The temptation to hire a full service marketing agency is easy to understand. They do it all!
Discounted rates, full website builds, PPC management, SEO, social media posting, what else could you want for one affordable rate?
The question is, at what cost?
This article is meant to add a lens of skepticism to your decision making process when deciding how to proceed with your marketing plans.
No, just the ones that common businesses can afford. A true full service agency will have specialists that each own a channel.
In those large Agencies, an account manager will have an overall strategy and dispense that strategy to experts in a department who can execute.
However, these agencies charge a lot. Giant companies (with names you’d recognize) will normally have both a full service and in house group working together to execute multichannel marketing campaigns.
But it isn’t reasonable to expect a startup SaaS, B2B or eCommerce company to be able to afford one of those.
1 in 3 companies that Search Click Boom works with has been burned previously by a full service agency that promised them the moon.
Every story is the same, the agency promises a website, visits, conversions and ultimately positive ROI.
However, after burning through $50,000+ dollars, and only half way through their contract, many companies are left scrambling for a way out.
Truth is, the Digital Marketing Agencies aren’t always inherently evil, it’s just that they’re unable to allocate the proper resources to deliver the results your company deserves.
The employees of these companies often wear many hats. For example, your account manager is also managing your PPC and SEO campaigns. This is how they stay lean to make profit.
And you know what? It works for them and some of their clients!
The most common offer that draws companies to the full service trap is the offer of a new website, pages, landing pages and other flashy and expensive web designs and creative assets.
And for the agency, those are the most expensive products to produce, which is why they ask you to sign a contract with a recurring monthly fee. So they can pay off those efforts after they are complete.
At most agencies, the software engineers are the second highest paid employees just above art/design. Which happen to be the teams involved in the creation of your site.
Not to mention, the sites and creative they produced are often from a template that the agency once made from scratch but now copies and pastes.
To be fair, there is nothing wrong with getting a templated site, most landing pages follow a very similar formula, just ask yourself if it is worth the cost you are paying.
Your site will likely be completed by the full service agency by month 2 or 3. So what are you paying for after that?
The agency’s answer would be the ongoing management of your PPC, SEO, and Social.
Exactly who is managing each of these channels?
Advertiser’s entire careers are dedicated to each of these areas on their own. Heck, Search Search Click Boom only does Google Ads for B2B SaaS. That’s the kind of specialization your company deserves and should expect.
These channels are so complex and the algorithms that affect success change on a weekly basis. It’s not practical to leave all of that on the plate of an account manager who is also balancing 20 hours of meetings per week.
Remember, you’re not only paying this agency a reduced rate, but you’re also leaving whatever ad money you are spending in the hands of an under-qualified account manager. Potentially doubling your waste.
This has nothing to do with how smart the agency employees are.
It has everything to do with the hours required to break profit in each of these channels and the lack of employee power at the disposal of the full service agency.
You’ve already heard Search Click Boom’s experience with Full Service marketing agencies. 1 in 3 of our clients come to us after being burned.
We’re trying to help you prevent that by identifying some red flags in marketing agencies before you pay them.
Here are some stories from places like Reddit, Quora and Twitter and lessons to be learned from voices around the world so you can see those red flags before they waste your money.
Avoiding roasting anyone specifically, this full service digital marketing agency has vague text on their front page.
What’s clever about this header is that it knows the target audience really well.
This agencies ideal customers will be short on time, overwhelmed by marketing and frugal. That’s who the full service agencies in questions feed off of.
This user has seen many agencies making vast claims with little data to support their claims.
Of course, you don’t want to have an agency making precise promises with no acknowledgement of the downsides or potential risks. In fact, it’s usually a good sign if an agency comes across as more realistic.
However, having a clear understanding of their processes and former successes (with data telling the story) would be nice.
A lot of FSAs (full service agencies) will wait until you have a heavy time or money investment to disclose some added, crucial fees that are ‘required for you success.’
This eCommerce owner was put in a situation where they had heavily invested time, right up to their busy season, when they were informed they needed to pay a heavy toll to continue.
This is definitely an extreme representation of this example, however, it can happen at any scale.
Be warned. Know what questions you need to ask and don’t let fancy, arbitrary marketing language distract you from what you can afford and the results you need.
Many of these agencies will first connect you with a sales person who takes on most of your communications through the contract singing.
Often this is because they can make promises and push for the sale more than the account manager. Likely, the account manager will be too busy to communicate with you (pre sale and post).
This owner had to break out of contract due to bad performance and terrible service. After they signed a contract, it was impossible for them to get any information out of their manager.
After breaking the contract, any remaining semblance of attentiveness was lost and the client was left in the dark.
To avoid this, be sure to ask for regular meetings and clarification on response expectations from your AM.
If you have an agency who has created your website, ad accounts and more, make sure that they give you access to these things the minute they make them. They are yours.
The same user from before waited until after they discontinued their work with the full service agency. Now, the agency is avoiding giving them access to the Google Ads and analytics accounts.
These accounts are technically owned by the company, not the agency. The agency should not keep these from you.
Don’t let your full service agency get away with stuffing conversions or celebrating easy achievements.
