How to choose a marketing agency without getting burned

Decide what you are buying before you call anyone

Agencies sell bundles because bundles are easier to price. That is fine when you know what you need and dangerous when you do not, because the bundle will contain the services the firm enjoys selling rather than the ones your business is missing.

Write the actual problem down in one sentence first. The phone rings but half the callers are outside our area. We get found for our name and nothing else. Our booking rate collapsed when the estimator left. That third one is not a marketing problem at all, and a good agency will tell you so before it quotes you.

Questions that separate the good from the plausible

Who will do the work, and can I meet them? The person in the pitch is often not the person on the account. Ask for a name and for how many other accounts that person carries.

What have you talked a client out of recently, and why? A firm that has never told a client no is selling capacity rather than judgment.

How will we know at ninety days whether this is working, and what would make you tell us to stop? An honest answer names a number that could move the wrong way.

One more, and it catches a surprising number of people out: what happens to the results if we pause for two months? Anyone who says nothing changes is describing paid advertising and calling it search work.

What you should own

Your ad account, your analytics property, your Business Profile, your domain and your website all belong in accounts you own, with the agency added as a user. This is the most common trap in the industry and it is the easiest one to avoid, because it costs nothing to fix at signing and can cost you everything later.

The same goes for the writing and the creative. Ask plainly whether the pages produced for you remain yours if you leave. We have taken on clients whose previous agency simply switched off a site they had been paying for over three years, because the build and the hosting were bundled together and never transferred into their name.

Contract terms worth pushing on

Twelve month terms are common and are not automatically a problem. Real search work does not pay back in sixty days, and no firm can invest properly in it under a rolling thirty day agreement. What matters is the exit. Thirty days notice after an agreed initial period is fair. An auto-renewing year with a ninety day cancellation window is not.

Watch for ad spend and management fee arriving as one number. Keep them separate so you can see what is paying for the work and what is reaching the auction. A percentage-of-spend arrangement quietly rewards the agency for spending more of your money, which is worth naming out loud before you agree to it.

Does hiring locally matter?

Less than local firms claim and more than nothing. Nobody has to be down the road to run a search campaign well, and some of the best media buyers we know work three states away. What proximity genuinely buys is context: knowing that the shore towns empty out after October, that a Route 35 address means something specific to a customer, that a permit takes three weeks in one New Jersey town and three days in the next.

It also makes the awkward meeting possible. When results are poor, the firm that will sit in your office and explain it tends to behave differently all year round from the one that emails a slide deck and reschedules the call.

Signs to walk away from

Guaranteed first place rankings. Guaranteed lead numbers offered before anybody asked what a lead is worth to you. A full proposal arriving within an hour of the first call, which means it was written before the conversation and your business is a name merged into a template.

Reporting built out of impressions and reach with no line for calls or booked work. And a scope with no named deliverables, because ongoing optimization is not something you can hold anyone to at the end of a quarter.

What a fair first ninety days looks like

Month one is mostly measurement and cleanup. Tracking that actually fires, access sorted out properly, and an audit that includes the parts that are your own fault. Month two is the first real changes, usually to pages and campaign structure. Month three is where the earliest numbers become readable, and none of them are final.

If a firm cannot tell you at day ninety what changed, what it cost and what it produced, you have your answer. That is the standard we hold ourselves to at Digital Branding Blocks, and it is a fair one to hold anyone to. If you have a proposal in front of you and want a second read on it, send it over through our contact page and we will tell you what we would ask.