Controversial opinion: if you can’t find the right agency for your brand after multiple attempts, it’s a skill issue.
This content was originally published in the No Best Practices newsletter on 11.03.2024.
Two things inspired me to write this: a debate on X about agency pricing and a really bad experience I had with a client’s media buying agency.
I’ve written about the “agency vs in house” question, and I’ve written about how to build out your internal marketing team. But today I’m going to cover how to find the right agency for your unique situation.
If you’re frustrated with your agency or are afraid to work with one because of all the scary stories on DTC X, this newsletter is for you.
To Get The Right Agency, You Need To Do Some Pre-Work
You need to do two things before you start interviewing agencies: define what it is you actually need, and run some numbers so you’re able to give your agency meaningful goals.
Defining Your Ask
To define what you need, take stock of your current situation:
- What growth stage are you in: pre-launch, pre-PMF, growing or mature?
- What does your growth curve look like: steady growth, plateau or decline?
- What in-house resources exist w/r/t Meta ads?
- What is the level of platform knowledge that exists in-house?
A company that hasn’t sold a single unit with a founder who has never logged into Ads Manager has different needs than a $50M brand that has been consistently doubling revenue since launch.
The less sales track record you have, and the less in-house expertise you have, the more you’re going to need to hire expertise–which is expensive.
Some agencies offer nothing but a hired set of hands with some oversight/a “system” from a founder. That is enough for a brand with a proven offer and playbook that is still on an upward growth trajectory. It’s not going to help brands who are stuck in a plateau.
I think this bears extra emphasis, because I run into this issue SO many times: a generalist agency will NOT bust you out of a plateau. There isn’t a “media buying secret” that’s going to solve for PMF, weak creative strategy or a dry product pipeline.
I’m going to define some common situations with my recommended agency solutions in the next section.
Defining Financial Goals
You need acquisition-oriented processes and reporting to scale on Meta. If you’re using a blended ROAS target pulled directly from your P&L, you are cooked.
And if you’re not tracking the correlation between daily ad spend and daily new customer sales, you’re putting a target on your back for the agency sharks.
(S)he who owns the data owns the interpretation owns the narrative. I work with a lot of clients who have a sense that something is “off”. The agency says “performance has never been better” but sales are down YoY. And that is because the agency is twisting the data to avoid accountability (sometimes through ignorance, sometimes through malice).
You need to own (and understand) the “source of truth” for your business. Otherwise agency sharks will take you for a ride. Fortunately, I’ve written extensively on how to do that.
Here is my step-by-step guide to customer forecasting–this will tell you how to set your total media budget and set customer acquisition targets for the year.
Here is my step-by-step guide to setting KPIs for your Meta ads and total digital spend.
Here is my step-by-step guide to daily KPI tracking–this will tell you how to answer the question “should I increase/decrease my daily ads budgets?”
If you don’t put this framework in place, you are saying “hi agencies, I’m giving you a free pass to grade your own homework”. This is dumping chum into the agency shark tank. You WILL get ripped off.
Common Situations Where Brands Struggle To Find A Good Agency
Here are some of the situations where I see brands churn through a lot of agencies or get stuck in a relationship that isn’t serving their needs.
Sub-$5M/year Brand With Minimal In-House Expertise
These are the brands most likely to post “all agencies suck” on X. They don’t have enough knowledge to vet agencies. And they’re often price-conscious, yielding a low quality option set. At this stage, you should NOT be seeking out an agency.
Finding product-market-channel fit is one of the most challenging hurdles a brand has to cross. Reason being: there are SO MANY variables to refine. I did a three part series on how to narrow down these variables: media buying, creative and everything else. I also shared a list of reasons your brand will NEVER scale on Meta here.
My top recommendation for founders in this situation: DIY with help. Learn how to use Meta ads using free and/or paid resources (I shared some at the bottom of this post). Build out your first group of campaigns and see how they perform. And then find someone with deep experience scaling brands on Meta and try to set up weekly paid coaching.
When you’re looking for a coach, you want someone who has scaled brands from sub-$5M to $10M+. You don’t want someone who has only worked with $25M+ brands.
MentorPass is a good place to look. You can book some initial 30 minute calls with a range of folks to see who you vibe with, then book a recurring session with your favorite(s).
This is not sponsored–I used to have consulting hours on MentorPass, but I don’t really do one-off calls anymore because they blow up my calendar.
Brand With Amazon Or Wholesale Traction That Wants To Launch/Scale Meta
In this scenario, you probably have some eCommerce sales driven by the halo of awareness from your wholesale presence. So you have the same GTM challenges as a brand-new brand, but you have to spend more to “see it working”.
