12 Warning Signs You’ve Partnered With the Wrong Performance Marketing Agency
June 12, 2024
Head of New Business at Aimers Veranika Hres is sharing 12 warning signs indicating that it’s time to re-evaluate your agency. She is drawing from our experience serving as a trusted partner to SaaS and Tech companies and building long-term cooperation with our clients. Even if you don’t currently work with any agency, this post is worth your time. It provides a useful guide on how to select a performance marketing agency and avoid making costly mistakes in the future.
Have you ever hired a wrong marketing agency? We did a poll on Aimers LinkedIn page and marketers have opened up about the most challenging aspects of working with an agency. Poor communication took the first place with 45% of votes, with lack of transparency going second with 35%. Low performance and no growth plan came last, with 15% and 5%, respectively.
What Marketers Are Saying
Renato Cassinelli, Head of Marketing at PayRetailers, noted that the most critical challenge that he sees is that “in many cases, the agency does not take the time to understand the client’s business.” He suggested that it makes sense to not demand an instant execution from the agency, but provide a detailed onboarding, including workshops, to educate the agency first. Meanwhile, Delfin Vassallo, Marketing Director of Uponor, mentioned that poor project management can also be an issue in client-agency partnership. Anya Policht, Content Marketing Manager at Pricemoov, shared her real-life experience when she had to chase an external marketing agency for deliverables and documentation, while the project manager struggled to provide answers. She concluded: “This experience reinforced the importance of having the right tools and ensuring strong relationships and professionalism. Effective communication and accountability are crucial for successful project outcomes.”
I have to say that all of these are supported by my own experiences. During sales calls with potential clients, I’d say 1 out of 3 of them confess that it hasn’t worked out with their previous agency. I usually dig deeper and ask them for more details as to why cooperation hasn’t gone well. And yes, the same as in our poll, poor communication and lack of full transparency and accountability are sometimes more challenging than lack of results or growth. And as Renato has stated, agencies are not taking time to understand their clients’ business deeper.
Our Approach
So during our initial sales calls here at Aimers, we also discuss a specific set of workflow elements that we have at our agency and that we’ll devise for the particular client. These are made to prevent these or similar situations happening during our partnership.
As an agency, we pride ourselves in our highly personalized and boutique approach for each client. As a result, they stay with us from 1 to 6+ years. During this time, we seamlessly integrate into in-house teams and provide scaling up or down of their marketing efforts, when necessary. We work mostly with B2B SaaS and Tech businesses – such longevity of client-agency partnerships is not your typical story for this fast-paced and highly demanding industry.
Warning Signs You’ve Partnered With the Wrong Agency
So, based off my conversations with our clients and our 10+ experience as a performance marketing agency, I’ve compiled a list of 12 warning signs that your agency might be wrong for you. If these apply to you, you have to consider a complete overhaul of your agency-client collaboration and setting up new processes. Alternatively, you can consider switching agencies altogether. This list will also serve as a useful guide for selecting the agency that’s right for you, and establishing your collaboration in the most efficient way possible.
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Get Started1. You Don’t Know What’s Going on With Your Campaigns
Your marketing agency doesn’t share any reports with you, and they haven’t set up dashboards. You have to manually check the campaigns yourself to track the progress.
2. Constant Push for Higher Budgets
You are constantly told that you need to raise budgets to get better results.
3. No Pro-Active Suggestions for Improvements
All suggestions for changing campaigns or creatives come from you. The agency offers no ideas on how to improve your marketing efforts. Instead, they say that your results are good, and you just need to wait a little longer.
4. They Are Yes-People
Another warning sign is when, to all your suggestions, your agency people say “yes, let’s definitely try it.” Performance marketing is the type of marketing where you can derive algorithms and know what will work and what will not. Real experts in the field are more likely to say, “yes, let’s try it, but it’s important to keep in mind that X might happen.” They want to test hypotheses, but they set the right expectations and provide expert advice.
5. No Results in 3 Months Time
If you’ve been cooperating with your agency for more than 3 months, and you are still far from the desired results, or there are no results at all – this is a clear sign that something is wrong.
6. You Don’t Know Your Conversion Rates and Lead/Client Worth
After a month or so of partnership, you need to know precisely how much your lead and client are worth, as well as your conversion rates.
7. Your Project’s Technical Team Is Constantly Changing
That means the current team couldn’t deliver results (obviously not good), or there is a low retention rate at the agency, which can mean some systemic issues (also a warning signpost for you).
8. Poor Communication
The communication with the agency is subpar. All responses come with a more than 24-hour delay, making it difficult to conduct effective multichannel marketing.
9. No Interest in Your Product or Service and Industry in General
Your agency does not ask a lot of questions concerning your product/service and the market niche that you’re operating in. You notice they take a general approach and employ blanket solutions.
10. No Growth Plan and Roadmap
Your agency does not have a growth plan for you. And there is no clear roadmap of where your cooperation and marketing efforts are going, and how it’s going to be achieved.
11. No Insights on Website and Landing Pages
Your agency tells you that your website and landing pages are “bad”, but they don’t provide specific data-driven optimizations to change that.
12. ROI Indicators Are Negative
This one is kind of self-explanatory – but I want to stress that you got to constantly keep in mind why you’ve hired the agency in the first place. The agency needs to bring you more value than what you pay for them, and that means the ROI needs to look good.
Takeaways
Hiring a right marketing agency can be a secret super-power that takes your business to the next level and allows you to leave your competition far behind. As with anything worthwhile, though, it does add a layer of complexity to your workflow and processes. You have to carefully research available options and set up the cooperation with selected agency in the right manner – as well as avoiding painful mistakes outlined in this post.
Would you like us to help you reach your marketing goals? Drop us a line to have a quick video call with Veranika and her team. It will include a free audit of your advertising account and possible strategies for achieving the outcomes that you want.
Veranika leads the sales team with a focus on developing and executing strategies that drive revenue growth. She is committed to building strong client relationships and achieving sales targets.