Introduction: Breaking Through the Noise

Let's be real. The modern-day American marketplace can be loud, busy, and overwhelming. It's like a digital Times Square at midnight. In this cacophony of brands competing for a sliver of the eyeball and cognitive territory of an audience that is already staring at their phone, the business owner is thinking, "I just want to thrive, not just survive." The question is not if you need a digital advertising strategy, but how do you establish a strategy that breaks through the noise? Enter the world of digital advertising agencies and firms. But before you understand their value proposition consider the following: we have to first get past the jargon of the corporate world to see what they really are in a "modern context". They are today's navigators through the unchartered waters of this online world.

Think about your own experiences. How did you last learn about a new brand? Did you have a household problem you needed to find a solution for, and, at some random time during your day you read a blog post from now a company you have no idea who they are but exactly fit your need? You might've been flipping through a social feed and saw an entertaining video ad or a sponsored post that was targeted exactly to your interests and you didn't scrolled past it, you watched it. Or you were in the midst of exploring a major purchase and then learned of a "review round-up", or case study that put one option clearly above the other options. Each of these moments, from first awareness to final purchase, are part of a journey. In almost every instance, that journey was not an accident. It was organized and planned intentionally by a digital advertising agency.

What Digital Advertising Agencies Really Are

The term "behavioral advertising agency" may seem impersonal and technical to some. It may evoke images of walled conference rooms with lots of data analysts examining spreadsheets. Without a doubt, data is the fuel for this work, but a good agency is an amalgamation of artist and scientist. They are creative storytellers who understand how humans connect emotionally but also have a systematic mind to measure how the story impacted the audience, often to the last decimal. They develop and compose the conversations your brand has with the broader world, all while ensuring the interactions are happening in the right place, at the right time, and with the right message.

The Foundation: Deep Business Understanding

So what does that look like in practice? Let's dive in. It all starts with a basis of really understanding your business in a deep, almost personal way. Before drafting an ad or identifying a target audience, a worthy agency will not just research your company, they will internalize it. This is not as simple as answering some questions on a questionnaire, it's digging deep to understand your "why". Why did you start this company? What problem to you want to solve with every ounce of your being? What does success actually look like for you?

At the same time, the agency will direct their view to the outside world, to your customers. This is not simply identifying general demographics such as "women, 25-40." That's simply where it starts. The real gold is in the psychographics: what are their dreams? What keeps them awake at night? In what kind of language will they accept? What other brands do they adore, and what makes them love those brands? This phase is about developing a living, breathing portrait of the people you want to reach. It's empathy as a business strategy. Without this, any campaign centered around creatives, budgets, and placement is essentially yelling into the wind.

Strategic Development: Creating the Narrative

With this compass of understanding, now the agency begins the journey of charting the course into the strategic phase, where the overarching narrative of the campaign is created. That narrative becomes the core idea that connects every single touchpoint. For example, a company selling premium hiking gear isn't just selling insurance, tents, or backpacks—they're selling self-reliance, the adventure of the journey, and deep-seated peace in nature. That core narrative becomes the North Star to make sure that the ad, the social post, the email—every experience—feels like a chapter in the same story about the brand.

Multi-Channel Blueprint

From this narrative, now the multi-channel blueprint emerges. The age of putting all your marketing dollars into one medium—remember the good old days of putting your chips on the table of a television ad—is long gone. Today, the picture is more like a financial portfolio—a strategic, diversified portfolio across a group of digital platforms, each platform selected for its unique ability to target a different part of your audience in a specific stage of the journey.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

One of the elements of that portfolio is SEM or Search Engine Marketing. SEM is the art and science of putting your brand in front of potential customers when they are actively looking for what you have to offer. SEM is often divided into two powerful disciplines: SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and PPC (Pay-per-click) advertising.

SEO: The Long-Term Strategy

SEO is a long-term strategy. It is the step-by-step process of making your website and content so authoritative, so valuable, and so technically polished that search engines like Google will reward you with higher rankings. This will narrow in on a mix of different skills. First is the content side: researching and writing articles, guides and web copy to answer the questions your audience is typing. Then there is technical: making sure your website loads quickly, is secure, and is easy for users and search engine "crawlers" to navigate. You can think of SEO as working to build an asset that is permanent. It's not about renting space; it's about earning a valuable corner of a digital piece of land through the daily work you put in to earn a position. The uptime you earn is often the most valuable type because it is based on active intent.

PPC: The Sprint

PPC, or pay-per-click, is a sprint. It's the ability to pay to be on top of the search results page, right now, for those valuable keywords. The most typical platform to run your PPC campaign is Google Ads. The beauty of PPC is speed and their targeting capabilities is breathtaking. You can target by location, the day of the week, the time of day, the device they are on, and even individuals past behaviors online. And because it is "pay per click," which is also, the fundamental principle of the campaign, this means you only pay when someone clicks knowing they are at least somewhat interested. There is a science to managing PPC campaigns. It is an ongoing process of bidding, testing ad copy, analyzing performance results, and adjusting landing pages to keep the cost of acquiring a customer below the value they bring. It is a high-risk, data-driven game of efficiency, and if you can nail it, you can get a flood of warm leads and sales.

Social Media Advertising

Now we find ourselves in the broad, constantly changing, and chaotic world of social media advertising. Social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and X (formerly Twitter) are much more than social networks; they are cultural vehicles with their own languages and norms. The role of a digital advertising company is to be both a builder of community and a driver of performance.

Organic Social Management

The organic side of that—managing a brand's social presence—is about personality. It is the personality that responds to a comment with a wink and warmth. It is the eye that curates a visually pleasing Instagram feed. It is the creativity that produces a TikTok video native to the platform that is shared and saved. This work builds the tribe. It builds loyalty and turns customers into advocates.

Paid Social Advertising

Paid social advertising is where that community building and hyper-targeted amplification meet. The ability for targeting demographic details is sophisticated on social platforms like Meta (Facebook and Instagram). You can reach people not only by age and location but by their interests, hobbies, life events (someone getting engaged, buying a house), and the other pages they follow. This allows for almost surgical targeting. An attorney who practices locally and specializes in divorce can create ads targeted to anyone in the city suffering change in relationship status to "Separated." A B2B software company can create ads targeted to "IT Directors at companies with 500+ employees in the healthcare space" on LinkedIn. Paid social is the megaphone for your best content, allowing you to literally promote it to the people most likely to care about it - driving everything from brand awareness to website conversions and straight sales.

Content Marketing

But what fills that megaphone? What is the substance of all those ads and social posts? This is where content marketing becomes valuable. In an ocean of sales pitches, your content is your value proposition. Your content is the reason people chose to engage with your brand when you are not directly asking them for their money. Your content can be a long blog post that provides clarity and insight into a complicated topic in your industry; a short, funny video that makes someone's day; an informative podcast interview with an expert; or a detailed case study talking about the successful project in your field. The goal of content marketing is not to sell; it's to serve. By truly providing value, you build trust. You establish your brand as a helpful authority. When someone is finally ready to purchase, they don't see another vendor, they see your brand as the trustworthy guide they have been learning from for months.

Email Marketing

And this is where one of the most powerful and most underused channels becomes important: email marketing. Despite the onslaught of flashy social media algorithms, the unassuming email inbox remains the holdout sanctum of direct communication. Your email list is an owned asset. Unlike your social media following, which exists on a platform that you cannot control, your email list is an asset. It is a direct line to those that have raised their hands to say, "I'm interested." Modern email marketing is a far cry from the unappealing, often bulk, promotional blasts of yesteryear. The attempt is at segmentation and personalization. An effective agency will help you to build automated email sequences that feel personal- a welcome series for new subscribers, a nurturing series for someone who opted into a guide but has not made a purchase, or even a re-engagement campaign for a lapsed customer. It is about sending the right message, to the right person, at the right time, so you feel less like sending junk mail and a personal note from your best friend who happens to be an expert at what they do.

Data and Analytics: The Non-Negotiable Foundation

Underneath every single one of these disciplines is the non-negotiable piece of data and analytics. A digital advertising agency without a robust analytics practice is like a pilot flying blind in a storm. Every click, each view, every form submission and every purchase provides them with one data point. Their job is to bring together the data points into a story that makes sense and is actionable. Using tools like Google Analytics, they can see not just how many people visited your site but what they did once they got there. Which pages they were absorbing the information, and where they got confused and left the site. Which advertising campaign was responsible for the customers that made the most purchases? This information creates a powerful feedback loop! It tells the agency what's working and what's not, so they can pivot away from things that are not effective and lean into what's working! That's to say, this realization leads to what becomes a culture of continuous optimization, which changes marketing from a cost center to a measurable, accountable engine for growth.

