An advisor for hiring your next marketing agency

How do you choose the right marketing agency?

Start with your own economics: what a customer is worth to you and what you can afford to spend to win one. Then run the search in order.

1. Define the need. What problem you’re hiring for, what budget you can commit, and what result would make it worth it.
2. Build a shortlist from agencies whose relevant work you can actually see.
3. Check the claims. Ask for comparable work, what the agency’s part in it was, and references you can call.
4. Compare proposals on the same terms. Ask every finalist the same questions, then line up deliverables, exclusions, staffing, your responsibilities and total cost.
5. Meet the people who’ll do the work, and ask whether they’ve seen what’s being promised.
6. Agree how you’ll work together and how it ends: approvals, reporting, review dates, and what you keep if you part ways.

Then give the plan a fair chance to work.

That’s the short version. The longer one comes from running an agency, and from leading marketing for companies that needed someone to manage their vendors.

First, the obvious conflict

I run a marketing agency. I founded Connective Web Design and I still lead it. So when I offer to help you choose an agency, you should be asking whether I’m going to steer you toward mine.

This is how I handle it. Connective is only on the list if you want it there. If it is, it answers the same questions and gets measured against the same criteria as every other agency. I don’t take referral fees or commissions from any agency I recommend. Before we write the brief, I tell you about any relationship I have with any agency we might look at. We agree on the criteria in writing before anyone’s proposal arrives, so the goalposts can’t move once we see who’s bidding. My recommendation shows its reasons against those criteria, so you can check my thinking line by line.

The decision is yours. My job is to coordinate the search, ask the questions you might not know to ask, and push on the answers until they’re clear.

What I learned sitting on the client’s side

A few of the companies I’ve led marketing for hired me partly to be their voice with their own vendors. One of those vendors was a paid-search specialist managing very large ad budgets. They knew the tools cold. They were excellent at the platform. And they were optimizing the account beautifully toward numbers that didn’t connect closely enough to what the business needed.

Nobody on the client side had the background to challenge them, so nobody did. Once someone could ask the questions in their language, the conversation changed quickly.

That experience shaped how I think about hiring agencies. Specialists are worth hiring. Somebody owner-minded still has to steer them, and that somebody needs enough hands-on experience to know when the specialist is right and when their advice serves the channel more than the business.

Are you ready for an agency?

I run a marketing agency, and I don’t think you should hand your marketing goal-setting entirely to your agency. They don’t know what a customer is worth to you as well as you do.

Work out what a new customer is worth, what you could afford to spend to win one, and what you’re spending now. If you’re not sure of the numbers, bring your best estimate and agree with the agency on how you’ll set a baseline before committing to a bigger program. Walk in with those numbers and you have something you can both work toward beating, month after month. Walk in without them and the agency ends up setting the target for you.

Then ask whether an agency is the right kind of help. If the work is one narrow specialty, a specialist may be better and cheaper. If marketing is central to how you grow and steady in volume, an in-house hire with outside help might serve you better over time. When you do hire in-house, be careful who screens the candidates. I’ve seen good companies make bad marketing hires because the wrong person did the screening, someone who couldn’t tell strong expertise from a confident interview.

What should I look for when vetting a marketing agency?

Watch what they do before they pitch. A good agency gets curious early. If you mention a competitor, they go look at it, check its search visibility and read its messaging, and come back with opinions and specific questions about your business. If they’re recommending tactics before they understand the business, ask what those recommendations are based on.

Ask to meet the people who’ll do the work, and ask whether those people have seen what’s being promised. A lot of agency relationships go wrong in the gap between what sales sold and what delivery planned to build. At my own company, delivery now signs off on what sales sells, for exactly that reason. Ask any agency how they handle it.

How to build a shortlist and check the claims

A good shortlist is three or four agencies with work you can see that looks like what you need: a similar kind of business, a similar size of problem, similar channels. Familiarity alone isn’t a qualification, mine included. Ask each one whether they have the capacity to start when you need them.

Then check what they tell you.

• Relevant work. Ask for two or three examples close to your situation, and ask what the agency did versus what the client’s team or other vendors did.
• References. Talk to a current client and, if they’ll give you one, a former one. Ask what it was like when something went wrong.
• Reporting. Ask to see a sample report, with the client’s details removed. It shows you what they think matters.
• How they work. Who you’d talk to week to week, how often, and how decisions get made.

How to evaluate an agency’s proposal

Proposals are hard to compare because every agency packages its work differently. Strip them back to a few questions.

• What can I realistically expect at this budget, and by when? A good answer is specific, a little cautious, and names the assumptions behind it. It’s a question I’d put to owners, too: are you expecting $75,000 results on a $2,000 budget?
• What would make us change course? If they can’t say what data would tell you it isn’t working, nobody will know when to stop.
• What drives the price? They should be able to explain the trade-offs and what the extra investment would buy you. Then you can decide whether you actually need it. Sometimes the more affordable option is the right call.
• Where are the boundaries? What’s included, what costs extra, and how changes get priced. Clients rarely mind paying for extra work when the boundaries were clear up front. Surprises are what sour relationships.

Then put the answers on one page. I use a grid along these lines, one column per agency:

How to compare what agencies charge

Agency pricing varies too much by scope to give you a useful number here, and I’d be cautious with a firm quote given before an agency understands the work. What moves the price is how many channels, how much custom work versus repeatable work, how senior the people are, and how much strategy is included versus production. When two quotes are far apart, compare scope, staffing, production, outside costs and assumptions before deciding what explains the gap. Sometimes one is pricing more thinking. Sometimes one has left something out. Ask each agency to show you where the money goes.

Agree how you’ll work together, and how it ends

Most of the friction in an agency relationship comes from things nobody wrote down. Before you sign, settle who on your side approves work, how disagreements get resolved, who supplies information and how fast, and how much of your team’s time the agency will need. An agency can only move as fast as your approvals.

Settle the ending too, while everyone is friendly. Keep your ad accounts, analytics and domain in your own name. Make sure the agreement states which files, content and licenses you receive, what happens to work in progress, and what keeps costing you after the relationship ends, like software or hosting. Some of what an agency uses, like licensed imagery or third-party tools, may not transfer, and it’s better to know that now.

Is it your agency, or is it you?

Some agencies do poor work, and asking hard questions about it is completely fair. Where I’ve seen relationships go off the rails, though, it’s often from the other direction: the client starts micromanaging, changing course every few weeks or directing specific tactics, and still expects big results on a short timeline. A plan that doesn’t get its full chance to run isn’t really a plan anymore.

A fair test has limits. Don’t wait for the review date if the work is plainly wrong, tracking is broken, commitments keep getting missed, or the business has changed underneath the plan. And a missed target doesn’t automatically mean a new agency. It helps to ask which of these it was: the idea was weak, the execution was poor, your side held things up, or conditions changed. Only some of those are fixed by switching.

Replacing the agency makes sense when the plan has had its full run, the targets were reasonable, and it still didn’t move. Or when you can’t get clear answers about what’s working, the people you were sold aren’t the people doing the work, or the reporting keeps getting longer while the results stay the same.

Before you fire anyone, it’s worth one hard look at the brief. Sometimes the finding is that the agency is fine and it’s being briefed badly. That’s a useful thing to learn, and a lot cheaper than starting over.

If you’re also weighing whether you need a strategist more than an agency, the marketing consultant and fractional CMO pages explain how that works.

Based in Houston, working nationwide

I’m based in Houston and help companies across the U.S. choose an agency. Houston clients often want local shortlists, and I know the Houston agency market well because I’ve competed in it since moving my company here, after two decades of agency work.