One of the biggest fears of every business looking to hire a paid advertising agency is “I hope I don’t get conned”.
How do we know that?
Because every person sitting across our table (or at other end of our Zoom calls) starts the conversation with the exact same look on their face.
A mix of suspicion, fear, realisation they don’t know enough about the subject, and that feeling that they’re about to give this bunch of media agency people access to their business and they don’t have guarantees on what’s going to happen next.
Tell us, how far off the mark are we?
So — we decided to list the 7 most important things to know, do, ask and understand before you sign on the dotted line:
Let’s dive right in!
Most paid advertising agencies work on the same model:
We’d recommend you enquire with multiple agencies to sanity check what we’ve just said for your own peace of mind — don’t take our word for it!
A management fee is the amount the agency gets paid for the work they do in your accounts. Going into details here would take pages and pages, and frankly would be really boring unless you’re into these kind of things, but top level, the fee usually includes, yet is not limited to:
Most of the time there is work that needs to be carried out before you’re able to start advertising. This is a separate, one-off cost that shouldn’t be included in future monthly management fees, and includes:
For clarity: 100% of the agreed advertising spend is used to advertise.
Google, Facebook, and any other advertising platform take money directly from the bank account or the credit card attached to the advertising account – the agency doesn’t get a penny.
This means there is no way for the agency to take a cut of the advertising spend behind your back as well as their management fee.
There shouldn’t be any reason for the agency to ask you to pay them the advertising spend as well as the management fee.
If you get this request, question it — the agency would have to keep the money in a separate bank account, record it as disbursements, and be able to prove at any point that the entirety of the sum was used as advertising spend.
A lot of faff, if you ask us, when you can simply let Google or Facebook take money from your card every time you hit the spend threshold.
There we said it.
Now that we got that out the way, let’s unpack why with a famous saying.
“You can lead the horse to the water, but you can’t make it drink.”
John Heywood
Whether you advertise with leaflets, newspaper ads, social media, or digital ads – whether or not people enquire or buy from you, it’s something no agency in the world can control or guarantee.
What agencies SHOULD guarantee though, is targeted, quality eyeballs to your product, offer, or service. Common sense says that when we lead people with a problem you can fix to your solution, they are likely to enquire or buy from you, right?
We love good ol’ common sense.
If at any point the agency:
Then you know things are going to go south, FAST.
Let’s be clear: your advertising account, like any other online account you have, is your own asset. You own the account, you own the data in it, you own the ads, you own the images, the website you’re advertising to, EVERYTHING.
Any agency that tries to convince you otherwise is operating from Dodgy Land — avoid partnering with them at all costs.
There are two reasons this is important, and they’re not what you think they are.
Are they on time? Are they friendly? Do they take the time to make technical concepts simple and easy to understand? Are they really listening to what you’re saying and asking probing questions, or are they just waiting for their turn to speak so they can get on with it? Are you both on the same page? Do you even like them at all?
Let’s be real, nobody outside of the paid advertising community cares about paid advertising.
It’s hard work, it’s technical, and people get a headache just thinking about it.
So if you get in a meeting, and the media agency guys snow you under with technical lingo, you might want to reconsider, because this is likely how they’re always going to interact with you.
Paid advertising people are supposed to take time to ask about your business, your goals, what you’re currently doing, why have you decided it’s time to advertise, and what are your expectations.
They should specifically ask, and probe, and ask and probe again, around your goals and what you’re trying to achieve.
They should make sure they REALLY understand what you’re after. Sometimes even help YOU clarify what you’re after — after all, if you know very little about paid advertising, how are you even supposed to know what is possible?
Paid ads people should be less like another third party and more like a partner / consultant.
The Mickey to your Rocky, the Miyagi to your Karate Kid, the Yoda to your Luke Skywalker — capiche?
If the agency has got nothing to hide, they wouldn’t have any problem at all to introduce you to other customers so you can have a quick chat with them about their experience. If anything, having someone else sing their praises should only be a good thing!
At no point you should agree to working with an agency (or a freelancer, for that matter) on a handshake or via email, without a proper contract in place. You have to protect yourself in case things don’t go the way you thought they were going to go.
Take notes during the meeting, and double check in the fine print that there are no surprises.
Specifically, pay attention to the following:
Most of the time, agencies are open and willing to negotiate on the terms, provided that, of course, you’re being reasonable, and don’t try to get them to work for free.
(You might be laughing right now, but we had a few businesses trying their luck like that!)
As we briefly mentioned while talking about what’s included in the management fee, there are regular activities and maintenance that have to be done in your advertising accounts on a weekly, bi-weekly and monthly basis.
The best way to think about them, is to see your account like an athlete. The athlete needs to train regularly to improve his performance and have a shot at winning competitions. As soon as the athlete stops training, he’ll stop improving, and will more than likely keep losing to his competitors.
Different agencies have different approaches to account optimisation, but regardless of their approach, they should be able to tell you exactly what they’re going to do and how frequently they’re going to do it.
If they start glossing over, or say anything along the lines of “it’s difficult to say”, this is a cue you need to run.
We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: pushing buttons to create ads is the easy part. It’s the optimisation that makes or breaks an account.