The Reality Check: What It Feels Like To Work With An Agency

This is something you will not read in an agency brochure! The relationship between a business and its agency partner in digital advertising is not always smooth sailing! There are real tensions, real frustrations, and times where both parties question whether they are communicating in the same language. I share this with you not to deter your intentions, but to show you that if you know this up front, you will be more proactive than a disservice to the partnership.

Month One: Culture Shock

Month one can feel like culture shock! Your agency will request things that you did not know you had to provide. They will ask for access to your Google Analytics, your social media accounts, your email platform, your customer database, etc. They will request your brand guidelines even though they may only clearly live in your minds! They will have you scheduled in endless kickoff meetings to dive into questions about your business that start to feel like they are digging into anything and everything except to just "run some ads". This will test patience on both sides! The agency is building out all the messaging and targeting we talked about earlier, but from your end, it can feel like a lot of talking, and not much doing. My advice is to trust the process, and set clear expectations on what the timelines would look like. A quality agency will explicitly define the significance of the rationales at each step.

The Creative Review Process

Then we start making things real with the creative review process, and this is where things get fun. They present you their initial round of ad concepts, landing page designs, or content calendar. You are engaging with the concepts as someone who has lived and breathed your business for years. They are thinking about what will actually move the needle with your audience. At times that is in alignment. At times our perspectives don't align at all. You may think, "That headline doesn't capture what we do" while they are thinking, "That headline tested at a 40% higher click-through-rate than the more descriptive headline." This doesn't necessarily mean that one side is wrong and the other is right. However, it becomes a question of finding the common ground between brand authenticity and producing effective results in the marketplace. The best things happen when both sides listen intently and compromise.

Money Conversations

Money conversations will happen in spurts, and they may not always be comfortable. Digital advertising is always a game of investment versus return, but the return might not happen on your timeline. A Search Engine Optimization campaign could take six months to demonstrate an increase in traffic. A brand push on a social media platform may build a larger audience or increase engagement but those metrics may not move the needle on your bills. Your agency should be working to build a clear understanding of what success looks like at each phase, and they should provide you with a clear benchmark for what success looks like so they can be honest with themselves and you if something is underselling or if something isn't working. If they're not willing to have these open conversations, that's a sign. While marketing is a function of money, it most certainly should not be a function of blind faith.

Speed and Responsiveness

Your agency probably tells you it also has the urgent challenge of "speed and responsiveness." In your head, if you're emailing your team at 9 AM with an idea for a timely promotion, you would certainly like to see ads running by noon. The true challenge involves the development of creative, approval processes through proper platforms, determining allocated budgets, quality controls, etc. Everything happens faster than the old-school days of print and TV, however, immediate might not be a viable state-of-mind. We have found that setting up some baseline communication protocols helps. Weekly check-ins, shared project management tools, and designated contact points for easy access can alleviate a lot of friction out of the already complex engagement process.

The Specialized Worlds Within the Agency Ecosystem

All digital advertising agencies are not built the same, and an appreciation of the different species within the ecosystem will ultimately assist in finding the best fit for your individual needs.

Full-Service Agencies

On one end of the spectrum, you have the full-service agencies. These companies are a Swiss Army knife of marketing; providing an all-in-one operation of marketing strategy, creative execution, media buying, and analytical data reporting. The benefit here is simplicity and coordination. You have one organizational relationship, one contract to set up, and one long-term invoice every month. Usually, when your social media strategy needs to be lined up with the content calendar dealing with SEO, that is all required to interact with the email buildout, having everyone within the same walls (physical or virtual), makes a lot of that choreographed back-and-forth process smoother. The trade-off is that it's challenging to be accomplished at everything. Some full-service agencies can do it all well. Others are truly great at two or three things and okay at the rest.

Specialist Agencies

Then there are the agencies that focus on one thing that is special. They have made their mark in one discipline and have built their whole reputation there. You can find PPC agencies that know everything there is to know about Google Ads and have relationships with the platform that allows direct access to Beta features. SEO agencies where each person on the team could spend hours discussing Core Web Vitals and schema markup. Social media agencies that have run a campaign for several brands that has gone viral and understand the cultural considerations of each platform like anthropologists. The strength of working with a specialist agency is depth; they know their area better than most, but the downside is that if you are doing something multi channel, you may have to work with several agencies which complicates things.

