How to choose a marketing agency, without getting burned

Long enough for the work to have a chance, short enough that you are not trapped. For compounding work like SEO and content, a commitment measured in months is reasonable because the work genuinely does not produce results in weeks. For paid media management, there is much less justification for a long lock-in, because performance is visible quickly.

What matters more than the length is what the notice period and exit terms say. A twelve-month term with a clear thirty-day exit after the first quarter is a better deal than a six-month term you cannot leave at all.

It sounds like perfect alignment and it usually is not, for a practical reason: whoever defines the result controls the outcome. Performance models push toward whatever is being measured, which is fine when the measure is genuinely good and damaging when it is a proxy.

There is also a fairness problem in both directions. Results depend on your pricing, your sales process and your capacity as much as on the marketing, and an agency taking that risk will price the risk in. A hybrid where a base fee covers the work and a bonus rewards a clearly defined, jointly verifiable outcome is usually the sanest version.

Some of it is legitimate: scope genuinely varies, and a number without a scope attached is misleading. Some of it is not: hiding price allows it to be set by what a client seems able to pay rather than by what the work costs.

You can tell the difference by asking. An agency that cannot publish a price but will explain exactly how it prices, and will do so in the first conversation, is being reasonable. One that deflects until you are emotionally invested is running a process.

It depends on how many disciplines you need. One in-house marketer is rarely strong at SEO, paid media, web development, design, content and analytics simultaneously, so the genuine comparison is salary plus tools plus the specialists you still have to bring in, against an agency fee.

In-house wins on availability, business knowledge and focus. Agencies win on breadth and on not depending on a single person. Many businesses end up with both: someone internal who owns marketing, and an agency doing the specialist execution.

Line up scope against scope rather than price against price, and force both into the same format. What specifically happens each month. How many hours or deliverables does the fee represent. What is explicitly excluded. What is reported and how often.

Then ask each agency to explain the gap between their proposal and the other one, without naming the competitor. The quality of that explanation is frequently more revealing than either document.

Ask for evidence of the work, not a summary of it. In an ads account, the search terms report and the negative keyword list both change constantly when someone is working and not at all when nobody is. In SEO, ask which pages were published or improved and what changed technically.

Then look at whether enquiries moved, not whether traffic did. Traffic is the easiest thing in marketing to increase without increasing anything that matters.

If everything is in your name, nothing happens except that you remove their access. That is the point of insisting on ownership at the start, and it is why it should be settled before anything else.

If it is not, you are negotiating. Ask now rather than later: which accounts are in your business name today, and what is the written process for transferring anything that is not. A good agency will answer without hesitating, because it has nothing riding on the answer.