Agencies are great. Right? Or Are they. Seems like everybody and their relatives have an agency set up. The truth is anybody can claim to have an agency.
What is a marketing agency?
It’s a group of people or a person who claim that they can help in various areas of marketing. This can be print marketing, digital marketing or any marketing for that matter. However, the vast majority of digital agencies that exist today are marketing agencies.
Marketing agencies come in all flavors and sizes. Some focus on Google Proper. Some focus on YouTube. Some on TikTok. Some on Facebook. And some on everything. Can you believe that? Focusing on everything.
Typically, they are comprised of someone who sells you the service and someone else who actually fulfills the service. In other words, the sales rep builds their repertoire with you and some other minion on their team, usually a junior level person, actually does the fulfillment.
As I’ve mentioned before, experience in media buying comes from your experience and level of spend. The more you spend, the more experience you have. As you spend more on paid ads, you learn more on paid ads and therefore you know what to do in various circumstances.
A junior account manager can’t possibly know the best strategies because he or she are just learning.
Truth is, these agencies have a high turnover rate too. So it’s certainly possible that your account manager may change and shift over time. This account rep may or may not be dedicated to your account and may or may not have the experience necessary to produce the results you’re looking for.
I’ve worked with a lot of agencies. Lots from small to large agencies. Some have been really good, some have been nothing but talk.
And a lot of them have sold me the world and failed to deliver any glimmer of hope in performance that would beat my own benchmarks.
Here’s some of the typical agencies I’ve worked with.
“White Shoe Boy” Marketing Agencies
These are the agencies that “dress to impress” and know the marketing lingo. They talk a big game about key performance indicators (KPIs) and establish a very sophisticated “go to market” plan. This plan can take 3-4 months to “develop” all the while they bill you for their time that they are developing this mysterious plan. When the plan’s finally delivered, it’s so long that you need PhD to get through it. It uses sophisticated language and marketing garble you can barely understand. You’re forced to sign at the dotted line because you have no idea what it says anyway. Reading it is like reading an insurance policy.
They tout their successes and the “big companies” they’ve worked with. What they fail to tell you is that they’ve worked primarily on branding campaigns and not on performance or conversion campaigns. Companies that typically dish out the money for branding don’t care about performance. They are large corporations with a large marketing budget. This is effectively a tax deduction for them. White shoe boy agencies love spending money on branding because there is no real performance to measure. No barometer of success. Once you sign their long-winded proposal, the huff and puff and take weeks to do anything. Once the action is taken, all you see is a single campaign on Facebook with 5-10 image ads that looks like they were made on Fiverr. When you ask them if those ads will convert, they arrogantly respond and diminish your question. Of course this static image will work to get you hundreds of millions in revenue. “What are you even thinking asking such a silly question, you peon!”, you ask yourself.
When you meet with them weekly or monthly, they typically have these fancy reports and cite sophisticated marketing metrics like “thumb stop ratio” or TSR waiting for you that really don’t have much meaning. You ask them what’s moving the needle and they give you a fluffy response related to the creative or something that they really don’t know.
“Solopreneur” Marketing Agencies
These are individuals who are just getting their feet wet with client work. They were probably sold and online marketing course at one point or another and stand to learn while getting paid. Now, there is nothing wrong with the solopreneur type agency, just know that they will have limited experience and may not know exactly what to do when the times get tough.
They will be a bit more disorganized and lack the level of reports, but generally care about their client’s success. Most of these types of agencies I’ve worked will do their utmost to see their clients to success. Some will even work extra for minimal pay to determine the best possible course of action for their campaigns. Prepare for a lot of testing and a lot of failure. However, one of these tests may actually score a home run and help you achieve your CPA goals.
“Ferrari” Marketing Agencies
These are the agencies that promise the world, then go ahead and outsource the entire project to some off shore team. They try to make as much money as possible on the front end initial sale and proceed to churn and burn clients. Then, the owner will turn around and tout his expensive lifestyle coupled with social media videos of them spending your money. Instead of investing in campaigns and employees, they invest it in their expensive tastes and really not care about anybody’s success other than their own.
Performance Marketing Agencies
These are agencies that won’t charge you a whole lot up front, but take a percentage of revenue, profit or ad spend depending on KPIs. Their goal is high performing campaigns. The more successful you are, the more successful they are. They tend to establish themselves amongst your business and effectively grow with you. If you don’t make money, neither do they. Ideally, these agencies are the ones with experience and if they are confident enough to put themselves on a performance plan, they are confident they can help you grow your business.
Now that you know the types of marketing agencies out there, here’s a list of
Here are the 11 Reasons you should fire your agency
1. Negative Return on Investment
The first thing you should ask yourself about your marketing agency is are they bringing you return on investment? Are they making you money? Typically, we hire agencies to help with revenue optimization and growth. If they aren’t making you positive ROAS and positive ROI, they need to be gone.
2. They Blame Other Things, Not Their Performance
Surely, it’s you not me! They Say. If they start telling you that it’s a tracking issue, product issue, landing page issue or other issue, these things may be true, but they need to be doing their best to navigate the issues. If they are trying new things constantly and constantly hitting the same road blocks, perhaps you need to heed their advice and try to understand the issues at hand. If it’s constant blame-pushing without strategic insights and opportunities for improvement, then it’s time to fire them.