Performance Marketing/Growth Agencies

A new category is the performance marketing or growth agency. These are agencies that obsess about one thing: measurable results tied to a business outcome. They typically don't care about winning a creative award; they want to get your customer acquisition cost down by 20%. They are methodical and treat marketing like an engineer treats product development. They are constantly running experiments, they kill what does not work and scale what works. They speak the language and fluency of metrics like ROAS (return of ad spend) LTV (life time value) and CAC (customer acquisition cost). These agencies can be very powerful collaborators if you are an e-commerce company or SaaS business, where every interaction from the customer can be tracked. If you are in an environment where the buyer journey is longer or complex or where brand perception is as important as direct response, then you want to make sure the agency understands and values those softer metrics too.

Boutique Agencies

There are also boutique agencies, which is an interesting category to consider. Typically these agencies represent smaller teams, sometimes a small handful of people, but that dynamic can also bring an entrepreneurial energy and often a better access to senior talent. When you are a client of a boutique agency, you are not getting handed off to junior team after the pitch, you work with the people who have been working in the space for several years. Cultures tend to be a little less bureaucratic and nimble. Capacity is where the downside exists. If they take on too many clients, you might get less-than-final work, or you might find yourself waiting longer for deliverables to be completed.

Local and Regional Agencies

While we live in a remote-first world, geography still matters. Local and regional agencies understand the market dynamics in ways that national agencies do not. A Denver agency understands Mountain West culture and demographics. A Miami agency understands some of the bicultural dynamics of South Florida. If your business has a specific regional focus, there is value in working with people who live in that market and know the rhythms of the market. Likewise, regional clients don't have to work harder than they should. On the other hand, if you are targeting a national audience or international audience, there may be benefits through the engagement of an agency with a national reach and experience.

The Uncomfortable Truths of Digital Advertising

Let's talk about a few things that agencies won't likely tell you as part of the sales process that you should know going in.

Truth #1: Not Everything Will Work

First, not all of your ads, campaigns or strategies are going to work. Some of them will work great. Some of them will work okay. A few of them will bomb. Agencies that represent their track record as perfect are simply not telling the truth. Digital advertising is part science, part art, and part tea leaf reading. The behavioral patterns of consumers are complex and sometimes contradictory. What performed well last quarter may not work well this quarter, even if the company is otherwise comparable, as the market may have changed, a competitor may have reacted, or the algorithm likelyyy changed. A good agency is not defined by all their work turning to gold, but by the speed in which they pick up on failures, and the speed in which they steward the learning to change course.

Truth #2: Waste Is Inevitable

Secondly, the digital advertising landscape is rife with waste. Certainly not all the waste is intentional, but it exists because the medium produces waste while you're trying to build a campaign. You'll pay for clicks from users who had no intent to purchase anything. You'll pay for impressions that were technically "viewable," but for which zero human processing occurred. You'll pay to create content that is produced but ultimately, for whatever reason, never reaches an audience or is read and engaged with enough. This isn't anyone's fault. It's just the cost of doing business in a medium where you are attempting to reach many millions of people who have a broad range of interests and intentions. Zero waste isn't the goal. Acceptable waste, relative to the wins you receive from the campaign, is the goal.

Truth #3: Platforms Are Not Neutral Partners

Third, the platforms are not neutral partners in your success. They care about money and making money is done through ad revenue—Facebook, Google, TikTok—they only do so when you spend money with them for ads. Sometimes your interests align with their interests; sometimes they diverge. They will change and update their algorithms for their own purposes. You're not in control of that. Your agency may lead you through the changes at the platforms and champion your endeavors, but they certainly won't change the platforms. A few years ago, Facebook's business decision to reduce the organic reach for the business pages drastically changed the landscape because now businesses had to pay for visibility that they formerly received for free. It wasn't your agency's fault. That's just how their business works. Knowing this consideration can help you direct your frustration appropriately.

