Hiring a marketing agency is one of the most important decisions a small business will ever make.

One of the most important decisions a small business owner will make is whether or not to hire a marketing agency. It is also one of the most difficult. How difficult depends on what they know about modern marketing.

Before the digital age, the typical small business marketing strategy began with a Yellow Pages ad. The size of the ad dictated the cost. The next move might have been an ad in a magazine or on a billboard. Radio and television were always there for big spenders. But the rules of engagement were simple.

The digital era disrupted everything. Instead of the Yellow Pages, the internet is where people go to discover businesses. Paid search is the fastest, least demanding route to publishing an ad. Search engines are the new Yellow Book, and the search process is much more complicated.

Most owners understand what a Google ad is by now. Understanding what isn’t one is the hard part. The challenge is that there are so many types of digital ads, and setting them up requires knowledge of a complex process and an even more complex platform. The discipline is called Search Engine Marketing. There are people whose entire careers are built around creating and managing these ads. A business owner is extremely unlikely to hit the mark setting them up alone. They can opt for Google and Microsoft assistance, but those companies are known to milk budgets. They can outsource the work, but the industry is crowded with self-proclaimed experts who quite simply are not. Then there are marketing agencies.

That is far more to consider than a Yellow Pages ad. And that only covers search.

If a small business wants to go further, they enter a world of distinct channels, each its own ecosystem. Audience ads encompass text, image, and video, and can be found on social media or other websites. That is a separate discipline that requires its own expertise and calls for graphic design or video editing skills. SEO — earning visibility instead of buying it — takes months of consistent copywriting and technical skills, as well as a budget for backlinks. Then there is email marketing, an entirely different medium with high demands and low returns.

Every channel demands a completely different skillset that is far beyond what most owners have the time or background to manage. This is where the gap begins. And it is exactly why so many owners go straight to an agency.

Once that decision is made, a different set of problems surfaces. If an owner struggles to evaluate the basics above, how can they vet a specialized, multi-disciplinary agency? Most can’t even dismantle a bogus agency report. More on that later.

This is where the lack of an evaluation framework becomes a high-stakes, expensive challenge. Navigating it requires moving past polished sales pitches and understanding how these firms actually operate. That is where an insider’s perspective becomes valuable. And the most valuable perspective is a holistic one — earned from experiencing the industry from every possible angle.

My Perspective on Ad Agencies Comes from Sitting in Every Seat at the Table

My career started as a web design intern for a web-centric branding company. It wasn’t a full-service agency by today’s standards, but it was my first education in how agencies operate, how they sell, and how they think about clients. I turned that role into a lead position by the end of my second year. By the time I left, I was attending sales meetings to represent the creative and development side of the business. I had become the person who could explain and position our value to the client. That foundation has proven invaluable throughout my career.

After graduating, I became Director of Internet Services for another highly rated web development company. It was small, but it ranked as Charlotte’s number two web development company in The Book of Lists. During my short time there, 9/11 happened and the dot-com crash hit. That led me to the decision that shaped everything after: I founded my own web-centric branding company — Evision Studios.

The timing was right. The dot-com crash had exposed something I couldn’t ignore. Companies had been paying five to six figures for websites that were little more than a digital brochure. I had already established I could deliver high quality work, but my business could offer it at a fraction of the cost. I went straight after the Charlotte market — and won — against agencies that had been there for years. I landed a large law firm, a Fortune 500 commercial real estate business, a regional chiropractic center, America’s top French wine importer, established insurance agencies, real estate brokerages, and a long list of other types of businesses.

I ran that company for eight years. The reason I won was simple: digital experience and creative problem-solving. I understood where agencies created value and where they created friction. I could decipher what small businesses actually needed, then build systems around delivering those needs.

The website industry was flooded with providers, and most operated the same way. They would finish a design, hand it off, and wait — sometimes for months — for clients to stop running their businesses long enough to produce content. I had watched this bottleneck at every previous stop, and I started hitting it too. So I conceived a website content management system well before its time and sourced the build to developers. We weren’t just designing identity packages and websites anymore. We were building custom content management systems that eliminated the bottleneck. We never waited on a customer who purchased one. We closed projects, earned more, and got paid faster.