3. They Don’t Give You The Time of Day
Everybody’s busy. Everybody has meetings and things that need to happen. But, as servants to our clients, we must make time for our clients. Even if that means sitting extra with some meeting we may or may not agree with. Face time with client’s is just as important as performance. You can’t have one without the other. A disgruntled client who is performing well, but needs aren’t being heard will remain disgruntled. A client who feels good during a meeting and hates your guts behind your back because of performance, will have a negative association with you all the time. A balance is important. If your agency is being shifty or inflexible with their meeting times, then it’s time to move on.
4. Suggest Branding Campaigns
Unless you’re a giant corporation with an infinite amount of cash, run. Branding campaigns do nothing but burn your money. They are pointless and designed to siphon a marketing budget from a huge corporation. Yes, there is a use case. No it’s not good for small to medium sized businesses looking for growth. If you’re just looking for somewhere to put your marketing budget, then sure, run branding. But otherwise, avoid this at all costs. If branding is even brought up before you’re doing $50M annual revenue, run away.
5. Suggest Testing Audiences Only
If all the agency is doing is running your existing in house creative with new audiences and hasn’t iterated or suggested to iterate on new creative, run. Audiences have a place in testing. Lately, Facebook Lookalike Audiences have been performing yet again for me. But, if the discussion is constantly circulating around audiences and having to slice and dice the most minutia of data, then this is just not going to be a good fit.
6. Talk in Circles
Clarity in communication and transparency in our conversations is very important to me. If you’re not getting a clear answer and the responses seem to be shifty or spun, then the agency either doesn’t know what they are doing or has something to hide. Maybe they aren’t as good as you initially thought. In any case, it’s super important to get a clear answer to simple questions. Especially, if the question is data-related or strategy related. Even a simple answer like let me do some data analysis and get back to you is sufficient. But, what’s not sufficient is answering with fluff.
7. Scramble on a Plan
When I run media, I always know my next steps. In fact, I’m so overwhelmed with ideas and iterations that I want to test, I usually can’t get to all of them. If an agency is struggling with ideation or next steps and they feel they have exhausted their options (they haven’t). then it’s time to move on. Generally, the options are either, test more variables or scale the winners. If the core offer doesn’t convert, then they can help you suggesting different landing pages or funnels to try so that you can maximize your success. The agency is your advocate and should always have your best interests in mind.
8. Lack of Performance
Sometimes you’re not looking at ROI from your front-end advertising efforts, sometimes it comes through high-ticket sales or backend offers. That’s fine. But if your overall metrics are depressed and down, then it’s time to evaluate why. If the lead cost or cost per appointment is too high for you to be profitable, this could be a sign of an overall lack of performance from the agency you have hired. It’s a hard pill to swallow, but sometimes the agency is just not performing to your expectations. Maybe they are rude. Maybe they aren’t professional enough. Maybe they aren’t taking your project seriously. Or maybe, it’s just that they are not prioritizing your business because they have other things going on. Sometimes Agencies can’t track their own performance. They just don’t have concrete data and insight in how their efforts are turning into ROAS for your business. You should, without a doubt, know exactly what’s moving the needle if you set up your tracking correctly. If you didn’t then the agency should at least advise you on what to do. Whatever the reason, if you’re not happy with the performance and you’ve given them ample time to improve, it’s time to move on.
9. Rigidity
If the agency is offering you credits or hours or some other rigid metric. Something like “I’m only going to output x amount per week” then they have set some very clear expectations with you. You should expect nothing more out of them. Typically, this is just being inflexible and trying to maximize their internal team’s ROI. After all, they likely pay people an hourly rate or salary that translates into an hourly rate. In this case, they are maximizing their own hourly rate so the owners can maintain a healthy margin off of their human capital. There’s nothing wrong with that. After all, business is business. However, the goal of any agency is to see their client’s succeed. If the agency is churning and burning clients left and right and you’re constantly seeing them work with someone new, then that’s not a good sign.
10. Retention
Client retention is super important. Working with agencies with long-term clients is an indicator that the existing clients are happy with their performance. If there is a lot of turnover or churn of clients, then that can be an indicator that there is something that their clients are not satisfied with.
11. Hand Off
Did the sale just occur and you’ve paid your bill only to be handed off to someone else who is going to fulfill the account coupled with perhaps a project manager and account manager? A lot of the times only the person doing the work in advertising knows the nitty-gritty advertising and can explain it in a way that makes sense to an owner. If you’re being bounced around from person to persona and can’t get stable answers and communication from the horse’s mouth so to speak, it’s time to consider who you are working with. In other words, if you’re getting responses from the account manager that is incongruent with your expectations or unsatisfactory, then it could be time to seek an alternative provider for your marketing needs.
Not all agencies are bad. Not all will waste your money. I’ve worked with some outstanding agencies, it’s just harder to find the good ones who are actually going to be straight up with you.
The most important fact is you should trust and love who you’re working with. The people around you should elevate you and make you feel amazing all the time. If this isn’t happening, then you need to reconsider your options. Check in with yourself and you’ll know the decision you need to make.
Let’s face it, anybody can learn Facebook Ads. It just takes A LOT of budget and experience. After spending hundreds of millions on the platform, I’m confident that the process I have will shortcut your learning curve and propel you to success.
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