Thinking About Hiring a Marketing Agency? Here's What to Consider

Hiring an agency of any kind is a major decision for marketing leaders. Besides the (often large and long) investment, there’s usually a time-intensive onboarding process before the work ever begins. Which makes choosing the wrong agency a tough pill to swallow—and can lead to a difficult conversation with your CEO.

But the right agency partnership can help you expand your capabilities and scale your marketing strategy beyond what any individual marketer could handle alone.

In our debut episode of This Meeting Could've Been a Podcast, Vector's CEO Josh and I share our own agency hiring journey—from initial skepticism, to strategy and execution, to the results that made it worthwhile.

What you'll learn:

• When to bring in an agency (and when to keep things in-house)
• How to convince founders that agencies aren't just "doing your job for you"
• Real warning signs of a bad agency partnership
• Practical frameworks for measuring agency success
• Why AI isn't replacing agency work (but is changing how it's done)

Top three takeaways

Takeaway 1: To get buy-in, hire an agency to scale, not outsource

The marketing leader’s dilemma: you're accountable for results, but you can't personally execute everything that needs to happen. Our job is to orchestrate and scale. And for certain things, that means hiring an agency.

But some CEOs see agencies as a redundancy. “If we hire them, what will you do?” And that’s typically because they view agencies as an outsourced cost center, rather than a strategic partner in scaling and driving revenue.

If you think you might run up against this misconception, come prepared with two scenarios:

1. A plan for IF the agency comes aboard that clearly illustrates what both parties will be responsible for and the estimated business impact. 
2. A plan WITHOUT the agency in tow and the estimated business impact.

Translate the trade-offs of forgoing this agency in terms of pipeline and revenue.

Takeaway 2: Great agencies compound your vision, bad ones “know better”

I’ve worked with both incredible agencies and terrible ones, and the difference is rarely about capabilities. It's almost always about how well they listen.

Part of the agency onboarding process is to deliver as much pertinent information about the company, product, brand, and target audience as possible. Bad agencies won’t dig into the input deep enough (either out of sheer laziness or pure ego), and their lack of understanding is usually reflected in the work. Whether it’s ad creative, technical writing, or anything in between, the final deliverables feel superficial and lack a point of view.
‍

The best agencies listen intently to your strategy and positioning, then push you to execute it more boldly than you might on your own. This is most important when marketing leaders start to get cold feet about an idea or execution that initially excited them. It’s the agency’s job to foster trust and empower the marketing team to stay the course.

When you find an agency that truly understands your vision and levels up your execution, you've struck gold. This delicate balance of respect and creative tension produces work neither of you could have created independently.

Takeaway 3: Measure agency impact through metrics and proof points

So you’ve found a great agency. They’re delivering amazing work. How do you prove that it’s actually delivering results? 

Traditional metrics matter, of course. In our work with organic content agency, ércule, we track search rankings, qualified traffic, and conversion metrics. But we've added a crucial layer: tangible examples that even non-marketers can immediately grasp.

We call them "board-ready proof points”—visual or experienced examples of progress that often resonate more with executives than spreadsheets of data.

Here’s an example: just two weeks after working with ércule to publish an article titled “What is Contact-Based Marketing?” on Vector’s website, the article powered both Google’s and Perplexity’s AI-generated answers to the same question.

"Founders are coin-operated and often dumb in these particular areas," Josh admits. "Can you measure the direct results of that? No. But will a founder get so excited to go to the board and say, 'Look, if you type in Vector into OpenAI, it doesn't think we're an Australian manufacturing company anymore!' Absolutely." (True story, btw.)

When you balance quantitative metrics with these qualitative proof points, you create a compelling narrative about agency impact that satisfies both marketing's need for detailed measurement and leadership's desire for clear, tangible results.

Catch the full episode (and subscribe to This Meeting Could’ve Been a Podcast!) on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform.