Chicago Digital Marketing Agency

It varies greatly. Your industry, market, competition, and which services you invest in all play a part in cost. Chicago digital marketing companies typically charge between $100 and $200 for an hour of work. For some companies, a $1,200 ad spend might be enough to meet their business goals; others may spend tens of thousands per month, spread out across different channels and campaigns.

Hexxen’s marketing packages are month-to-month:

• Foundation (SEO, content, and site support): $1,250 – $1,850 a month, plus a $3,500 setup fee
• Competitive (expanded growth support): $2,250 – $3,500 a month, plus a $5,000 setup fee
• Industry Leader (custom strategy for larger, more competitive markets): $5,000+ a month

Ad spend is paid directly to Google, Meta, or LinkedIn and is separate from these fees. We just charge a small percentage for management.

That’s largely decided by your customers and industry.

When proximity matters, such as a home service company or medical office, local SEO, Local Service Ads, and geo-targeted social media can help you meet your customers where they’re at.

A manufacturer may need to invest in technical content, better SKU organization, and national Google ads.

A new brand may need a logo and a website before any of that.

The answer isn’t to always invest in everything. A business that already ranks well may get more from fixing the pages and forms people land on. An ecommerce website that already has good navigation and product information may need to first focus on technical SEO and development work to gain more visibility.

Maybe, but often not.

A new site is typically only necessary when outdated tech stacks, limited functionality, or a backend full of band-aids limit the site’s technical capabilities.

If your site loads quickly, works with modern plugins and APIs, and still has a good URL and navigation structure, we may recommend light improvements or redesigns of specific areas while keeping the site largely intact.

Some clients want to keep their old site mainly because of how much they’ve already invested in it. We typically caution against making that decision based on past spending alone. The money spent fixing an outdated site, which you’ll likely need to replace eventually anyway, may be better invested in building its replacement.

Our proposals often include two options: one for designing and developing a new site, and another for working with your existing site.

We often recommend starting off with a mix of both.

A main advantage of SEO is that you pay once for a page or set of pages, while with ads you pay for every click. However, your ads pages can show up immediately, while SEO often takes 3-6 months to start showing consistent results.

Using paid ads to supplement revenue in the short term while investing in SEO for the long term makes sense for many businesses.

Once SEO takes hold, the advertising budget can often be moved to support specific services, offers, products, or new locations.

It varies by channel:

• Search ads: calls can start within days of launch, with the first month or two spent testing what brings in leads at the right cost
• Local Services Ads: these start once Google finishes verifying your business, including any license your trade requires
• Paid social: traffic starts right away, but it often takes a few rounds of testing to find what works
• SEO and content: more substantial gains usually show over 3 to 6 months
• AI search: typically pages start showing up within a week or two of publishing

Through a mix of different software and platforms, and whether or not the leads you’re getting are a good fit.

• Service businesses: cost per qualified inquiry and booked jobs
• Law firms: consultations and signed cases, through intake tracking
• Ecommerce: sales and acquisition cost, measured against your margins
• B2B companies: quote requests and the deals they turn into

We use Search Console, GA4, your ad platforms, and other services to get the numbers. Then we turn that data into a digestible report and build recommendations for future work.

The important part is to match performance with your business goals. A page that gets 50 visits from people ready to hire you can be more valuable than one that gets 5,000 visits from people just browsing. We measure success differently depending on your business:

Yes. Wrong leads usually trace back to targeting or messaging: ads showing in Gary when you only serve the North Shore, or pages that attract small jobs when you want large ones.

We’ll compare your campaigns with the inquiries your team actually gets, then fix what’s off before recommending more spend.

For some industries, yes. A few examples:

• Roofers must include their IDFPR roofing license number and licensed business name in advertising, under the Illinois Roofing Industry Licensing Act.
• Plumbers must include a license number in any advertisement for plumbing services, under the Illinois Plumbing License Law.
• Law firms can say which areas they practice in, but the Illinois Rules of Professional Conduct restrict terms like “certified” and “specialist,” and the Illinois Supreme Court doesn’t recognize specialty certifications.

It depends on your customers, but Chicago makes a strong case. About one-third of Chicagoans speak a language other than English at home, and almost 70% of them speak Spanish, according to a WBEZ analysis of Census data. Chinese, Polish, Tagalog, Urdu, and Arabic are next.

For a business serving Pilsen, Little Village, or the Northwest Side, Spanish- or Polish-language pages and ads can reach people that English-only competitors miss.

A specialist agency runs one channel. A digital marketing agency plans across channels, so the budget can shift toward whatever brings in customers. Meanwhile, your ads, site, and content all point in the same direction.

Hexxen can do it either way. Some clients hire us for one service, like SEO or paid ads. If you’d like us to handle your entire marketing strategy, we can do that too.

Yes. While we pride ourselves on being a one-stop shop for SEO, marketing, design, and development, some clients have a marketing director, a separate SEO provider, or a creative agency they want to keep.

There are plenty of talented people in our industry, and there’s no reason we can’t work successfully alongside them as long as everyone is focused on the same goal: growing your business.

Yes. Your website, content, and source code belong to you, and your advertising, analytics, and social media accounts stay under your control. If you already have accounts, we can work within them rather than starting over.

If you stop working with Hexxen, you keep your accounts, campaign history, and data.