us. And if you've read this far, you can always book a free audit — claim your audit here.

• "I don't understand anything they're telling me." If they explain everything with acronyms and technical jargon to sound like experts, that's a red flag. A serious agency explains things in plain language, as if talking to someone who's just getting started — because you probably are.
• "They promise results but have nothing to back it up." Ask for real examples of work with other businesses, not just pretty screenshots or promises. If they can't show you anything concrete from before, it's probably because they don't have it.
• "I don't know if this is actually working." Before starting, the agency should tell you exactly what they'll measure to know if it worked — something concrete like calls, messages or booked appointments, not something vague like "more digital presence."

In the end, all three come down to one thing: if an agency can't clearly explain what they're going to do, show you they've done it before, and tell you how you'll know if it worked, it doesn't matter how nice their pitch is — you shouldn't hire them.

A business owner told us his previous agency sent him reports full of "reach" and "impressions" charts, but never said how many new customers had come in. At About Agency, the report always answers one question: did this bring in customers or not?

The kind of result you'll see depends on the combination of your website, your reviews and the quality of your product or service.

Before spending on an agency, here's what you can do yourself, and it costs nothing:

1. Google reviews: ask your latest customers to leave you a review. Something as simple as sending the link over WhatsApp after a purchase already adds up.
2. Quality photos with your phone: you don't need a professional photographer. With good natural light and a clean background, a phone photo already looks much better than a dark or blurry one.
3. Better social media content: posting regularly and showing the behind-the-scenes of your business (how the product is made, who makes it) builds more trust than just photos of the finished product.

If you've already done this and feel it's not enough, that's when it makes sense to talk to an agency. The short answer for how long it takes is: between three and six months.

The longer answer is more like this: it's similar to training. Nobody gets strong in three days, but in the first week you already notice you're sleeping better. Those early signals exist before the big result, and a serious agency shows them to you so you don't feel like you're spending money blindly while you wait. If one promises big results in a week, they're either exaggerating or using tricks that can later damage your brand.

In practice, not everything takes the same amount of time: things like activating reviews or improving your contact information show up within days. Things like ranking higher on Google or earning an audience's trust take longer, because they don't depend only on you — they depend on Google and your audience also "trusting" that you're consistent, and that isn't earned overnight.

Less than most people think. You don't need the perfect logo or a full business plan drawn up. The minimum is knowing who you sell to, having some way for the customer to contact you (WhatsApp, phone, form), and knowing how much you can invest per month without drowning.

Everything else — the brand message, the photos, the website — is usually built together with the agency, not something you need to bring already solved.

Many businesses wait until they "have everything looking nice" before asking for help, and that delays their growth by months. At About Agency we prefer to start with what already exists, even if it's messy, and improve it as we go.