Day 1 is assigned to a specific date by the CSP team based on your batch start date.
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📅 Week 2 · Saturday
day-12
What is Clarigital?.
Today you'll learn: what Clarigital is and why businesses pay for it — explained so clearly you could teach it to your parents by tonight.
⏱ ~20 mins
📖 Read + Quiz + Submit
✅ Need 3/5 to unlock
🔒 Saturday only
Week
Week 2 of 2
Day
12 of 14
Program
CSP — 2-Week Program
📖 Read This First — About 8 Minutes
'How much does digital marketing cost?' is the wrong question. The right question is: what return do I need to justify the spend?
One of the most common questions businesses ask is 'how much should I spend on digital marketing?' The honest answer is: it depends entirely on your business, your goals, and your current stage. But there are frameworks for thinking about it that prevent the two most common mistakes: spending too little to see results, and spending without tracking return.
Digital marketing costs fall into three categories: ad spend (money paid to platforms like Google and Meta), agency or freelancer fees (money paid for expertise and management), and tools and software (subscriptions for analytics, email, design, etc.).
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Ad spend is fuel. Agency fees are the mechanic. Tools are the dashboard. A car needs all three — fuel to move, a mechanic to keep it running efficiently, and a dashboard to tell you what's happening. Many businesses buy fuel (ads) but skip the mechanic (strategy) and dashboard (tracking). That's how you drive blind and run out of fuel.
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Small Business (₹15–50k/mo)
₹10–30k ad spend + basic tools. Sufficient for local visibility, Google Maps, social presence.
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Growth Stage (₹50k–3L/mo)
Meaningful ad spend + agency management. Enough to test channels systematically and scale what works.
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Agency Fees (India)
Freelancer: ₹10–30k/mo. Small agency: ₹30–80k/mo. Full-service agency: ₹1–5L/mo. Depends on scope.
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In-House vs Agency
In-house = more control, slower to build. Agency = faster execution, higher fees, potential misalignment.
📊 The right way to think about budget: If your average sale is ₹2,000 and your margin is 40%, you make ₹800 per sale. If your target CPA (cost to acquire a customer) is ₹400, you'd need a 2x ROAS minimum to break even. You can now work backwards: to hit 100 sales/month at ₹400 CPA, you need ₹40,000/month in ad spend. Budget follows the maths, not the other way around.
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Read the reference page below before taking the quiz.
What are the three main categories of digital marketing costs a business needs to account for?
A
A: Design, copywriting, and photography
B
B: Ad spend (platform costs), agency/freelancer fees, and tools/software subscriptions
C
C: Website hosting, domain name, and SSL certificate
D
D: Social media followers, email subscribers, and website visitors
✅ Ad spend (Google, Meta), agency/freelancer fees (expertise), and tools (GA4, email platforms, design software) are the three cost categories. Most small businesses only think about ad spend and miss the others.
❌ The three categories are: (1) ad spend paid to platforms, (2) agency or freelancer fees for expertise, (3) tools and software subscriptions.
Question 2 of 5
A local restaurant wants to start digital marketing. They have ₹15,000/month total budget. What is the most strategic allocation?
A
A: Spend all ₹15,000 on Instagram followers
B
B: ₹10,000 on Google Ads and ₹5,000 on Instagram Ads with proper tracking setup
C
C: Save it for 6 months and then spend ₹90,000 at once
D
D: Spend it all on a website redesign
✅ Splitting between Google (captures people actively searching for restaurants nearby) and Meta (awareness and retargeting) with tracking set up is the right strategy for a local restaurant. Followers-only spend generates no direct revenue.
❌ A balanced split between search intent (Google) and social awareness (Meta), with tracking set up from day one, is the most strategic use of a limited budget.
Question 3 of 5
A business hires a digital marketing agency paying ₹60,000/month in fees plus ₹80,000/month in ad spend. After 6 months they have no idea if it worked. What was the critical error?
A
A: The ad spend was too low
B
B: They used an agency instead of hiring in-house
C
C: No clear success metrics, tracking, or reporting requirements were set at the start
D
D: They should have split the budget across more platforms
✅ Spending ₹8.4L over 6 months without measuring results is a failure of planning, not execution. Always define success metrics and reporting requirements before any spend begins.
❌ The critical error was no measurement framework. Before spending a rupee, define: what does success look like in numbers, how will it be measured, and how often will results be reported?
Question 4 of 5
What does 'working backwards from CAC' mean when setting a digital marketing budget?
A
A: Starting with the largest possible budget and reducing it over time
B
B: Determining your maximum acceptable cost to acquire a customer, then calculating the ad spend needed to hit your sales target at that CAC
C
C: Copying the budget approach of a competitor
D
D: Starting with organic channels and adding paid later
✅ Working backwards from CAC means: know your acceptable cost per customer → multiply by your target customer volume → that gives you the required ad spend. It's the mathematical approach to budgeting.
❌ Working backwards from CAC: acceptable CAC × target customers acquired = required ad spend. This turns budgeting into a business decision based on unit economics, not guesswork.
Question 5 of 5
For which type of business does in-house marketing typically make more sense than an agency?
A
A: A business that needs immediate results with no marketing knowledge
B
B: A single-person startup with no budget
C
C: A growing business with consistent volume, where deep product knowledge and speed of content production matter
D
D: Any business with a budget over ₹1 lakh/month
✅ In-house works best when deep product/brand knowledge + content volume + speed matters more than broad channel expertise. An in-house marketer who knows the product deeply often outperforms an agency managing 30 clients.
❌ In-house is better when deep product knowledge and content speed matter. Agencies are better for specialised channel expertise or when you don't have volume to justify a full-time hire.
–of 5
Answer all 5 questions, then check your score.
✏️ Your Task
🔒
Score 3/5 to unlock this
Complete the quiz above first. The moment you score 3 or more, this section unlocks.
🏅
🎉 Day 12 — done!
Day 13 opens Monday.
📝 Today's Task
Someone in your family runs a small business. In 3–4 sentences, explain Clarigital to them like you're actually WhatsApp-ing them right now. Your own words — not copied from the page.
Start like this: "So there's this platform I was reading about — it's basically for businesses that get too many WhatsApp messages to handle manually. It lets them..."
0 / 800
From your registration confirmation email. Can't find it?
Submitting before 11 PM IST on your assigned Saturday counts as Day 12 complete.
Week 2 · Coming Tomorrow
Day 13 — Putting It All Together — A Complete Digital Marketing PlanOpens Monday on your assigned date.