Marketing agencies don’t pride themselves on being cheap, largely because they aren’t.

Using one is a big financial commitment, even if it is necessary for growth.

On top of that, the months move quickly. In marketing, 30 days isn’t a long time and you’ll be paying your next invoice before you know it.

So you’d be keen to make sure you’re getting the most from your agency at all times.

But how do you do that without overstepping or micromanaging? How do you achieve maximum input from your agency without impacting the relationship?

Well, having worked a decade now in agencies and client-side, I can tell you that being a Grade-A, All-Star dick is not the answer, so let’s look at other ways of getting your agency to play the game.

Brief Things In Properly

Recently, a client sent me a creative brief. The brief contained colour schemes, fonts, and imagery to use. They said they wanted their product to look like it was in a particular setting, and they approved the use of AI to make that happen because they didn’t have any images of the product in that setting.

So, I produced something that met the criteria they provided. It used the right brand colours. The font was the same one they suggested. The product was in the right setting courtesy of ChatGPT and some creative Canva-ing.

I sent it for approval, confident it would meet all the requirements.

As you’ve probably guessed already, the client rejected it.

They then provided an example of what they wanted, and that example didn’t contain a single colour provided in the original brief. The font was entirely different and none of the images originally provided matched the new layout.

The vast disconnect between what they provided and what they wanted was perplexing. There was no connection to their brand, website, socials or the brief they had initially provided.

My career has been scattered with incidents such as this, from clients swearing black-and-blue they didn’t have a brand guide to pulling one out their arse after six rounds of creative revisions, to clients requesting a whitepaper to be written on a topic only to entirely change the topic when we presented the first draft.

Doing this kills momentum and makes you look like you don’t know what you want.

So to summarise this one: Brief. Your. Agency. Properly. 

Tell them everything you want and everything you’re expecting in one go. And for the love of God, make sure it’s accurate.

If it’s not, at best, you’ll piss your agency off. At worst, they’ll charge you for the revisions. And regardless of best and worst, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

Provide Access Quickly

Digital marketing usually requires multiple points of access. Google Analytics 4. Merchant Centre. Google Ads. Meta Business Manager. Instagram. Website. Hosting. Domain. CPanel.

And most of that access has to be what I refer to as “God Mode” access – we need to be able to change everything without involving third parties such as developers.

Don’t waste time by delaying this or debating with your agency over what they want and why. Just do it.

If you don’t trust your agency enough to give them the access they require, then you’ve partnered with the wrong agency.

And if, for whatever reason, you simply cannot grant that access (i.e. privacy reasons) then ensure you have a robust delivery system where your agency can request changes from you.

But not providing access to something is one of the most inane ways of holding up progress.

Your agency can’t start until they’ve completed their due diligence and set up tasks, and if the reason they can’t do that is because you can’t be arsed figuring out how to grant access to GA4, then all the delays that come from that are on you.

Give All Your Feedback In One Go

Something I realised over my years in marketing is that being able to give concise and actionable feedback is a genuine life skill.

In so many instances, feedback is drip-fed to agencies in bits and pieces. Fixing it takes three times longer than it should, and whole projects get delayed as a result.

Let’s say there are three things you don’t like about a piece of creative: there’s a word you don’t like, one of the colours isn’t quite on brand, and you’d rather use a different image.

What you do in this situation is tell the agency exactly that.

Don’t ask them to change the word and then wait for them to do that before telling them about the colour.

Say what you need to say and everyone moves on.

And if the agency keeps getting it wrong, maybe you need to read point one about briefing your agency properly again.

Or change your agency.

Respect Your Agency’s Time

Turn up for meetings on time.

It’s really the most basic indication of respect between agency and client.

Yes, things get in the way and both you and your agency will run late for the occasional meeting, but if you’re routinely late for scheduled meetings, or worse, just not turning up at all, then you’re showing your agency that you don’t respect their time.

You probably don’t like it when people waste your time, so don’t do it to others. When respect starts to dissipate in a relationship, the passion starts to ebb, and there’s only one place that ends: a breakup.