Years later, content management systems were everywhere — WordPress, Joomla, Drupal. But I write naturally, so I had already started owning the content for my clients and made it part of my creative services. I sold “optimized” content that helped customers rank. I built processes for SEO too.

Logos and identity packages were no exception. I learned early that clients want to feel involved in the creative process. I capitalized on that knowledge and catered to it by including them. The catch is that involvement and efficiency pull in opposite directions. So I built a process that created efficiency and turned a greater profit.

When a company rebranded, I offered three logo roughs, gauged where they were leaning, and finalized in that direction. Once the logo was set, the fonts, colors, and styles were set — essentially forming a brand guide. This made the design for the rest of the collateral easier and faster. Clients felt included. I didn’t overcommit. And I had it all down to a system that worked for everyone.

Three things became clear during my run as an entrepreneur. I understood small business challenges. I understood small business marketing agencies. And systems thinking came naturally to me.

How Systems Thinking Creates Value an Agency Can’t

When you start thinking in terms of systems, leverage, scalability, and process, everything changes. The people who get this are the people you want working for you in almost every discipline. Especially in leadership. That is where the tone is set, where optimization begins, and where incremental growth happens.

I worked with those kinds of people throughout the life of Evision Studios. The model was expanding. We were scaling. We had a process for everything. I even had a partner — a licensee who functioned as an account executive. Then the Great Recession hit and forced me out of business. My first run as an entrepreneur ended as fast as it started. But the fruits of that experience surfaced as I began my quest to become a marketing executive.

My agency experience and ability to build systems paid off immediately. I built my first sales and marketing system as Director of Sales and Marketing for my first employer — a real estate technology provider that offered graphic design, email marketing, website development, and search engine optimization to powerful real estate brokers across the United States. The unfamiliar part was the SaaS capabilities that powered all of those efforts, as well as brokerage management. Still, the name of the game was the same as I had done for my own business. Prospecting with better lists, email marketing and analytics with better tools, sales calls to schedule demos, managing a website redesign, blogging — a little more of the same for me, but with the advantage of managing all of it from one intelligently built system. The CEO and I were a good team. We had a process, and growth became clockwork for us. We grew an eight-year-old tech company by 40 percent in a single year.

Next I became Vice President of Digital Marketing & Communications. I managed digital assets and campaigns for a behavioral health conglomeration and its subsidiaries. There was a lot of learning on the job — especially around bureaucracy. As I learned, I built that department around two systems.

The first was a scalable marketing operation designed to leverage and develop young talent. I gave them the big picture so they understood why the mundane work mattered, then trained them on the specific tasks that ate my bandwidth. Over time I trained them to do more, so I could do more elsewhere. I had kids with no skillset performing technical SEO within weeks. We were earning national rankings for some of the most competitive keywords on the search engines at the time. I was also blessed to have a highly paid and talented technical team supporting me in other areas of the business.

The second system was an ROI attribution system. That system would give us granular visibility into the direct impact our work had on revenue. Once that was in place, it was time to choose an agency — a vetting process I was fully prepared for.

While others saw hiring an agency as a simple process for unloading responsibility to a third party, I knew I was vetting the best options to plug into and fuel specific parts of a system I had already built. Three years of doing the work myself had given me a comprehensive, granular understanding of every channel, campaign, and initiative — some of which I was strategically clearing off my own plate. The tracking systems we had finally built would show us how well marketing fueled sales, how well sales fueled marketing, and what it all did to revenue at the campaign level. Everything I had worked toward was coming together.

I tell this story because what happened next is highly relevant to this post. What happened next was ill-advised, and it cost everyone.

My new supervisor struggled to understand the digital landscape. He taught me how to get buy-in. He taught me how to build a strategic business plan, but there was a hard cutoff where he no longer understood the details inside the plan he taught me to create. Part of that plan was vetting agencies for SEO only — something I had already been doing before I was promoted under him. We interviewed several. All strong, but in different areas. Some were far beyond our budget. Others were too small for the workload.

