The #1 Red Flag To Avoid When Hiring A Marketing/Advertising Agency
At the risk of sounding like a TikTok influencer pitching a skincare routine or something, people ask me all the time, if there's one piece of advice that I could give for anybody looking to hire a marketing or advertising agency, what would it be?
My answer here is extremely simple: If their website or any of their marketing materials say that they are "not your average agency" or "not like other agencies", they're absolutely right.
THEY ARE WAY WORSE.
RUN.
Due to the nature of our business and the unique types of clientele that we serve, we spend a lot of time cleaning up oftentimes, pretty significant messes created by blatantly substandard agencies or agencies that just don't understand the types of customers or the organizations in general that populate our space. A couple of years ago, I began to notice a trend with all of these fine folks and that was it. It seems to me that agencies identifying themselves with either examples of this verbiage (and there are a whole lot of them out there that do) use this as a dead serious warning flag that utter wreckage is coming and you should avoid, avoid, avoid.
In the years since, whenever we enter into a situation where we are either taking over for another agency that is in the process of being dismissed or we're going into a situation where we're partnering with another agency on a project of some sort, this is the absolute first thing I investigate. If I see anything along these lines, I know we're getting ready to have a bad time (and it's likely, that for quite some time, the client has been having a much worse time and our first order of business is going to be delivering a bunch of bad news, which is something that nobody likes to do or to hear).
So far, I have not missed on this once. It's ALWAYS there. If you see it, get away from that agency as fast as possible and most certainly do not trust them with the face of your business.
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Darin Roberge is CEO of Motorwerks Marketing and is a Marketing and Media Consultant in the Specialty Automotive and Live Events industries. Darin has been named a Business Trendsetter by Arizona Foothills Magazine, is a two-time nominee to Phoenix Business Journal’s 40 Under 40 list and is one of Sports Car Market Magazine’s 40 Under 40. Learn more about Darin at www.MotorwerksMarketing.com
Freelance writer, editor and marketing strategist
2 年My sense is that the agency space is so crowded that firms think they have to repeat these empty buzzwords in order to keep up. And for too many small firms stressing “uniqueness” is a way of changing the subject from a limited or non-existent record of producing real results.