Four ways to buy it. Here is what each one really costs.
Real 2025 and 2026 numbers from pay guides, government wage data, published agency price lists and industry rate surveys. Australia and the United States, so you can compare a hire against a freelancer against a retainer before you sign anything.
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Ask three providers what content help costs and you get three numbers you cannot compare. One quotes a salary, one quotes cents per word, one quotes a monthly retainer. All three sound reasonable and none of them tell you whether you are being had.
So here is the actual market, priced four ways, from sources that publish their method. Award pay guides, government wage data, published agency price lists and rate surveys with sample sizes attached. Every figure below is from 2025 or 2026 and is named at the bottom of the page.
Australian figures are in Australian dollars, United States figures in US dollars. Nothing here is converted, because you are hiring into one market or the other, not both.
Start with the floor and work up. In Australia there is a legal minimum, and above it a market rate, and the two are a long way apart.
That 30 percent is an economy wide private industry average, so treat it as a planning multiplier rather than a quote. The Australian version runs on superannuation, leave loading and payroll tax instead of health insurance, so the components differ and the principle does not: the advertised salary is not what the person costs you.
Two independent Australian sources landing within about $2,700 of each other on the same role is unusually strong agreement for salary data. Plan a coordinator level hire in Australia at roughly $65,000 to $70,000 before on costs, and a social specialist meaningfully above that.
Freelance is the only one of the four options where both markets publish real survey data, and the result is the most surprising number in this guide.
A 1,000 word blog post costs about the same in Sydney as it does in Chicago. When freelance quotes vary wildly, the variance is almost never geography. It is whether you are buying words from someone who has to be briefed every time, or time from someone who already knows your business.
The useful comparison is against the retainer. Four 1,000 word posts a month at market rate is $1,000 to $1,800, which is $12,000 to $21,600 a year, and it stops the month you stop commissioning. That is the number to hold up against every agency proposal you are sent.
This is where the spread gets wide enough to be worth understanding, because the same words are sold at five times the price depending on who is selling them.
Note the gap between the $1,219 average and the $960 median in the Australian audit. A handful of expensive agencies drag the average up, which is exactly why an agency quoting you $1,200 can accurately say it is about average. The median is the number to plan against.
Rates tell you the price of a thing. Budget data tells you whether you can afford it, and there is one source that publishes both halves.
The CMO Survey, run by Duke, Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, published its 35th edition in 2026 from fieldwork in January 2026 with 308 respondents. Firms under $10M in revenue reported spending 13.34 percent of revenue on marketing, and 15.50 percent of that marketing budget on social media.
Marketing budget of about $66,700 a year. Social media takes about $10,340 of it, which is roughly $860 a month. That lands almost exactly on the $960 median agency retainer, which is the cleanest sanity check in this guide.
Marketing budget of about $266,800 a year. Social media takes about $41,350, or roughly $3,450 a month. At that level a part time hire, a freelancer on retainer and a premium agency tier are all genuinely on the table.
Somewhere between those two, an agency retainer stops being cheaper than a person. Compare the annual retainer against a salary plus on costs, not against the salary, or the comparison flatters the hire by about 30 percent.
One caveat worth holding. CMO Survey respondents are marketing leaders at firms that have marketing leaders. Read 13.34 percent as what a business that takes marketing seriously spends, not as an average across every small business with a website and good intentions.
Same work, four ways to buy it, annualised so they can be compared honestly.
Hours are unfalsifiable. Pieces published are not. Turn every quote into a cost per published piece and the five times spread between agencies collapses into something you can actually rank.
At $495 a month nobody senior is writing your posts, and that is fine if the work is simple. At $2,450 a month you are entitled to know whether a strategist touches it or whether you are paying a premium for the same junior.
Freelance stops clean. A retainer usually takes the calendar, the templates and the learned voice with it. Ask before you sign what you keep, because that single answer can be worth more than the price difference.
Averages in this market are pulled up by a small number of expensive agencies. When a proposal says it is priced at the market average, ask what the median was in the same dataset.
A salary plus 30 percent on costs still leaves out the hours you spend briefing, reviewing and approving. That is the cost most owners discover in month three, and it never appears in a salary guide.
Every figure above is public. Nothing here is modelled, estimated or extrapolated from a vendor blog post, and where a source is older or narrower than the others it is flagged in the section that uses it.
Wages and salaries, three Australian sources and three American.
Freelance rates and agency pricing.
And the budget side, which is the only source here that covers both what businesses spend and how they split it.
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