Many clients with accounts that we audit will ask “we have a lot of conversions but no revenue, what are we doing wrong?”
The conversions in these cases: visits to the page and sales on branded keywords.
This user corroborates that story with a cautionary tale. They would report performance with branded terms included.
Dig deeper in the account, make sure your agency is reporting based on the conversions that matter to you.
Don’t let brand terms dress up your reports either. Branded campaigns are important but will perform well with very little effort. Separate the success of your brand campaigns to get a true sense of your conversion results.
There are many solutions to get you a quality website or landing page. In fact, you can do it by yourself easily with today’s landing page tools.
You don’t need design sense or conversion knowledge, just a sense of what your competition is doing and your goals with marketing.
Knowing this is important because getting a website is not enough to justify a long-term contract with a full service marketing agency.
They will most likely end up wasting the money you spend on their services and the money they spend for you on ads.
Here’s a brief overview of all of the red flags you should be aware of.
If you are already paying a full service agency, these can be things you look out for.
If you are considering hiring one, these can be questions that help you decide which agency you choose (or if you use one at all).
Make sure that your agency gives you admin access to every account they make for you.
Don’t settle for a digital marketing dashboard. Often, if this is the only view of performance you have, it will be tailored to favor the agency.
Don’t wait to ask for access until you fire the agency. Gaining access will become a chore akin to pulling teeth.
Your CMS is the control center behind your company website. If your full service marketing agency made your website, ensure you have full admin access the minute it’s made.
Popular Content management systems include WordPress, Wix, Webflow, and for landing pages it could be something like hubspot or instapage.
Make sure that you have admin access to your ad accounts. Just because your marketing agency created it, doesn’t mean they own the data within.
Anything in that account belongs to your business and should be accessible by you. This will be helpful for when you eventually fire your full service company and hire a specialist.
A specialist can benefit from your historic data to pluck insights so that not all money was lost.
By no means will any method of digital marketing render immediate revenue or even low funnel conversions.
However, if you’re a month or two into your stint with a full service marketing agency and haven’t seen any related spikes in traffic, traffic quality or high funnel conversions, put some heat on that agency.
Your marketing agency should be willing to meet with you at your pacing within reason (we offer weekly, bi-weekly and monthly pacing).
If you are having trouble contacting your agency and aren’t given enough facetime, it’s time to find someone who values your money more than them.
It doesn’t take an expert to determine if an ad account is organized or disorganized.
Do the campaigns, ad groups and keywords follow themes?
Is there an acknowledgement of search intent with ad copy, keywords and landing page strategy?
Check the search terms in your ad account, are the searches you’re showing up for good quality?
In most cases, a simple glance can tell you if it’s worth at least asking what’s going on.
You should listen carefully to the tone of the salesperson or account manager before and after you sign a contract with a full service agency.
If the overall sentiment is that you will be able to 100% expect results quikcly, then you should be skeptical that you are being overpromised.
Digital marketing takes time. Even PPC. Optimization is a real thing that you have to wait months to see. That could be on the fast side.
You can trust a realistic (or pessimistic) agency more than you can one that guarantees the moon and the stars.
At SCB, the pitch is that you have to be willing to spend all the money you can afford to lose without results.
That’s the mindset you should have, no matter what solution you choose for your marketing services.
Ideally that’s unrealistic, but you should be set up to expect the worst.
Finally, when the reporting comes back (or before), make sure that the cost per conversion, conversion volume and conversion value numbers are approved.
Many audits will reveal that previous Ad and SEO managers were showing you overly-positive conversion numbers. When in reality, they are counting conversions like add-to-cart and page engagement stats.
Especially if you are a B2B or SaaS, don’t let “click on directions” or “count multiple” conversions fool you. Take those out of the tracking.
Values can be tricky too. Often full service digital marketers will add massive values to leads and SQLs that make your ROI and ROAS look way bigger than they are.
So now that the roast of all digital marketing agencies is over, what should you do instead?
Unless you are willing to pay for a big-league performance marketing agency, don’t consider paying for every marketing channel to be covered.
You don’t need to master all of them right away. Master a few to start and grow from there once you have a few reliable ones.
If it’s marketing in general that overwhelms you, hire a marketing consultant instead of a full service agency.
Consultants will help you plot strategy as well as hire freelancers and specialists to get the job done.
You will pay more for the consultant but you can pick and choose which channels you advertise on and you will get higher quality services.
Most marketing consultants have networks of go-to specialists. Likely these contacts will be high-value specialized hires that they have in their back pocket.
Not enough money to hire a marketing consultant? The alternative doesn’t have to be hiring a full service marketing company.
Instead, do some research, figure out what channel will work best for your business and either hire for that one or take it on yourself.
Especially with SEO and Organic social, a few blog posts can educate you enough to take these in-house and leave the PPC to specialists.
Honestly, depending on your industry, PPC can be pretty intuitive these days as well.
Heed this warning or don’t. Some companies get exactly what they need from full service agencies. They’re not all bad.
If you must, go with a recommendation from someone in a similar industry.
If your industry is really unique, don’t trust a cut rate agency with your strategy.
Thank you for reading!
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