Nate Tilley walks through what to check before hiring an ad agency: verify their case studies, how long they've been operating, whether they offer performance guarantees, and crucially, that you own your ad accounts and pixels. Avoid agencies staffed mostly by junior contractors.
First, you're going to want to look and see if they have any case studies. If they have case studies, you can probably count on them being a good business. Okay. Second, you're going to want to see how long they have been in business. Okay. Third, you're going to want to make sure that not only do they have case studies, but that they've actually done had successful results for businesses just like yours and businesses similar to yours as well. Fourth, you want to make sure that they have some kind of performance based incentive or some kind of guarantee that they offer on a minimum amount of results. Look, it's marketing. You can't guarantee sales from marketing directly, but you can at least make sure there's some skin in the game. That way, if they at least don't hit the minimum criteria, you're not hung out on a big retainer or something like that. And then the, the fourth thing you want to look at is are they on a retainer? Are they on a pay per lead model? What's going to be best for your business? You want to set yourself up to be able to have all the data, have access to all that, see all the billing and the ad spend and everything like that, fully trans. Transparently. You want everything to be tracked and pixeled under your own assets so you can actually use them to build assets and make data out of. And you're going to want to make sure that everything is set up where you can see it and that you ultimately have access to all that. So aside from those factors, when you're looking to hire an agency, it really comes down to if you trust the person and if they can deliver you an ROI. If they've delivered ROIs for people in the past, they similar to businesses like yours, you can probably count on them delivering an ROI for you. Now keep in mind, the more they have delivered success, the more that their price will generally be. And so you might have to pay more, but you get more for what you pay for in this business especially. So when you're looking at an advertising agency, just know quality over quantity, right? So unless you're wanting to give somebody a shot that's starting out, but just know that a lot of the people that are starting out in the junior marketers, they're actually going to be learning on your dime. They're going to be figuring out how to do a good sales process to closing you on the deal and then going and trying to find a contractor or somebody to build it out for them. So another good thing that you can ask Is like, you know, what is a. You can ask, like, what's your team look like? You know, do you have an internal team, a remote team? Do you work with contractors? What does that look like? What do you do in house? What. What kind of remote team are you working with? You know, who's on your team, that kind of stuff. And that'll give you a pretty good idea of an agency. And the thing is, the reality is, guys, there's a lot of good agencies out there. And, you know, I hire agencies myself to help me with my business. And Alex Hormozi, who wrote this amazing book right here, also talks about hiring agencies. So it's not a bad idea to actually hire an agency to bring on for yourself to get leads and results. The reality is there's a lot of good people out there that are doing a really good business and offering a great service for your local business. But also there's a lot of people that started a marketing agency when they were sitting in their mom's basement. And they don't, you know, they're not even legally old enough to drink yet, but they're telling you how to grow your business. So obviously watch out for that and know that a lot of the, you know, so that's all assuming you're hiring a done for you agency. But if you're hiring like a done with you agency or you're buying a course, just know that you're gonna have to settle that stuff up. Okay? Like, it's gonna be a long process to set all that stuff up. Everybody says it's a copy and paste formula, but at the end of the day, a lot of times if you're the business owner and you buy into something and then you have to it yourself, that can be so much time and so much headache. Sometimes it's better to just hire somebody to do it right off the bat. So a lot of good companies out there. If you have any companies that you're not sure about, you want us to check into, we have a vast network of agency owners that we work with in all different verticals, all different service levels. And we've fostered these relationships to make it easier for you to find a partner. Just DM us the word agency and we will help you to find an option that's right for your business. And I'll see you on the other side. Thanks.