Understand that if they have taken the time to do something for you, you should at least take the time to acknowledge what they have done and action your part of the responsibilities accordingly.

Similarly, remember that business hours are a thing.

Your business is your life, and it doesn’t rest on evenings and weekends.

However, your agency does. Their staff aren’t paid to work outside of Monday to Friday during business hours. If you email at 5:15pm on a Friday, don’t send an email first thing Monday complaining that you didn’t hear a reply.

This just pisses people off and makes you come across as unreasonable.

Let Your Agency Do What It Does Best

No one knows your business like you do, but the trap many business owners fall into is thinking that their customers are just like them.

They like the same things you do. They respond to things the same way you do. They think like you, walk like you, and talk like you.

Generally, this is wrong. Your customers might have some shared interests with you and sometimes, you’ll be right in your assumptions.

But the tapestry of their lives, experiences & relationships means that they will perceive things differently than you, and may not respond how you expect.

Sometimes it takes an outsider to understand that, so if your agency produces something that doesn’t necessarily engage you, remember this: you aren’t your customer.

You aren’t buying your product. Therefore, you aren’t the target market.

Let the agency try something different.

That said, just because your agency is convinced of their work doesn’t mean you’re wrong, either. A good way of navigating this is by split-testing what you want against what your agency wants to see which works better.

That way, you can use data to support your beliefs and then build on that together.

Don’t Cancel At The End Of Month One

Allow me to make this point clearly: very few marketing campaigns turn a brand into a household name in the first year, let alone the first month.

Building a brand and marketing a product takes time. Months – plural – not weeks.

It’s perfectly normal to see very little ROI in the first two to three months. Your agency is still figuring out the best way of promoting your products, and your audience is likely only seeing you for the first time.

That audience has to learn to trust you, and that doesn’t happen quickly.

Give it time, and listen to the expectations your agency is trying to set.

But always remember, if your agency promises you fast results and it sounds too good to be true, it nearly always is.

And if you’re concerned your agency is deliberately under-setting expectations, then perhaps it’s time you looked elsewhere.

You Are Not Your Competitors

This is a spiral into which I’ve seen many clients fall. They spend their days looking at their competitors and getting jealous. Every meeting with your agency comes back to what your competitor is doing, and you stop talking about what you’re doing.

Two things that can go wrong with this:

• Your competitor is in an entirely different place from you. Even if they do the same thing, their journey to that point will have been different to yours. That means what’s right for them isn’t necessarily what’s right for you.

• Too much focus on your competitors can lead to copycat campaigns where your agency tries to emulate what your competitors are doing because they think your regular references to your competitors are an indication that you want to be more like them. This almost never works unless you do it in a very tongue-in-cheek way.

That said, it’s crucial to know what your competitors are doing at all times, so keep that up. Your agency should also be doing this.

But as far as you know, your competitors are looking at you and hassling their agency about what you’re doing.

So keep an eye on your competitors, but blaze your own trail. If it doesn’t work, at least you did your own thing.

That’s a much better place to be than if you’d failed while copying your competitors.

It’s tiring living with the niggling knowledge that if you’d simply done your own thing, the outcome could have been better.

You Don’t Need To Be An Expert In Everything

A colleague and I once spoke to a client who claimed they were certified in SEO.

“Odd,” we thought, considering there aren’t any official SEO certifications.

Sure, there are courses you can do, and at the end, you even get an email saying “Well done, you know SEO!”

But there are no official University or Google courses on how to rank better in search engines, so we called bullshit on the client’s claim.

Behind his back, of course. Because professionalism.

The point is that digital marketing is complex and everything works differently.

No one is expecting you to be an expert in all of it. Heck, most people working in agencies won’t be experts in all of it.

If you don’t understand it, the worst thing you can do is pretend you know everything, particularly if you’re getting it wrong.

No one will have a problem with you not knowing something. Everyone will have a problem with you not knowing something but pretending you do. Particularly if you obtrude your opinions over reality.

Learn from your agency. They know more about this than you do.

