What Startup Founders Should Watch Out For When Hiring A Marketing Agency

Hiring agencies to do project-based work in areas such as design, development, or marketing can be faster than sourcing, interviewing, and recruiting individuals contributors.

They also have clearer offerings and can handle being on a contract versus needing to be hired on a full-time basis with benefits.

Additionally, many agencies have well-staffed teams with subject matter experts, who do much of the project management tasks, which is a great bonus for busy founders and managers.

While agencies can be a great way to scale your team quickly it isn’t a bulletproof solution. Just as you would source and vet an individual contributor, you need to do the same for an agency.

However, vetting can be a challenge when you are hiring people outside of your expertise or sight unseen. One way to tackle these challenges is to have someone like a teammate or advisor be involved in the process.

You can also leverage a teammate or advisor even after hiring an agency to gauge progress and fit.

Having done my fair share of hiring and firing, startup founders I advise rely on me to help them vet individual contributors from marketing interns to CTOs, as well as agencies.

What To Do When You Run Into A Roadblock With Marketing Agencies

About a month ago, a startup founder I advise, told me that they had hired a new marketing agency, but were having trouble communicating with the agency.

Unsure whether it was the agency or them, the founder asked me to help. Since I was slowly coming up to speed, I told the founder to give me at least two weeks, and I that I’d be sure to setup a call with the marketing agency.

Before the call, I reviewed the marketing agency’s plans.

Most of their plans seemed straightforward, but there were a few things that caught my eye.

The first was how they wanted to go head-to-head with existing competition when it came to SEO, instead of building content around different long tail keywords.

The next was how their ideas for blog posts didn’t really seem to resonate with the voice or brand the founder was building.

Since the startup hadn’t yet launched their product, the agency wanted to do a lot of things, that to me seemed, like it would be a waste of time and money until there was a firm launch date like running Google AdWords and Facebook campaigns on a pre-launched SaaS product.

Finally, there were marketing tasks that needed a developer’s time but would need to wait until the product was closer to launching so a developer would be free to help.

Getting Marketing Agencies To Educate You On Their Plans As It Relates To Your Startups Goals

Wanting to give them the benefit of the doubt, I figured I’d ask the marketing agency what their reasoning was for these tasks to understand where they were coming from, and how it could benefit the startup.

The call was scheduled for thirty minutes. Once everyone was on I got down to business. I spent about 30 seconds explaining my role and how I was helping the startup.

When I was done, the founder of the marketing agency proceeded to talk about their process, and what they wanted to do. I was trying to get a word in edgewise but was finding it incredibly challenging.

We had about 15 minutes left on the call, and I still had a number of open questions that I hadn’t gotten answers to. I did the only thing I could do and interrupted.

I told the agency that the product didn’t have a launch date yet due to some features that were open-ended, but we would have a firm launch date for them for sure in two weeks. As a result, I needed them to understand that we couldn’t lend a developer to handle some of the marketing tasks.

It seemed like the founder of the agency was annoyed at me for bringing this up all of a sudden, and asked why I hadn’t been there right from the beginning.

The startup founder stepped in and explained I had been helping with product, and had recently come up for air to help with marketing. Going forward I’d be more available.

The founder of the agency seemed OK with the response and proceeded.

Again I had to interrupt to ask why they believed these tasks were important to at this stage of the startup, and how they had planned to measure success for each experiment.

Instead of answering my questions, the founder of the marketing agency proceeded to explain to me the importance of getting customers before launching.

I agreed that it was important, but felt like I wasn’t getting through.

Referring Back To The Contract When You’re Stuck

I pushed to understand why they felt like these tactics would differentiate the startup from the competition.

The founder of the agency started explaining the importance of content marketing, what blogging was, how often we should be doing it, and the importance of SEO.

At this point, the founder of the startup sent me a Slack message saying that it was surprising that the founder of the agency hadn’t even looked me up prior to the call! After all, didn’t I know a thing or two about blogging?

I responded to my advisee, confirming that it was going to be a challenge to communicate with this agency any further on this call.

I then suggested that we postpone the contract to which the founder of the agency responded was impossible. The contract was set for a solid 6 months and there was no way to pause it.

This is when things became crystal clear to the startup founder, who was shocked to hear about the terms of the contract. The startup founder went through the contract which stipulated the startup had a right to cancel at any time if they felt the agency wasn’t making progress.

The founder of the agency realized the mistake.

By this point in the call, l I excused myself because there was no more headway to make. The startup founder ended up firing the marketing agency.

While it might seem like our call had been frustrating and fruitless, it had actually been extremely productive, because it confirmed two things that the founder had been wary about:

• The agency’s reluctance to talk about how the tactics would differentiate the startup
• The agency’s communication style of being authoritative versus conversational, cooperative, and educating us when we were looking to understand where they were coming from

Our experience had taught us that communication style is a clear indicator of how easy or challenging it would be to work with an agency going forward.

While no one enjoys firing people, it is a necessary when you realize there was a misfit in hiring, and when it’s clear that the mistake cannot be easily rectified.

Now I want to know, have you been in this startup founder’s shoes when it comes to hiring? How did you go about vetting agencies or individual contributors, and how did you spot red flags?

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And check out my these other posts on marketing for your startup:

• Growth Hacker Marketing Comes At A Steep Price For Most Startups
• Just Because You Aren’t A Marketer Doesn’t Mean You Can Neglect Marketing
• How To Avoid Overspending On Marketing Your Product
• How To Quickly Spot And Move On From Bad Marketing Channels