When Should You Hire a Marketing Agency?

How Do You Know It’s Time to Hire a Marketing Agency?

It’s time when the work you need is specialized, needed faster than you can hire, or bigger than your team can absorb, and when you already know which offering and buyer the work is for. Agencies earn their fee by bringing depth you can’t justify on payroll, which is why the case is strongest when you can name the gap.

The four situations where we’d recommend one:

• You need skills you can’t keep busy full-time, such as paid media, analytics, design or SEO, because a specialist in each would cost far more than the work you have for them, and an agency spreads that cost across many companies.
• You need speed, for a launch, a new market or a channel you want tested this quarter, and recruiting, hiring and training someone would take longer than the window you have.
• You need an outside view, because the team is too close to the offer or the numbers to see what a buyer sees, and an agency has seen the same problems at many companies.
• You need capacity to scale what’s already proven, when a channel is paying back and your team can’t run more of it well, which is the situation the Marketing Action Plan page covers in detail.

When Should You Not Hire a Marketing Agency Yet?

Wait if you can’t yet say what you sell most profitably and to whom, if nobody inside can own the plan and the numbers, if you can’t share your data, or if the budget can’t cover both the agency’s work and the ad spend it will manage. In each case the agency’s time goes into problems only you can solve, and you pay for it.

• There’s no clear offering or buyer, and an agency will build campaigns for whatever you hand it, so if the answer to “what are we selling, and to whom?” changes depending on who’s asked, settle that first, which is the work the IMPACT Offering and IMPACT Prospect pages walk through.
• Nobody internal can own the plan and the numbers, which matters because someone on your side has to decide priorities, approve the spend and judge results against your own sales records, and an agency left to grade its own work will tend to report the numbers that flatter it.
• You can’t give access to data, and if the agency can’t see your CRM, your conversion tracking and which leads became customers, it can only optimize for clicks and form fills, which is how accounts end up with plenty of leads and few sales.
• The budget can’t fund the work and the ad spend, since an agency fee with too little left over for media buys a well-managed campaign too small to tell you anything, so either fund both properly or start with one channel you can afford to run at a readable size.

The useful help for the contractor was on the operations side, such as hiring and training technicians or freeing their time, because the limit was how many new buildings the service team could take on.

Marketing Agency vs In-House vs Fractional: Which Fits?

An agency fits specialist work across several channels, in-house people fit work that’s constant and needs deep knowledge of your business, and a fractional marketing leader fits when you need someone to own the strategy and the plan before you can justify a full-time executive. Many companies end up using more than one.

The mix and who owns what is covered in “Decide who does the work” on the Marketing Action Plan page, and how to structure a marketing department shows how the mix changes as a company grows. If you’re comparing costs, build the budget from the customers your growth goal needs first, as in How Much Should a Company Spend on Marketing?, then compare what each option costs to deliver it, using what marketing agency pricing models look like to put every proposal on a cost-per-customer basis.

In a smaller business the owner often owns the plan, so an agency or freelancer for the specialist work can make sense before a first marketing hire. In a larger company the usual mistake runs the other way, with several agencies each running a channel and nobody inside owning the whole plan, so budget decisions become negotiations between vendors, and what to focus on when hiring a CMO covers choosing the person who owns that plan.

What Should You Ask When Hiring a Marketing Agency?

Ask how they’ll measure success, what they’d do in the first three months, and who will do the work, then judge the answers on whether they tie the work to customers and profit. A good agency answers these specifically and is comfortable telling you what it wouldn’t do.

1. How will you measure whether this is working? Look for an answer in customers won, cost per customer and profit, counted in your sales records, rather than clicks, impressions or the conversions the ad platforms report about themselves. The Channel Selection page explains why that source of truth matters.
2. What would you do in the first three months? In our own work we treat the first three months as setup and learning (tracking, pages, campaigns and a first round of results), with scaling after that, so expect a plan with a sequence and a date for the first real review rather than a promise of results by month two.
3. Who will do the work? Ask to meet the people who would run your account and how many other accounts they handle, since the senior person in the pitch is often not the person in the account.
4. What do you need from us? A good agency will ask for an internal owner, access to your CRM and tracking, and quick decisions, and one that asks for none of it plans to work from the platforms’ reports.
5. What would make you tell us to stop or change course? You want an agency that will say when a channel isn’t paying back, and it should be able to describe a time it told a client exactly that.

How Do You Hire a Marketing Agency and Make It Work?

Hire a marketing agency by deciding the result you need and how you’ll measure it before you talk to anyone, then choosing the agency whose plan and people fit that result, and reviewing the work against your own numbers on a fixed schedule.

1. Write down the one result you’re hiring for, such as more qualified leads from one buyer type or a lower cost per customer in one channel, and the number you’ll judge it by.
2. Name the internal owner who will set priorities, approve spend and attend every review.
3. Get your data ready, with CRM access, working conversion tracking and a way to tell which leads became customers.
4. Set the full budget, covering the agency’s fee and the ad spend it will manage, at a size large enough to produce a result you can read in one review period.
5. Talk to a short list and ask each agency the five questions above.
6. Agree what the first three months should produce, and when you’ll make the first real decision about the work.
7. Review monthly against your own sales records, and quarterly against the plan, changing course only when the numbers or something real in the business changes.

If you can’t complete step 2 or 3, the first hire probably belongs inside the company, and it’s better to learn that before you sign anything.