Truth #4: Attribution Is Messy

Fourth, attribution is messier than anyone wants to admit. Meaning that trying to determine which marketing touchpoint was actually responsible for the customer purchasing something is more difficult and messy than you think it is. The standard attribution models either grant credit to the first view, which is the first exposure, or to the last click, which is the last interaction before conversion. But customer journeys are rarely linear. A potential customer might see one of your ads on Instagram but doesn't engage. Three days later they search for your company name on Google and read your article. A week later they open the email you sent along with your newsletter and click through, but don't purchase anything. Two weeks later they search a product category from the brands located on Google, click through an ad from you, and buy. Which customer touchpoint "caused" the purchase? To put it frankly: all of them. Your agency should be telling this convoluted story rather than simplifying the customer journey.

How Services are Evolving at Agencies: What's New and What's Next

The digital advertising landscape constantly evolves, and so too are the agencies that exist within it. Several trends are changing what agencies offer and how they deliver service.

Influencer and Creator Partnerships

Influencer and creator partnerships are no longer a side hustle for agencies, they have evolved to a bona fide discipline. Full-service agencies are hiring whole teams dedicated to researching relevant creators, negotiating partnerships, managing campaign efforts, and measuring impact of work performed. This is no longer simply paying a popular celebrity six figures for a series of native posts. It's building real relations with micro and mid-tier influencers that have truly engaged audiences in a niche category. For example, a sustainable fashion brand might work with twenty creators that all have an audience between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. Each of these creators would provide a steady stream of organic content that feels less like an advertisement and more like a recommendation from your friend.

Video Production Evolution

Video also continues to be extremely important, although the use of video is changing. It is not so much about delivering a flawless 30-second spot these days as it is about efficiently producing a flow of video content in a variety of formats for various platforms. In fact, many agencies are hiring videographers and editors who can produce everything from beautiful branded films to quick, lo-fi TikTok videos shot on an iPhone. The best agencies understand the distinct languages of video that each platform possesses, specifically, what works on YouTube does not work on Instagram Reels, which does not work on LinkedIn. It is no longer simply about video production. It is about video production with fluency to each platform's specific culture.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)

Conversion Rate Optimization has developed into another vertical specialization of its own. This is the refined practice of improving the percentage of website visitors who perform a desirable action. Perhaps you have terrific ads that are driving a lot of traffic to your site, but only 1% of your visitors are actually requesting a quote or making a transaction. A CRO specialist is one who will examine the behavior of users, discover pain points, and methodically run tests to improve that number. They may try different headlines, change the color of buttons or length of forms, switch up page layouts and other things in a process that is rigorous and based on data. For instance, if you were to successfully improve content that drove your conversion from 1% to 2%, you have effectively doubled the value of all your advertising you spent to that point with no additional spend on traffic. It is leveraged value.

Marketing Automation and CRM Integration

Marketing Automation and various integrations to CRM (like customer relationship management) systems are now an expectation. Agencies are not just producing campaigns. They are designing systems. They are establishing workflows to automatically place a lead who fills out a form on your website into a nurture sequence, tagged for their interests, and emailed over time. They are connecting your advertising platforms to your sales tools to provide the sales team insight into which marketing touchpoints each lead has interacted with. This level of integration requires technical skills beyond traditional marketing skills.

Business Model Consulting

Some agencies are venturing into product and business model consulting. After driving traffic to your website for several months and being able to see precisely how thousands of people interact with your business, they see insights beyond marketing. They will notice your pricing page has massive drop-off, not because of how the page is designed, but because your pricing structure itself is convoluted to potential customers. They may further notice that one service you rarely mention is driving organic search traffic with high-value leads, suggesting you might want to make that service more centrally featured in your business. Forward-thinking agencies engage in these bigger strategic conversations with their clients because the line between marketing effectiveness and business model effectiveness blurs more each year.

Making the Decision: How to Pick the Right Agency Partner

You decided you want an agency. Now for the hard part, choosing one. There are thousands of firms out there, all having shiny websites, enticing case studies, and a great sales pitch.

Start With Self-Clarity

Start with a level of clarity about your own reality. What are you trying to actually accomplish? Instead of a five-year plan to elevate your business to a higher echelon, what we need are specific, tactical and measurable goals that can be executed either in six months, or twelve months down the line. Maybe you need more qualified leads? More online sales? You need some brand awareness in a new market? A potential business line needs to be launched? All of these pointed to different types of agency. Be just as certain, clear, and transparent about your constraints: What is your real-life budget envelope? What internal resources do you have in place to support the agency in any way? How much of your time is yours to dedicate to this partnership?

