Qolca Team · 2026-10-06 · 9 min read
Community manager, agency or an operated team: what each option costs for a new business in Peru in 2026, how much ad budget you need on Meta and Google, and why the only number worth tracking is what each customer costs you, not likes.
You have the capital, the product and maybe the RUC. Now you need people to know you exist. The first quotes arrive and none of them look alike: a community manager offers a monthly fee for posts, an agency offers a package of campaigns, someone else offers a website. It is hard to compare them because each one sells a different slice. This guide splits the cost of marketing a new business in Peru into the parts that actually matter, so you can compare apples with apples.
Every marketing budget has two lines that people often mix up. The first is the work: creating content, setting up and adjusting campaigns, answering messages, measuring. The second is the ad budget (pauta): the money that goes to Meta and Google to show your ads. Some providers bundle both into one fee or take a percentage of the ad budget, which makes it hard to know what you paid for. Keep them separate. The ad budget should be charged to your own card, in your own ad accounts, so you see every sol.
A freelance community manager is the cheapest way to have a presence on social media. In Lima the fee varies a lot with experience and the number of posts. What you usually get: a content calendar, design of posts and stories, and replies to comments. What you usually do not get: ads managed against a sales target, someone answering WhatsApp at night, follow up on people who asked for a price, or a monthly report on orders. A community manager is a good fit when your business already sells and you need consistency in your feed. For a launch, the feed alone rarely brings the first customers.
Agencies in Lima tend to fall into two groups. Some build something once and leave: a site, a brand, a launch campaign, for a one-off fee that can be in the low thousands of soles. Others rent you one discipline every month: ads, SEO or content, with retainers that range from a few hundred to around S/10,000 a month, and performance agencies often charge 10% to 18% of the ad budget. Both can do good work. The gap is that nobody owns the whole path from ad to sale. The ads agency reports clicks, the content person reports reach, and when sales do not show up each one points at the other.
The third option is one team that sets up and runs the whole selling side: ads, content, WhatsApp with an assistant, follow up, the store or booking page, receipts, and a monthly report. It costs more per month than a single freelancer, but you are not paying three providers and coordinating them yourself, and there is one number everyone answers to. Qolca works this way, and so we are not neutral here. Judge it by the questions in the last section, not by our word.
Enough to learn, before enough to scale. For a first test, S/800 to S/1,200 over three weeks on Meta (Instagram and click to WhatsApp) is usually enough to see what one inquiry costs you. Google makes sense when people already search for what you sell, for example "dental clinic in Surco" or "English academy in Arequipa". Once you know your cost per inquiry and how many inquiries become customers, you can calculate the monthly budget instead of guessing it.
Likes, reach and followers are easy to report and easy to inflate. They do not pay rent. The numbers that matter for a new business are few:
Whoever you hire, ask them to report these numbers monthly. If the report is full of reach and impressions and never mentions customers, you are paying for activity, not for selling.
For reference, Qolca publishes its prices: a Validation of S/2,200 over three weeks (credited toward the setup), a setup of S/4,500 to S/8,500, and monthly operation of S/3,900, S/5,900 or S/7,900 plus IGV with a six month minimum. The ad budget is always yours and goes straight to Meta and Google. We do not promise sales; we commit to the work, the dates and the report on the 5th. If you want to talk it through, book a free call at https://calendly.com/qolca-info/consultoria-inicial-gratuita, or write to us on WhatsApp at https://wa.me/51991376769.