Be Realistic About What Your Budget Can Achieve

You wouldn’t believe the number of clients that want to take their marketing direction from companies such as Apple and McDonald’s.

I suppose this is closer to the point about competitors above but on steroids. So many steroids.

If you aren’t a Fortune 500 company turning over billions of dollars of profit each year, you have no business citing companies such as the above as your inspiration.

Sure, you can take pointers such as Apple’s very simple creative style, or McDonald’s hyper-focus on consistency, but the reason their marketing has such a powerful impact is because of who they are – and they have spent decades moulding their image. Their brand identity is more important than the message they are sending out.

It’s highly unlikely that your hand-knitted organic jumpers made from ferret wool will benefit from trying to emulate Apple.

Be realistic. Fight the battles you stand a chance of winning.

There’s a second part to this as well, which is that you need to remember what you’re paying your agency.

If your agency retainer is $2,000 per month and for that budget, they are running your Google Ads, Meta Ads, updating your landing pages, creating content, and providing your reporting, you have a phenomenal deal.

Cut your agency some slack and recognise that they are helping you out by doing all that work for such a small price.

It might be a large amount of money to you, but it’s often a small amount for the agency, and they have to allocate their resources accordingly.

Give Them “Play Money”

Digital marketers love drinking, so make sure you pay for their bar tab.

Of course, I’m not being serious. By “Play Money” I’m talking about giving them a set budget each month to try new things that might not necessarily align with the rest of your campaign.

I’m a huge fan of Rory Sutherland, the Vice Chairman at Ogilvy & Mather Group. He specialises in consumer psychology, and one of the points he makes is that the opposite of a good idea isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but another good idea.

Sometimes, it’s the wildest, throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks ideas that actually become something worth chasing.

That could be an ad that says something surprising about your product. That can be an email subject that says “Sorry, we made a mistake,” before offering a discount for not complaining about this alleged mistake that you didn’t actually make.

Play money should be used to try new things and encourage creativity. And put that in the hands of your agency, and you might just end up with something very special indeed.

Try Something New

In line with the previous point about play money, don’t be scared of trying something new with your marketing.

As a business, you need to adapt to grow. Because of this, you need to be extremely careful that you don’t get stuck in your ways.

If you’ve tried something before, then it isn’t a new idea. You’re copying yourself, and we’ve already covered what happens when you copy things with your marketing.

Particularly if you’re selling a reasonably common product or service, sometimes you need to act differently to catch attention.

It’s worth remembering that if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten. Simply rehashing old ideas and expecting them to work differently is not an effective marketing strategy.

If you can bring your agency into this discussion, you’ll be bringing them into your business. They’ll relish the chance, and if they are trying to prove that their idea has legs, they’ll work 10x as hard.

Ultimately, It’s Not Your Fault

I get it. It was only in the past few years that marketers pulled themselves out of the top 10 least trusted professions.

A lot of what we sell is confusing and sounds like snake oil. We present you imaginary figures interspersed with technical jargon such as impressions, ad recall rate, engagements, interaction rate, Quality Score and conversion ranking. 

We’ll show you so much data that it’s hard to understand if there’s anything actually worth knowing in our reports.

After an hour of meeting us, you’ll probably have more questions than you started with, and you’re still paying the bills.

It’s natural to be uncertain, and it’s also natural to wonder if you’re making the right decision by using your agency.

But if you need your agency to hold your hand a little bit, the worst thing you can do is create unnecessary hurdles just to stay in control of something that’s meant to help you.

Just tell them.

A good and empathetic agency will stand with you and guide you through everything. If there’s something you need them to show you, tell them what you need. If they are doing something you don’t like, let them know. If you don’t know, defer to the experts.

No amount of money turns people into mind readers, and even high-paying clients can receive dud campaigns from micromanaging their agency to a degree that the team stops caring about your brand.

It’s all about communication. You’re paying the bills, but you still need to communicate with them respectfully and efficiently.

And if that respect isn’t reciprocated, then it’s time to change agencies.

Maybe one that runs simple, effective digital marketing?

Well, now you mention it, I can think of one guy…