What a monthly package includes
A monthly package buys one thing: a shoot day, or several, turned into a set of finished stills and vertical clips cut for your feed. Packages start at £500 for one shoot day and 20 to 30 finished assets, enough for four to six weeks of regular posting from a single day on site.
| Package | Shoot days | Assets | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | 1 day/month | 20–30 | From £500/month |
| Growth | 2 days/month | 40–55 | From £900/month |
| Full retainer | 3 days/month | 60–80 | From £1,300/month |
| One-off day | 1 day | 20–30 | From £600 |
| Add a second location | Same day | +10–15 | +£150 |
| Add a presenter | Same day | No change | +£120 |
What a package covers, and what it leaves out, matters more than the price on its own.
- Included: shooting, editing, colour grading and files delivered ready to post
- Included: a planning call before the first shoot in a new package
- Not included: writing captions
- Not included: scheduling or publishing posts
- Not included: community management or replying to comments
I hand over a folder of finished files. What happens after that, the words under each post and who watches the inbox, stays with you or your marketing person. See full pricing across every service if you’re weighing this against a one-off shoot, and what a monthly content package should contain covers the planning side in more depth.
How much content one day actually produces
One shoot day gives you 20 to 30 finished assets. At four posts a week, that is five to seven weeks of material from a single booking, longer if you stretch stills into carousels or reuse them as stories. It is the number every new client asks about before anything else: how much do I get for the money.
I shot a full month of Instagram content for a bakery in Bethnal Green in one Tuesday afternoon last winter. Twenty-eight images and four short clips, and the owner was still posting from that single day six weeks later without a reshoot in between.
The honest caveat: that is material, not a content strategy. Twenty-five good photographs with no plan for what to say sit in a folder and go stale. If you do not know what you want to say about your business this month, more assets will not fix that; a clearer brief will. I’d rather talk that through on the planning call than shoot a day nobody ends up using.
For a bigger one-off library rather than an ongoing monthly drip, a full branding shoot suits a business that does not post often enough to need a retainer. That is not a knock on packages, it is simply a different tool for a different posting rhythm. Full detail on the maths behind the numbers is in how much content one shoot day produces.
Vertical video, and why it eats the day
A stills-only day gets you roughly eighty frames, shot fast because nothing needs to hold still for camera moves or a second take. Add vertical video to the same day and you lose about a third of that shooting time to setup, retakes and cutaways, and get back six to ten finished clips instead.
That trade is worth it if video is going into your feed. TikTok, Reels and LinkedIn native video get watched differently to a static post, and a stills-only package won’t touch that format at all. It is not worth it if you are adding video because everyone else does, with no plan to post it weekly. You will pay for clips that sit unused while stills carry the account regardless.
Longer-form work, an interview or a founder story rather than a fifteen-second cut, is podcast and long-form video territory, a different booking to this one. More on planning the split is in vertical video for business.
Social media marketing for London businesses
Content production and marketing strategy are two different jobs. Most people asking about social media marketing in London want the first one: photographs and video that look like they belong on the platform. I shoot and edit. I do not set your posting frequency, run ads, build a content calendar or manage community replies; that is an agency’s job, not mine.
Most advice tells small businesses to post daily. I think that’s wrong for most of the restaurants and studios I work with. A slower, better-considered rhythm, three or four times a week with content worth watching, beats a daily post nobody finishes. If you need both the pictures and the plan, hire a producer for the shoot and an agency or freelance social manager for the strategy, rather than expecting either one to do both jobs well.
Restaurants, retail and hospitality
Restaurants and independent shops are the highest-volume users of this service, and for good reason: menus change, stock turns over, and a feed that looks three months old reads as a business that’s stopped caring. A menu change, a new seasonal dish or a shop refit is a shoot trigger on its own, not something to fold into the next scheduled visit.
Reel formats that work well here: a dish or product close up, a quick process shot, plating or pouring or wrapping, and a wider shot of the room or shopfront doing what it does. I break down which Reel formats work for restaurants in more detail elsewhere. As a rough rule, reshoot every six to eight weeks if you’re posting several times a week, or you end up recycling the same ten photographs by the third week.
For video alone, restaurant video from £600 is available as a standalone booking if a retainer is more commitment than you need yet. See content work for London businesses for examples from restaurants and shops around Hackney and Dalston.
How the retainer works
- A short planning call each month, ten to fifteen minutes, to agree what’s changed and what needs covering.
- The shoot day itself, usually two to three hours on site depending on the package.
- Delivery within five working days, edited and ready to post.
- Files land in a shared folder organised by platform, so vertical video and square stills do not get mixed together.
- One month’s notice in writing to pause or cancel, given before the next shoot date.
- Unused months do not roll over. Skip one and that shoot is gone, not banked for later.
That last point catches people out more than anything else in this arrangement, so I’d rather state it plainly here than have it be a surprise on an invoice. A retainer is a standing booking of my time, not a bank of stored credit. If your posting drops off for a month, the notice period is there so nobody is caught out by an invoice for a shoot that did not happen.
When a retainer is the wrong shape
A business posting twice a month does not need monthly shoots. Book two days a year instead and space the content out yourself; a retainer at that posting rate pays for shoots that outlast their use before the next one arrives.
A business with nobody to write captions or publish the files ends up with a folder of unused assets and a monthly invoice that stops making sense by month three. If that is your situation, sort who is doing the posting before you book a retainer, not after. I’d rather lose the monthly booking than watch a client pay for content nobody uses, and I will say so plainly on the first call.
Tell me how often you post and on which platforms, and I’ll reply within one working day with a package that matches your posting rate. Book a planning call before committing to a full retainer.