How to Hire a Marketing Agency, Part 4: The Contract, and the First Ninety Days

The contract checklist

Before signing, the agreement should answer each of these in plain language, and a vendor that resists any one of them has explained something about how the relationship will go.

• Term and notice: month-to-month or fixed, how much notice ends it, whether it renews on its own.
• What gets delivered each month, in countable units, and what happens to the fee if it is missed.
• Reporting: what is counted, in what format, by what day of the month, and who reads it with the owner.
• Ownership: the website address, the hosting account, the site, all content and photos, the Google listing, review-site logins, and customer data, all in the business’s name from day one.
• Access: the top-level login to every account for the owner, not view-only.
• Exit: what is handed over, in what format, within how many days of notice, and at what cost.
• Subscriptions: every tool, who pays for it, whose name is on it, and whether it survives the relationship.
• Exclusivity: whether the agency will also take a direct competitor in the same trade and market.
• Price changes: how much notice is required and whether the work changes with them.
• Who does the work, by name, and what happens if that person leaves.

The one-hour month

Once the contract is signed, managing the agency becomes a different job. The owners who get value out of vendors are the ones who spend one hour a month on it rather than ten hours in a bad quarter. That hour is a standing monthly review with the same agenda every time: the deliverables that were promised against the ones that arrived, the four numbers from Part 1 updated for the month, cost of marketing by channel, and one decision.

The decision is what gets more money, what gets less, and what gets stopped. A month with no decision is a month the owner paid for a report.

Where more than one vendor is involved, which is normal once a website company, a listing service, and a review tool each send their own invoice, somebody has to be the single point where their work meets. Without that, the website company builds pages the listing service does not know about, two vendors ask for the same photos, each report claims the same jobs. The person holding that seat can be the owner, an office manager with a checklist, or someone hired for it. It has to be a named person, and the agencies should know the name.

The ninety-day review

At day ninety the phone will probably not be ringing more yet, because most of the work that matters takes longer than that. The review asks four things instead. Did every deliverable named in the agreement arrive? Is the tracking in place, with each source on its own phone number and each web form carrying its origin? Does the owner hold every login? Does the report count jobs instead of views? Reviews and the Google listing will have moved by then. Rankings will not, and an agency that said so on day one has earned another quarter.

The one thing to do tonight, before any of this, is to open the account where the website address was bought and the Google Business Profile and read the name on each. If either belongs to a vendor, that is the first conversation to have. It will be a short one.