Evaluate Their Work

When you are evaluating agencies or will be evaluating agencies at some point, think beyond the gloss and shine of the agency website. Ask to see real examples of their work and with some caveats, especially if they have worked with businesses like yours either in size or in industry or some other quantifiable quality. A boutique hotel wants to see hospitality and/or travel work, not another consumer tech startup. Expectations should include examples of work tied closely to their strategy, and the value add behind their status as the agency in partnership. In other words, the agency needs to demonstrate that they drove the results, not because they made an ad. Anyone can make a pretty ad. More to the point of further questions, did the ad achieve positive, profitable business outcomes?

Understand Their Process

Have an honest conversation about the agency's process. How will the agency approach the new client relationship? If applicable, what does the first 90 days of the relationship look like? How frequently will you and the agency meet after the initial relationship kicks off? What type of report will you receive from the agency and how often? If something is working, what happens? Again, you are looking for specifics, not mumbo jumbo. If they cannot clearly articulate their process, be sure that is not lost and is pretty concerning.

Meet the Team

On the topic of people, discuss what the structure of the agency looks like. Who is actually working on your account daily? Frustratingly, clients get pitched by a senior leadership team and they disappear after signing the contract. Having team members with less experience on the execution side is not a bad thing, but you want to know who they are, what their background is, and how senior oversight will happen. Ask if you can speak to the actual people who would be on your team.

Check References

Ask for references, and then call the references. Don't just accept the case study they put together. Speak to current and former clients. Ask the client about responsiveness, creativity, strategic thinking, and transparency. Ask what surprised them when they worked with the agency - what were the positives and negatives? Ask if they would hire again.

Assess Cultural Fit

Understand the cultural fit. You are going to be working with these people for a long time. Do they communicate in a way that you will feel comfortable? Are they good listeners? Do they seem genuinely curious about your business? Do they ask tough questions? Some agency-client relationships fail not because of capability, but because the working styles and values did not align.

Watch for Red Flags

Be suspicious of agencies that guarantee unrealistic results. If someone tells you that they can triple your revenue in three months or get you on the first page of Google in a few weeks, this should give you pause. The best agencies will be optimistic, but grounded in reality. They will frame what is possible while educating you on all of the variables, timelines, and risks at play.

Find the Right Fit

Finally, know that the right agency for you may not be the biggest or the most awarded. It is the agency whose capabilities make sense for your needs, whose experience is relevant to your situation, whose process makes you feel confident in their guidance, and whose people you can see being good stewards of your brand through success and failure. Sometimes, it is a prestigious national agency, other times, it might be a ten-person operation out of a converted warehouse downtown.

The Value Question: Is This Investment Worth It?

Let's address the elephant in the room. Digital advertising agencies are not cheap. Depending on the level of service involved, you may be looking at monthly retainers of a few thousand dollars for basic services all the way up to tens of thousands for full service programs. For a small business owner, that number can be legitimately terrifying. It is a very real amount of money that could be spent hiring another employee, upgrading equipment, or building a cash reserve. So is it worth it? Honestly, it's going to depend entirely on your particular situation, your goals, and the quality of the agency you've chosen.

When the Math Makes Sense

When there is a potential return on the investment, then it makes sense. If your business has good unit economics – that is, each new customer generates significant profit – then you are making a fundamentally sound marketing investment if it brings in new customer acquisition. For example, if you are running a law firm and each new client is worth several thousand dollars, spending $5,000 a month on marketing that brings in two new clients in a month is very good math. If you are running an e-commerce business with a healthy margin and repeat purchase rate, you are adding scalable revenue in customer acquisition.

When to Wait

It doesn't make as much sense when you don't have the fundamentals. customer service is a disaster, or your operations cannot keep up with the growth, marketing will only elevate those problems. The very best agencies are straightforward enough to actually tell you that. They will say, "Let's not run advertising to support this yet, let's fix your issues, or be very deliberate and laser focused with our approach until you're ready to scale." An agency that is willing to let their clients forgo revenue by delaying the timing, is the agency you will want to work with.