This is a scammer’s favorite scenario. Scammers love a situation where they can insert themselves, take credit for growth they did not create, and then blame a downturn on factors outside their purview.
Brands in this situation should hire an experienced consultant to develop a GTM strategy for Meta. You want someone to review your sales data in eCom and wholesale/Amazon and tell you: which products to push on Meta, which bundles and offers to test, and how to optimize your website and landing pages for Meta, plus media buying and creative strategy.
Wholesale/Amazon brands usually have to build out an ad creative production capability from scratch. A good consultant will give you a playbook for this.
Someone on the brand’s own team needs to take ownership of eCom growth–updating the daily tracker, providing KPIs and budget guidance to the media buyer, and building up enough knowledge of Meta to guard against ripoff artists.
This person can be an internal team member with the time and interest to take on the role. It can be a new hire dedicated to the eCom channel (although this is risky before you gain traction). It can also be your GTM consultant on a retainer basis.
Don’t hire an agency until you’re able to consistently spend $2-3k/day on Meta profitably.
Sub-$100M Brand With Plateauing Or Declining Revenue
Common situation: brand hits a multi-quarter growth plateau and decides to go agency shopping. This might be the answer to your problems, but it usually isn’t.
There are cases where media buying strategy needs to be enhanced to enable the next stage of growth. If a brand has “tapped out” Meta, they might want to swap in an agency with more experience running top of funnel campaigns and tactics. Or they might do better with an agency who can provide more creative strategy and support.
But most brands who hit a growth plateau have not tapped out Meta. Usually, the real problem is one or more of these three things:
- A merchandising problem–not enough new product, over-dependence on a single hero SKU, or a host of other issues
- A creative plateau–over-reliance on a single creative format, angle or target audience
- An acquisition issue–the business is sub-optimized for acquisition, rode the “covid bump” and now its paid media playbook is less efficient
Instead of speed dating agencies, you need to find someone who can audit the business, tell you exactly why it’s not growing, and what to do about it. This is what I do in my marketing audit projects BTW.
If you have one of these underlying issues, swapping agencies might give you temporary relief, but it won’t last. Agencies love to tout their “proprietary media buying strategies” (lol). But this often amounts to duplicating your winning ads into as many different campaign setups as possible to create a quick bump in spend.
Growing Brand With ~$10M Annual Sales
IMO this is the revenue benchmark where brands should consider bringing on an agency. It’s time to delegate some of the legwork so the founder or eCom P&L owner can get more strategic.
You should have spent the journey up to this point developing enough knowledge of Meta to create a “playbook” for your business. You know your strongest offers. You know what creative angles tend to work. You know what your customers care about. You have a semi-consistent annual marketing calendar.
At this point, “Which agency?” is a question of what type of help you want to pay for. You want someone who, at a minimum, will carry out your playbook consistently and conscientiously.
Basically, you want continuity so you’re not glued to Ads Manager during Thanksgiving dinner, or while you’re lying in bed hallucinating from a 102 degree fever.
Ideally you can find a partner who will challenge and expand your POV and provide the benefits of multi-client visibility and a close working relationship with Meta (i.e. direct line to help you with account issues).
Ultimately, finding the right agency is a lot like dating. You can be the sweetest peach, but some folks just don’t like peaches. I’ve seen one client rave about an agency while another feels the same agency’s work is subpar.
Here are a few pieces of advice I can offer re: finding the right agency for you:
- Seek referrals from brands in the same product category and stage of growth
- Make sure the agency has worked with at least a few other brands in your category. Even better if they specialize in your category.
- Don’t hire an agency that works with brands who do major awareness-building outside of Meta. It’s too early for that.
- The slicker the sales process, the harder you need to vet. Dedicated salespeople = red alert. DEMAND an interview with the actual team who will be managing your account.
- Ask the “hands on keyboard” team how many brands they manage. The answer shouldn’t be more than 3 or 4.
- Be suspicious of agencies with multi-month contractual lock-in. Agency owners will claim they need 90 days to prove results. That’s fair. But bad agencies churn clients through the lock-in with no intention of providing the services or results they promised.
An agency relationship will always sour if you abandon the mental and spiritual “ownership” of “the number” to the agency. YOU must own the number. YOU must know what it takes to achieve the number–including factors that have nothing to do with Meta.
You want an agency that feels similar levels of ownership–intrinsic motivation. But at the end of the day YOU own the business, so you must take ultimate ownership.