How to Hire a Marketing Agency, Part 2: What Is Actually for Sale

Three things in every proposal

A marketing proposal bundles three different things, best pulled apart before reading the price. The first is strategy: deciding which customers, which services, which towns, and which channels (the places a business can be found, like Google, the mailbox, or the side of the truck) get the money this year, and in what order. The second is execution, the actual pages, posts, listings, photos, and review requests. The third is accountability. Somebody reads the numbers every month, notices when a channel has stopped paying for itself, and moves the money.

Most agencies sell the second one. Strategy arrives as a slide in the sales deck, rarely revisited. Accountability defaults to the owner, who becomes the project manager for a vendor he hired so that he would not have to be one. That is not dishonest, since execution is what agencies are built to produce, but the owner should know which of the three is missing at his company before he buys. A shop with a clear plan and no hands needs execution. A shop that has tried four vendors in five years and cannot say why any of them failed does not need a fifth executor. Vendors cannot execute a plan that does not exist, so the honest first purchase there is the plan.

Owned or rented

Every channel falls on one side of a line. Owned channels build something that keeps working after the invoice stops: the Google Business Profile (the listing with hours, reviews, and a map pin that appears when someone searches the business by name), the review count, the website and its pages, the customer list. Rented channels buy attention for exactly as long as the payments continue. Neither side is wrong. An owner should know which side each dollar is on, though, because rented channels feel like they are working sooner and owned channels are the ones still working in year three.

Reviews first

The first chart below is why the map that follows counts reviews per month rather than the total. Nearly everyone reads reviews before choosing a local business, most people now require four stars or better, and older reviews stop counting within a few months. A business that collected its reviews in 2022 and stopped is starting over in the customer’s eyes. The encouraging figure is the second bar: most people who are asked for a review leave one.

Rankings are not calls

The second chart is why the map counts booked jobs from search rather than rankings. Two out of three Google searches now end without anyone clicking anything. A business can hold the same position it always did and receive fewer visitors than it did two years ago. The number that survives that trend is the tracked phone number on the listing.

The map

The “first result” column is an operating standard from running these channels in Northwest Ohio, not a published benchmark. Showing up on Google is the channel owners most often misjudge, because it is the slowest to move and the easiest to sell as fast. An honest agency will say so without being asked.

How the fees work

A flat monthly fee, usually called a retainer, buys attention and continuity. It is the right model for work that compounds, like reviews and showing up on Google, where the value shows up in month nine rather than month one. It is the wrong model when the deliverables, meaning what actually gets handed over each month, are vague, because an agency paid the same amount whether or not anything ships has no particular reason to ship. A monthly fee should name in writing what arrives each month (pages published, review requests sent, listings corrected) and what happens to the fee when it does not.

A project fee covers one-time work with a clear end, such as a website, a logo, or a photo shoot. The question that matters is ownership after the project closes: who holds the website address, the account that keeps the site online, and the logins. A $6,000 website built on a system only that agency can edit cannot be moved when the relationship ends. That turns a project fee into a hostage situation, so the ownership question belongs in the first conversation.

Paying per call is the model behind the lead sellers on the map. The shop buys phone calls, usually shared with other shops bidding on the same homeowner, and the day the payments stop, the phone stops. That is a reasonable purchase for a new company with open capacity and someone who can answer within a minute, since a shared lead goes to whoever calls back first. It is the wrong purchase for a shop that already turns work away, because it pays for demand the shop cannot serve while the reviews, the listing, and the website sit untouched.