Once I completed the plan, and we narrowed in on a particular ad agency, my boss surprisingly took the reins in communicating with the agency’s account executive. I started to realize he and the founder of our organization were having conversations without me. The agency ended up winning far more business than I had ever intended for them to manage.

In a disagreement with the founder, I received the blame for a mistake that preceded my boss’s decision to make the ad agency an agency of record. After nearly four years of dedication and turning down several offers to work elsewhere, I put in my resignation, supported them throughout the month, and left for better pay with the real estate group I had worked with before. The ROI attribution system we built would later prove that the agency I had identified for SEO was mostly only good at SEO and not much else. Eventually the company slid and sold.

My next move was Director of Marketing & Creative Services for a prominent real estate broker. There, I implemented a geotargeted direct mail program that is still in use today and designed a blog-centric, automated social media and email marketing system — built on the same technology I had sold as Director of Marketing mentioned earlier. They owned both. While I was there, I also managed a relationship with a search engine marketing agency. That was a point of disagreement between me and the owner, because I did not believe they would produce. They didn’t.

Every system I ran required collaboration. The dynamics were typically the same. I conceived of a system, worked between a small team I managed, other departments, and internal and corporate executives to build these systems. The systems were built to scale, leveraging products from agencies and in-house talent. Whether it was direct mail, digital marketing, SaaS, or something else, it was always part of a larger system. Whenever I was able to manage these systems completely, the systems improved and we saw results. If the companies went in another direction — usually influenced by an outside opinion — they failed.

There are a few key takeaways here, and listing accomplishments isn’t meant to distract from them. It’s meant to shed light on them. One: there is almost always a clear gap between what your company’s marketing head should be and what your agency is. Two: both organizations struggled without the marketing head who built the strategies and systems. Both ignored that person’s advice and paid for it — literally. The lesson is simple. You need a systems thinker managing your marketing. And that includes managing your agencies and vendors. They will know their and the agency’s place in their system. The agency will not.

When a small business sits across from an account executive, they’re usually talking to someone who is very good at their job. The catch is, their job isn’t to win one project. It’s to win many. That is worth understanding clearly. An account executive rarely pays for themselves by winning one project, nor are they heavily involved after the sale. That doesn’t make them dishonest. It means there is misalignment from the start. What feels personal at first usually fades once the deal is signed. The interaction fades with it, and the experience after that varies.

Now contrast that with a strong internal systems-thinking hire, a contractor, or a consultant. They have one relationship to sell, and that relationship stays close. If they are genuinely competent, their first instinct isn’t to pile on as many disciplines as possible. They might pick one or two things to juice the lead pool for that organization. But they should be equally focused on investigating what’s working, what isn’t, and building a strategy for a system the stakeholders are comfortable with. In essence, a consultant should be more focused on building a strategic marketing plan than simply a marketing strategy.

What Does a Strategic Marketing Plan Look Like?

A strategy means little without a strategic plan of action. Such a plan should include high-level courses of action, such as vetting options for fulfillment, and it should include more granular tasks for already identified resources. These actions should include assignees, be categorized within projects, and these projects should be organized by which objectives they are designed to achieve. They should include a sequence when necessary, a timeline, and a budget for each effort. Ultimately the plan is a document that summarizes the business’s goals, tells the business what to do in order to achieve them, in what order, by whom, by when, how, and for how much. Never leave out how to measure results.

The strategic marketing plan is more than a deliverable. It is a high-value asset on its own. The document should be so comprehensive and valuable that it provides long-term value even if the consultant is not involved beyond its finalization. The plan should serve as a beacon for stakeholders — something they can use to make smarter decisions with regard to in-house hires or signing with a marketing agency. Typically, consultants who provide these plans stay available for a fee if needed.

Pairing the Right People With the Right Strategic Marketing Plan

Here’s where the agency comes back in — because for most owners, the agency was the plan. And for most agencies, the marketing plan is the plan.

