Retainers tend to be mutually beneficial for both parties. Here are a few reasons why:

Benefits for your business:

• A fast and reliable service
• You build a relationship with one day-to-day contact
• Your costs are predictable
• The positive relationship formed leads to real and ongoing value
• You leverage and benefit from the skillsets and experience of specialists
   

Benefits for the agency/consultant:

• They can invest time and focus on your business
• The relationship built up over time allows the agency/consultant to increasingly influence and adjust strategies so that they can better meet your goals. 

What does this mean?

Imagine you need to improve your organic web traffic, and you’d like to optimize your website for search engines. You could take the following two approaches.

1. Approach a marketing company for a three-month-long SEO audit that includes on-page optimization, building 10 backlinks, and publishing 50 local citations.
2. Approach a marketing company for a monthly SEO retainer.

In the first approach, your agency might deliver exactly what was laid out in your project agreement, but your website’s rankings and organic traffic remain unchanged. You have thrown your money away.

In the second approach, your marketing firm will consider your goals, build a strategy to reach those goals and then execute each month to achieve them. In the first month, they might focus heavily on your on-page optimization. In month two, your firm establishes all local citations and begins building links to your website. In month three, your firm continues to build links and starts to publish blog content according to a rigorous content strategy.

This is the biggest difference between a marketing retainer and project. A retainer will allocate resources to achieve your goals, while a project will provide a deliverable that you’ve requested.