How much does a marketing consultant cost in the UK?
A marketing consultant in the UK will cost you anywhere up to to £12,000 a month, and almost nobody in the industry will tell you where on that scale they sit until you've been through a "discovery call". We think that's daft.
So here are the actual numbers, what drives them, and, further down, our own full price list. Yes, really. Every number, published, because if we're going to moan about pricing secrecy we'd better not practise it.
The market ranges below are based on published UK rates as of September 2026. Marketing pricing isn't regulated and doesn't follow a standard; these are the real ranges you'll meet, not a rate card.
The four ways consultants charge
Day rates. The classic model. Published day rates for experienced UK marketing consultants run from around £500 to £1,800. The top of that range is director-level operators, people who've run marketing for serious businesses. The bottom is still a senior person. Meaningfully below £500 a day you're usually buying a freelancer's delivery time rather than consultancy, which is fine, but it's a different product.
Monthly retainers. For ongoing involvement, with the consultant as a regular presence rather than a one-off. Published UK fractional marketing retainers span roughly £1,500 to £12,000 a month depending on seniority and days per month, and the London end of the market starts around £4,000. More on fractional below.
Project fees. A defined piece of work at a fixed price: a strategy, an audit, a launch plan. Typically priced off the day rate, so a strategy project involving four or five days of work lands in the low thousands. The advantage is you know the number before you start.
Memberships and group models. The newest tier, and the one most people don't know exists. Group support (a monthly call, ongoing access to advice, a community at your stage) for a two-figure monthly fee. Ours is Qrios Minds at £59 a month. It's not one-to-one consultancy and doesn't pretend to be; it's how a one-person business gets a marketing brain on tap without a retainer.
What actually drives the price
Four things, mostly.
Seniority. You're paying for scar tissue. A consultant who's seen forty businesses hit your exact problem will solve in a day what costs a cheaper hire a fortnight. The expensive day is often the better value: a £1,200 day that fixes your positioning beats six £400 days circling it.
Strategy versus delivery. Advice costs more per hour than execution, and it should. It's the part that decides whether the execution is worth doing at all. Be suspicious of "strategy" priced like delivery. It's usually a media plan with a strategy cover page.
Scope. One channel costs less than the whole machine. A consultant looking at your sales process and your marketing (pipeline, conversion, follow-up, pricing conversations, not just the ads) is doing more valuable work than someone auditing your Instagram.
Where they are. London rates run 20 to 40 per cent hotter than the rest of the country for the same work. One of the quiet advantages of hiring in the North West: senior consultants here charge meaningfully less than their London equivalents, and the advice travels just as well. If you're near us, here's how to choose a marketing consultant in Liverpool.
Our prices, in full
Here's the bit almost nobody else will do. This is the entire Qrios price list, and none of it has VAT to add, so the price you see is the price you pay.
The affordable ways in.
Qrios Minds, our membership, is £59 a month per person for a monthly group call plus WhatsApp support whenever the "is this daft or brilliant?" questions strike. The Social Insight & Content Review, a social audit with competitor insight and two weeks of content ideas delivered inside 3 working days, is £99 (usually £149).
One-hour sessions.
The Power Hour (one hour, one problem, sorted) and Backed (our 1:1 mentoring) are both £150 a session on our launch offer, with the usual price being £195. Both are priced per person.
Half days, full days and workshops.
The Shake-Up, half a day on one big question, starts from £450. The Rip-Up, a full day on your whole sales and marketing picture, starts from £750. And our Vision & Values Workshop, three hours nailing your foundations with your team, is £150 per person.
Ongoing leadership.
Fractional sales and marketing leadership comes in three doses: 5 hours a month from £675, 10 hours from £1,200, or 15 hours from £1,500. That top tier is two full days a month of senior leadership for less than most firms charge for one.
The big one.
The Rewrite, a full strategy project with a fixed price agreed before we start, begins at £1,500.
Why publish it?
Three reasons. It saves you five discovery calls just to price up help. It keeps us honest, because a public price can't quietly inflate when your postcode looks expensive. And it means the first conversation we have is about your business, not a dance around budgets.
The maths behind it is deliberately simple: our full day is £750, which works out at £100 an hour, and the more time you commit to, the closer your rate slides towards it.
Ad-hoc help costs the most per hour, monthly commitment costs the least, and lock-ins don't exist anywhere on the list.
So what should YOUR business pay?
Match the spend to the size of the decision, not the size of the consultant's website.
Turning over under £250k, or pre-revenue?
A retainer is probably premature. Start with a membership at £59 a month, a £99 audit, or a one-off session. The worst buy at this stage is a four-figure monthly retainer that eats the budget the plan was supposed to spend.
Turning over £250k to £1m?
Pay for the strategy properly (a fixed project in the low thousands), then a light monthly involvement to keep it honest. This is also where fractional marketing leadership starts to make sense: a slice of a senior marketer, sized to fit, which is exactly what our £675 to £1,500 a month tiers are built for. The wider market charges £1,500 to £12,000 for the same idea aimed at bigger businesses.
£1m and up?
You're in retainer territory, and the question shifts from "can we afford advice?" to "should this be a hire?" A mid-weight marketing manager costs £35k to £45k a year plus everything that comes with employing someone. Senior fractional leadership at £1,500 to £4,000 a month costs less than that and buys a more experienced head. Do that maths before recruiting.
The pricing tricks to watch out for
The anchored discount. "Normally £5,000 a month, but for you..." A price that moves that easily was never real. (A published launch offer with the usual price stated next to it, like ours above, is the opposite: both numbers are public and both are honest.)
The rolled-up retainer. One monthly figure covering "strategy, management and delivery" with no breakdown. You can't tell what the advice costs, which means you can't tell if you're getting any.
Paying consultancy rates for delivery. If your £900-a-day consultant is spending that day scheduling social posts, you're overpaying by roughly £800. Advice and execution are both legitimate purchases, at different prices.
The eternal discovery phase. Audits that lead to audits. Diagnosis should take days and lead to a plan with dates on it, not another proposal.
Guarantees. Anyone guaranteeing you rankings, leads or revenue for a fixed fee is fibbing about at least one of the three. Honest consultants give you expectations and review points instead.
How to make any consultant cheaper
Whatever you end up paying per hour, you control how much of that hour gets wasted. Three habits that stretch every pound:
Turn up with numbers. Revenue, roughly where your customers come from, what you spend on marketing now. A consultant who spends the first hour digging out basic figures is billing you for archaeology. Ten minutes of prep on your side buys an hour of thinking on theirs.
Bring a question, not a vibe. "Our marketing isn't working" is a mood. "We get plenty of enquiries but hardly any become customers" is a brief, and it gets solved in a fraction of the time. The sharper the question walking in, the cheaper the answer walking out.
Actually do the last lot of advice. The most expensive consultancy in Britain is the kind you pay for twice because nothing happened after the first session. If the plan didn't get actioned, the problem to solve isn't strategy, and a decent consultant will say so.
The only cost question that matters
Not "how much is this consultant?" but "what does this decision cost if I get it wrong?"
A £1,500 strategy project that stops you spending £20,000 on the wrong agency has paid for itself thirteen times over. Consultancy is expensive compared with doing nothing, and cheap compared with doing the wrong thing at scale, which is what most businesses do instead.
Every price on our list is exactly what you'd pay, no VAT, no surprises, and it all starts with a free half-hour conversation. Get in touch and we'll tell you honestly which tier fits, even if the answer is "none yet, go build for six months first".