I Got Burned by a Marketing Agency. What Should I Have Had Before Hiring Them?

You paid the retainer for six months, plus the ad spend on top of it. The reports came in on time and every one of them said things were improving, and the phone sounded exactly the way it did before you signed. You could see it happening in real time, but the sunk cost kept you in for another quarter.

Now it's over, you're down real money, and the question you're left with is a fair one. What should you have had in place before you hired anybody?

It Usually Isn't That You Picked the Wrong People

Getting burned doesn't mean you were careless. A sales pitch is built to be convincing, and from the owner's side of the table a great pitch and a great agency look almost identical. You hired on the information you had.

Sometimes the agency really did coast and do the bare minimum to collect a monthly fee, and if that's what happened you were right to leave. More often, in my experience, the people doing the work were competent and busy, and they were running ads and building pages for a business that had never told them who the work was for. An agency is hired to execute. When nobody has decided which customer you want or what a good month looks like, the agency fills those blanks with defaults.

Defaults are how you end up with what owners describe as crap leads. The calls come from outside your service area, or they're for the small jobs you'd rather not take. Some are people collecting five quotes on price. The campaign did what it was set up to do, and it was set up without the part only you can supply.

Four Things to Have Written Down Before You Hire Anyone

You don't need a consultant to start on these. An afternoon with your job history open will get you a rough version of all four.

Start with your best customer and your best job. Pull the last twelve months and mark which jobs made you money, which ones you'd happily do every week, and which customers called back or sent a neighbor. That short list is who your marketing is for, and it's the first thing a good agency will ask about.

Next comes one sentence on why that customer should call you over the other three companies they're looking at. That sentence is your core message, and without it every ad and every page falls back on "licensed, insured, family owned," which is what everyone else in your market already says.

Then your numbers. You want to know what it costs you to land a job today and what a customer is worth to you over a few years, because those two figures tell you what you can afford to spend to get one more customer, and they're what turns a monthly report from a page of clicks into something you can judge.

Last, write down what a win looks like in ninety days, and write it in booked jobs and revenue. Leave impressions and clicks out of it. If you want eight more installs a month in two zip codes, write that down, because it's the difference between a plan and a strategy and it gives you and the agency the same scoreboard.

Put together, those four are the working core of a marketing strategy. Hand them to an agency and it can do real work in the first month, since it doesn't have to spend that month guessing.

Own Your Accounts Before Anyone Touches Them

This part is plain housekeeping, and it's the part that stings most when a relationship ends badly. Your ad account, your website, your Google Business Profile, your call tracking numbers and your analytics should all be set up in your company's name with you as the owner. The agency gets added as a manager.

When it's the other way around, leaving means starting over. The ad history that took a year to build stays with them, and the tracking number printed on your trucks stops ringing. Ask for owner access before the first invoice is paid, because a shop that plans to earn your renewal has no reason to say no.

What to Do Now That They're Gone

If you left your marketing agency, what do you do now?

Get your logins and your data back first, which means the ad accounts, the website, the Google Business Profile, the tracking numbers, and every report they sent you. Then hold off on hiring a replacement until you've written down who your best customer is, what you want them to know about you, and what a good month looks like in booked jobs. Whoever you hire next gets measured against that page.

It's tempting to sign with the next company quickly, because the phone is quiet and a quiet phone is expensive. A few weeks without paid marketing costs less than another six months of the same arrangement with a different logo on the invoice. Keep asking for reviews and keep answering every call while you sort out the four things above.

What to Ask on the Next Sales Call

When you do start talking to agencies again, four questions will tell you most of what you need.

Ask exactly who will touch your account day to day and how many other accounts that person handles. The person on the sales call is rarely the person running your ads, and you're entitled to know who is.

Then find out what they need from you before they start. A strong answer includes questions about your customers and your margins. If all they want is a login and a credit card, they're planning to run the defaults.

The third one is how you'll both know in ninety days whether it's working, and you want that answer in booked jobs. The last is what happens to your accounts and your data if you part ways.

A lot of owners who've been through this say they'd trust another owner's referral over online reviews or a cold pitch. That's a sound instinct, and it works even better when you walk in with your four things already written down.

Where We Come In

This is the work we do first with every client, before anyone talks about channels. Our Strategy First engagement takes 30 to 45 days. We research your market, your customers and your competitors, and we build the strategy with you. You get it with a ninety-day execution calendar that you can give to an agency or an in-house hire, or keep working through with us.

I won't sell it as a lead guarantee, because nobody can honestly promise you a lead count. You walk away with the page you needed the first time, so the next dollar you spend on marketing has a job to do and a way to be measured.

If you'd like to talk through what happened with your last agency and what was missing, give us a call at (914) 454-2228.