10 commandments for selecting a marketing agency today
Picking up an agency in 2025 for your marketing activities is not an easy road, but could become a successful story.
As big as a marketing department can get, we always need an extra help to accomplish a mission in our marketing strategy. Whether it’s for your paid advertising initiatives, managing your website or creating content, picking up an agency can be proven to be an ordeal, or sometimes a pure ‘love/successful story’. Ultimately, you are giving the power to a third party to act on your behalf, exactly like you could have done. The stakes are high for both parties.
So what makes the difference? How to avoid chaos? How to make the collaboration a success? Let’s explore what your checklist should look like when you are about to select your agency. At the end, your apprehension should vanish, and your business should be supported by trustworthy partners. Don’t you think? So, let’s keep this in mind.
1. Doing for themselves what they will help you to achieve
When you are looking for an agency, check if they are able to apply their expertise to their own business. Imagine that you’ve been referred to a SEO agency and they home page title has only “Home” in it. From your point of view, you are thinking: “How on Earth they will grow my business, if they can’t even apply the SEO basics to their own business”. In this case just run away as fast as possible.
The same goes for a design agency. Ask yourself the question when landing on their website: “Do they really know their stuff?”. Last but not least, if a B2B marketing agency not tracking you down for your contact details after visiting their website, then maybe it is not the right partner to select. In any business acquiring a visitor or a client is costly. You don’t want to let them go after a single visit. Look at how this e-commerce website is tracking you down with ads on any website you are visiting.
Needless to say that those examples can be accumulated. An SEO agency’s website can provide a fantastic user experience while tracking you down on the web to get your contact details. I am just stating the obvious. It is not rocket science, or is it?
2. Shortlist 3 or 4 agencies before reaching out
Act like any B2B buyer especially if you are not part of the 35% who are running their marketing activities in-house (1). You start with a search on the web, or even better, you have a few favorite names you want to work with because of your experience with them was successful.
You have listed a few now. Keep in mind that some of them will say no and won’t reply to your RFQ (Request For Quote). Why? There are a few reasons to that.
- “You are not the ideal client”. It means that you are not going to spend enough.
- “It’s out of our scope”. They are too busy for onboarding new clients, or they don’t want to have you as a client.
- Or they simply don’t reply because their website form is broken.
That’s why a shortlist of 4 is great. At least, you should have 2 offers to compare from.
3. An official registered partner
You have done your due diligence work. You need someone you can trust and most importantly who knows the platform you want to conquer. Most of those platforms, such as Amazon or Google have their own directories of approved partners. For example, you want to invest in retail media and want to invest in Amazon Ads? Look at their directory and find an approved vendor. This seal will assure you that the agency knows what they are talking about. Bonus: here is the link to Google’s directory.
4. A representative located on your time zone
This can be obvious but to avoid wasting time, I would recommend having a representative (account manager) living at a maximum of a 3-hour time difference. Why? Internal processes and workload can slow down things. Therefore, you don’t have to add an extra day on top of it because your account representative is located across an ocean.
5. And this person is your unique point of contact
In my experience, only 1 person should be your point of contact. Of course, for larger projects the pool of people involved can be bigger as you may need more expertise, but this person will remain your unique point of contact. Everything is going through them whether it’s a complaint or new project increasing their A.R.R. (Annual Recurring Revenue). With this type of centralization, you won’t hear about internal quarrels or employee’s exasperation because of their workload.
6. Define precisely the scope of work
On this you have to be more than thorough. A broad list of tasks about the work and the reporting bit won’t do it. Include in the list some SLAs (Service Level Agreement) and detail at the maximum to the point where only pressing send in your email client is missing, if you see what I mean.
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More importantly revised those conditions every quarter during the Quarterly Business Review (QBR) of the agency. See what is wrong and what went well. Draw conclusions and take actions.
7. A performance-based contract
Every contract you signed with any agency should be a performance-based contract. In other words, every deliverable or KPIs should be tied to an extra amount of money that they will get if they do it right or exceed the pre-defined threshold. This amount can be a percentage of the whole contract or a fixed amount. Nonetheless, it will be help to get their eyes fixed on the target.
For example: You are doing PPC (Pay Per Click) and your main KPI is CPC (Cost Per Conversion). Your CPC is at 100. In your performance-based contract you will mention:
- If CPC is getting lower than 100: 2% of the media spend will be granted to the agency
- If CPC is getting under 80: 5% of the media spend will be granted to the agency
- If CPC is getting at 50: 15% of the media spend will be granted to the agency
- Etc…
Of course, if it is going over 100 at the end of year, no bonus will be granted to the agency. And if you are good at negotiating, you can even ask them for a small refund.
This performance-based contract is obvious to me. It makes things more interesting for both parties. From the client’s side, you are adding value to the contract and know that the agency will have one focus only. From the agency side, the work is valued with an extra incentive. When I started my career in 2010, I was always inquiring why all agencies had performance-based contracts. After a few months, I got it. We met every time the expected results. Whereas in other positions I occupied later, when the contract was a fee (percentage) on ad spend, the only answers or results you got was: “You have to spend more” and its variations. A vicious circle leading to burn cash into man-hours and media spend instead of focusing on the results and performances.
Before signing, try to negotiate a performance-based contract; give the agency the incentive for a well-done work matching your goals.
8. Avoid the can-do-it-all agencies
In your research, you will find some all-in-one agencies. From PPC to building website or global branding campaigns, nothing can stop them. They can do it all.
I will always remember when I asked at that time to our website (build and maintenance) agency, a quote for a content strategy. After several meetings in which more than 5 employees from the agency participated, I finally received a quote. At a first glance, I thought we were Coca-Cola. The final price was 3 times what we were spending annually with them! The proposal was completely out-of-bound and their approach was not fitting our needs.
If you want something more such as a content strategy or a PPC agency, just start again the selection process, including those 10 commandments.
Don’t put all your eggs in the same basket. Otherwise, you will be completely dependent of this agency and this is the worst that can happen.
9. Address the problems immediately
To be frank but polite, always address the problem immediately. It may not change the outcome at all, especially when the results are good, but at least you will have expressed your concerns.
And be certain that this won’t happen again. If it does, you may be needed to re-think the relationship with your agency and change.
10. Change when not right
If you are not happy or satisfied, think about changing agency. After all you are the client even if sometimes you may seem to work for them. To make this change quick, don’t sign a 3-year (or plus) contract unless your have signed a performance-based contract. On top of that, be certain to have an early-exit clause. When things are not right, you want to get out as fast as possible.
You remember the content strategy quote I mentioned earlier? Well, after several website outages and hosting costs that were 80 times higher than needed, I got rid of them by proposing a plan to my management. When they saw the savings, the flexibility and the reliability by just hiring a developer they said yes. Sometimes bringing the expertise in house will be salvatory for many reasons.
- The marketing team skill set will grow.
- Your team will become stronger and inevitable.
- Your employees have always a better connection with the business than an agency.
- And as I mentioned, the operational cost will be lowered
Nonetheless, be careful of the turnover and what will happen if the employee is leaving.
What’s next?
You may already have experienced some of the situations described above, and you were stuck with a long term contract. At the end, your marketing results were affected. With those “commandments”, you will have a ready-to-go checklist, when selecting an agency will rise. Hopefully, you will get what you want at a good price under perfect conditions.
And if you think that I missed anything, just drop it in the comments. I will be more than happy to add it.
References:
26 Crucial B2B Marketing Statistics by Backlinko (1)
Cover photo by Mohamed Hassan from Pixabay
