Hiring a marketing agency is scary. It can be expensive and even if they don't lock you into a contract, it's really hard to leave. You'll end up depending on this agency for a lot of things, so it's important that you make the right decision.
I've worked for or with dozens of agencies I just want to share some questions that I think you should ask to identify any potential red flags. First, it's important to understand who's running this agency. Typically this is gonna be the founder, but whoever's running it is really gonna set the tone for how the agency is run.
A lot of the big issues I see with certain agencies come down to the fact that the person running the agency is a business person, not a marketer. I highly recommend finding an agency where the founder or the person running it is a complete marketing nerd. If the person running the agency is actually doing digital marketing every day and is motivated by finding new ways to help businesses grow, that energy will drip down through the entire organisation.
In addition to the founder, make sure you know who's gonna be in charge of the strategy for your campaign. In a lot of agencies, you're just gonna be handed over to some account manager, and that account manager is gonna follow some kind of step by step blueprint.
Talk to whoever is gonna be in charge of your strategy and ask them questions like, what are you most excited about right now? What are you doing differently this year than last year? And what experiments are you running right now where you don't know the results yet?
If this person isn't absolutely geeking out about how to get you more customers, there's a good chance they're gonna waste your money. And finally, you need to make sure you have a way to hold them accountable. And there's actually two ways that you need to hold them accountable.
Performance and deliverables. Now, you shouldn't expect them to tell you exactly how many customers they're gonna get you. Marketing is inherently unpredictable.
But they should be able to tell you how they're gonna know if the campaign is working or not. And good marketers don't assume that every initiative is going to be a success.
A good question to ask here is, how will you know if the campaign is successful, and what will we do if it's unsuccessful? There's no one right answer to these questions. But make sure the way that they're measuring success aligns with how you measure success.
One of the biggest mistakes is tracking success by impressions and or clicks. Just because people are seeing your ads or visiting your website doesn't mean it's resulting in more customers. However, tracking performance alone typically is not enough.
You should also be tracking deliverables. And this is because, as an agency, it's actually incredibly easy to do absolutely nothing and convince Most clients that the campaign is going very well. There are a hundred different metrics you can show and a hundred different ways to slice each of those metrics.
And even if you do absolutely nothing, those numbers are naturally gonna go up and down all on their own. It is alarmingly common for agencies to highlight the gains and ignore the losses. And when they can't ignore the losses, they'll blame it on some change in the platform or in Google's algorithm.
And you, as a business owner, are in no position to gauge whether or not they're being honest with you. And once you're a few months into a campaign, it's really painful to leave that agency. And I know from experience there are a lot of agencies out there, maybe even the majority of agencies, that are making their money primarily by convincing their clients that they're getting something they're not getting.
And that's why you should track deliverables. You should know exactly what work your agency is doing for you on a monthly basis. Sure.
At the end of the day, performance is all that matters. If your agency isn't showing you every task they've completed for you, you're right to wonder why. I talk with business owners every week that are currently paying an agency, and I always ask them what their agency is doing for them.
I would say 70 to 80% of the time, they really don't know. They might say something like I think they're optimizing our on site SEO, but if I ask them what that entails, they don't know. And most of the time this is by design.
Because a lot of agencies realize that if you counted up the actual hours they're putting into your campaign, you'd find out you're paying three or four hundred dollars per hour for work that's being handled by a junior member of their team. I didn't mean to make a video shitting all over agencies. There are a lot of great agencies out there.
Which is why it upsets me so much when I see agencies ripping people off.