A good marketing head changes that. Not by ruling agencies out, but by putting them in context. The plan presents options. It doesn’t always dictate the specific choice initially. It shows the owner what’s possible: a full agency, a department head with specialists, a hybrid of a department head with contractors doing the work. Each has tradeoffs. Each fits differently depending on budget and goals. Those details can be worked into the final product along with the math — and the agency math matters here. And unlike an agency pitch, this plan gets built with the owner and their stakeholders, not delivered to them — which is exactly why it holds up as a reference long after the engagement ends.

Agencies that are genuinely excellent at everything are expensive, for a clear reason. Building teams with real depth across strategy, creative, paid media, development, analytics, SEO, and branding isn’t cheap — and retaining them through slow periods isn’t either. On top of labor, they carry office space, management, sales, operations, software, and profit margins. Industry data and my own experience suggest that only about 35 to 50 percent of what a business pays an agency actually funds the work on their account. The rest keeps the agency in business.

That’s not a condemnation. It’s just how agencies work. Combine it with the fact that they’re rarely focused on one account full-time, and you have real reason to weigh an agency against an internal team — or a hybrid. It also explains the quiet drop in output some businesses notice after the honeymoon ends. They aren’t imagining it.

Whatever the owner chooses, it doesn’t replace the plan. It plugs into it. The agency becomes a component the marketing head manages, not the strategy itself.

Handing Someone the Keys to Marketing — The Other Hard Part for Business Owners

Here’s the tension nobody likes to name.

Once most business owners accept that they simply are not the best resource to manage all of their marketing efforts, they are faced with finding the right person. While finding the right person can be challenging for businesses due to various reasons — location, compensation, culture fit — these roles often sit vacant due to another obstacle: the owner’s willingness to relinquish the control necessary for any good marketing head to realize their full impact. Once a business owner makes it this far with their comfort zone, they then have to trust their new hire to help them hire someone else.

While this domino effect of change within an organization is real, nothing changes the fact that an owner who struggles to evaluate the basics of marketing is not the best person to evaluate a marketing hire, and certainly not the person to evaluate who they hire — whether it’s an internal employee or an ad agency. Make no mistake, an agency will fill whatever vacuum it is handed — on its terms, not the owner’s. The businesses that get real value are the ones that show up with leadership, structure, clear expectations, and the tracking to hold everyone accountable, including themselves.

Admitting what you don’t know is the move that protects you. It rarely pays off long-term to pretend. Just as your marketing person will never know your business as well as you do, you are not going to out-evaluate someone who has sat in every seat at the agency table. Hiring that expertise — even temporarily — is what keeps you from making a six-figure decision on a salesman’s word.

A Marketing Consultant Helps You Understand What You Don’t Know, What You Need to Know, and What to Do

Hiring a marketing consultant before you build a team or sign with an agency costs money. But it’s a fraction of what a wrong hire or the wrong agency of record will cost you — and it makes every decision after that easier.

The right consultant doesn’t need a desk, a title, or a permanent seat on your payroll. You bring them in for the expertise: vetting agencies, building the plan, standing up the systems. No long-term commitment. No culture-fit gamble. Just someone who has sat in every seat at the table, working for you instead of for the next account.

Their plan carries you through the gaps — the stretches between agency check-ins where you’d otherwise be guessing. And because measurement is built in from the start, you’re never starting from zero. If a relationship ends, yours or the agency’s, the sting stays where it belongs. You keep the infrastructure. You keep the data history. You keep the assets. You own the system.

That ownership is the whole point — and it starts with how the consultant works, not just what they leave behind. Because they build the plan with you and your stakeholders instead of handing you a finished one, you stay closer to every decision along the way. That’s what lets you pivot, hire, or bring the entire operation in-house whenever you’re ready.

A small business may need to hire an agency, build an internal team, or land somewhere in between — that decision could go either way, and it’s rarely the same answer twice. What it definitely needs first is someone who can evaluate the options and make that call for the right reasons, someone more invested in your growth than in keeping the engagement alive. Find that person first. Everything else gets easier from there.

Start the conversation