Why you can’t find the right paid ads agency (and what you can do about it)

Most marketing leaders have interviewed many agencies and hired a few. If you’re one of these marketing leaders, you probably also had bad experiences with agencies. Too slow, too many promises, not enough delivery, too junior, too expensive… 

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“I’m a marketing leader who’s spent +100K per year on advertising agencies. In four years, I’ve fired 3 agencies. Tried and failed to bring the position in-house.

I almost lost faith in paid advertising. Before finding a 'strategic partner' my team can’t (doesn’t want to) live without.”

• Sarah Breathnach, VP Marketing at Hunters

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Once you have one bad experience, you get more skeptical, more jaded. And finding the right agency might start to feel like an impossibility…

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So why do agencies fail?

According to Sarah: 

1. Cost vs ROI - your investment doesn’t meet your expectations.

2. Talent Allocation - often the amazing "sales call” is with the owner, who becomes hands off

3. Energy, Attitude & Persistence - When you start with an agency you have rose colored glasses - but can the agency bring the heat every month?

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The agency that won Sarah over was an agency that delivered on all three – ROI, Talent, and Energy. 

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I LOVED Sarah’s LinkedIn post, and think talent allocation is the most important of the three. When a company has a bad experience with an agency, it’s typically a people problem:

• They are too junior for the responsibility given to them 
• They don’t have real experience in X, Y or Z
• They never owned a pipeline number
• They have too many accounts to manage (they’re overworked) 
• They follow the agencies model to a T and that doesn’t work for your business 
• They don’t operate like an owner, so they don’t form great internal relationships and that leads them to not know what’s really going on inside the business

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“And they (agencies) can’t deliver because the people doing the work (not the owner) are juniors who are cutting their teeth on your account.”

• Julian Schaaf , Agency Owner, Industrial Growth 

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Largely, people problems in agencies occur because 

• Agencies scale by hiring inexpensive juniors that make their margins large
• The best junior talent leaves to start their own agency 
• Agencies with “specialized talent” usually work across even more accounts and don’t have enough context (the work is extremely templatized)

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Note: Sarah had some more context for her points above on why agencies fail. These don’t exactly fit into the talent allocation issues with agencies, but I wanted to make sure they were included: 

• With more spend, there’s more pressure to deliver ROI because the marketing leader is on the hook to deliver results internally.
• In complex industries, without experience you’ll have to coach them over and over again on the basics

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At the end of the day, it’s a model that’s breaking. Don’t get me wrong, there are agencies that rock that largely avoid these issues. But, they’re rare.

More problems? Sometimes, yes ...

Outside of the people problem, I’ve seen people run into these more tactical issues with agencies: 

• Use the same ads for every brand
• 2+ people working on accounts, often just keeping the lights on 
• Constantly rotating the accounts of 5-8 companies (10-32 individual ad accounts), too much work on their plate
• Limited knowledge of the true impact of paid social ads to an entire program
• Stops testing as soon as something is working “okay”
• In platform sometimes, but usually in custom made dashboards that give an incomplete story (but are easy to set up and look pretty)
• Uses Google Analytics to track everything, and doesn’t track things back to CRM (because it’s easy)
• Standardized reporting, which doesn’t fit most businesses 
• Playbook is from 5 years ago

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That’s why I started ATTN Makers - to build the agency I’d want in house. I wanted the agency I was excited about. The agency that has a high ROI, high talent allocation, and who cares (translation: high energy, attitude & persistence) 

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With ATTN Makers you get 1 person who has owned multiple pipeline and revenue numbers, cares about your success, and takes the long way (will invest whatever is necessary to make your business work).

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1 person that goes deep on a maximum of 4 accounts. Here’s what companies get from ATTN Makers: 

• Custom everything, no duplication of work (no it’s not scalable, it works for 4 companies)
• 1 person, so I have a holistic view of your program (not just 1 piece), which opens up opportunities for creative ideas
• Only working with a MAX of 4 accounts - creative ideas from different points of view, but manageable workload
• I care A LOT about your success, because I don’t want any churn (starting from 0 is the toughest part)
• Worked full time at 3 high intensity jobs at fast growing startups where I owned big marketing pipeline numbers
• Use paid social (very difficult to do right), to drive most pipeline
• Doesn’t stop testing, because that’s where growth comes from  
• In platform daily
• Any cross over in strategies are only used by 4 companies (no saturation in markets)

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Want to learn more about ATTN Makers? Click here 

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