Understanding the Economics

Depending on what your lifetime customer value might be and your operational capacity, the math changes significantly. A software company with a subscription type model where the average lifetime customer stays for three years and generates $10,000 in revenue per month could spend $5,000 or more to acquire a new customer. A restaurant with slim margins and no recurring customers must deliberate very carefully about how much it can spend to just get someone through the door one time.

Build vs. Buy

Then there is the build versus buy calculation. Should you hire an internal marketing team instead of hiring an agency? Probably. You could hire a marketing director, you could hire a content type person, you can hire a paid media type person, you could hire a designer. For some businesses at a certain scale, yes, it makes a lot of sense to build out your own group. The benefit is you're getting dedicated resources that are part of the fabric of your company. However, now you are also managing those people, hiring and replacing, paying for benefits on a paying basis, and are still buying the software tools for your marketing team. For a lot of companies, especially small- to medium-sized companies, working with an agency provides access to more capabilities, more tools, and frankly less management burden.

Purchasing Capability

Think of that investment in an agency, not as an expense, but rather a purchase of capability. You are purchasing access to capabilities to compete within channels your business either had no means to compete in or for whatever reason did not. You are purchasing expertise, often times developed over years, to avoid re-building that. You are purchasing time. It takes time to build the capability you could have purchased through the agency, time that could be long months or years. It's not about whether it cost money. Everything costs money! At the end of the day, it goes back to whether the capability you purchased is providing a return equal to your investment.

When to (Properly) Cut Your Agency

Now, I will say that sometimes an agency engagement is simply not going to work. This due to handful of reasons, the fit is not good, the skills needed are not the right fit, the market context changes and you need other capabilities. Knowing when to cut the agency relationship and how to cut the agency relationship is just as important as knowing when to work with an agency.

Red Flags

Red flags we have seen that indicate time for change include when they consistently miss deadlines for projects, for which their was not a legitimate reason, they are unable to produce results over an extended period, lack of communication or strategy, turnover with your account team that limits continuity, or you have a fundamentally difference disagreement on the organization values or approach. Finally, if you don't find our agency meetings valuable and you dread meetings it tells you something.

Be a Good Partner First

Before terminating anyone, ensure you were a good partner. Were you clear about the expectations? Did you provide them feedback when things weren't working? Did you give them the information and resources they needed? At times, partnership issues are really communication issues, and a heartfelt conversation can produce a solution. Schedule a candid meeting. Explain what isn't working and ask the question, "what can change?" Give them the opportunity to remedy the deficiency. Some of the best agency partnerships go through a rough time and come out better.

Exit Professionally

If you have made the decision that the partnership is not overcomable, ensure you handle the exit professionally. If your contract allows, give them notice. Work with them on the knowledge transfer—this means getting access to all accounts, documentation, and work product. Pay them for outstanding invoices in a timely fashion. The marketing community is smaller than you think, and most likely your paths will cross again with these individuals. Exit gracefully.

Transition Wisely

During the transition to a new agency, be mindful not to malign the first agency. You can be factual regarding why you switched companies, without badmouthing the prior agency. Your new agency does not need to hear your detailed rant bulleting every grievance. As with any relationship, your new agency needs to hear how they can help meet your needs, what you learned, and what success looks like going forward.

Conclusion: The Strategic Partnership

The decision to partner with a digital advertising firm, for any American business, is a strategic decision. It signals a recognition that the skills needed to win in today's global marketplace are diverse, specialized, and changing at lightning speed. It is virtually impossible for one in-house team, at a singular business, to have a sustained depth of cutting-edge expertise in SEO, PPC, social media advertising, content creation, email automation, and data science all at once. Through the agency partnership, a business has immediate access to the full range of experts and the expensive tools they use to do their work—all for a known investment.

An agency partnership is a force multiplier. It allows the business to focus on its foundational passion, whether that is building amazing products, delivering services, or innovating its industry, while the agency focuses on the essential work on building an audience, leads, and sustainable growth.

The best agency relationship is a true partnership. The client arrives with incredible industry knowledge, unique vision, and institutional know-how. The agency supplies an outside perspective, marketing expertise, and a finger on the pulse of digital consumer behavior. Together, they provide a partnership that is greater than the sum of its parts—a partnership capable of tackling the challenges and opportunities faced in the American digital landscape—the bridge builder for business and the customers they serve.