There is a sentence in almost every marketing proposal I have ever read, including ones we have sent. It is never in bold. It usually reads something like results are dependent on client cooperation, or subject to timely provision of assets and feedback.
Nobody reads that line. I would not read it either.
Then month four arrives, the numbers are not what anyone hoped, and that sentence turns out to have been the most load-bearing thing in the document. Because every promise an agency makes you has a condition attached to it, and the condition is you. Ask any decent agency what results you should expect and a careful one will answer in the same shape: here is the likely outcome if you do your part.
And then nobody, on either side of the table, ever writes down what your part is.
I want to write it down. Not to hand owners a list of homework, and not to give agencies an excuse, because most of the time when this goes wrong the agency should have asked and did not. But because the single biggest predictor of whether paid marketing works for a business is not which agency they picked. It is what the owner keeps sending after the contract is signed.
There Is a Condition Buried in Every Pitch You Have Heard
Think about what you are actually buying when you hire someone to run your marketing.
You are not buying customers. You are buying execution on top of things only you have: what a customer is worth to you, what you sell, whether people want it, who the good ones turn out to be, and what happens after somebody puts their hand up. Every one of those stays in your building. None of them can be bought in.
So the work behaves like a multiplier rather than an addition. Good execution on strong inputs is a very good business. Good execution on missing inputs is an expensive way to find out your inputs were missing.
This is not the same as whether you are ready to advertise at all. That is a separate question with its own answer, and I have written about the preconditions elsewhere. This is the question after that one. You have started, you are paying someone, and the thing that decides how it goes is the stuff that has to keep flowing from you every month.
There are six of them. In rough order of how much damage it does to withhold each one.
What a Customer Is Actually Worth to You
The first is a number, and most owners will not say it out loud.
Whoever runs your campaigns is optimizing toward a target. They have to be. Every platform makes you choose what to buy and what you are willing to pay for it. If you have not told them what a customer is worth to you, that target does not stop existing. It just gets guessed at, or worse, it gets set to whatever makes the report look best.
That is how you end up with a campaign that produces a great cost per lead and no money. Nobody was lying. Nobody had the number that would have made the goal correct.
The number is not revenue. It is what is left from a sale after the cost of delivering it, multiplied by how many times an average customer buys before they stop. Most owners have never worked out the second half of that, which is fine, but the version in your head is almost always too low, because it counts the first sale and forgets the rest.
Say it out loud even if it is embarrassing. Especially if it is embarrassing. An agency that knows you have forty dollars of room will build you something entirely different from one that assumes you have four hundred, and the difference is not effort, it is which campaigns are even worth running. If you want the long version of how that number gets built, it is in what your first ad budget is really buying.
Which of Those Leads Turned Into Money
This is the one almost nobody sends, and it is the one I would fight hardest for.
Modern ad platforms do not really let a person target your best customer. They learn who your best customer is from what you feed back. Send them nothing, and they optimize toward the only signal available, which is the form fill. Form fills are easy to get. There is an infinite supply of people who will fill in a form and never answer the phone.
So the account gets better and better at producing something you do not want, and it does it enthusiastically, and every report looks like progress.
The fix is unglamorous. Somebody on your side needs to look at the leads that came in and mark which ones turned into actual work, then send that back. Not a spreadsheet with forty columns. A list of who was real. Monthly is enough. Weekly is better if the volume is low, because at low volume every single one carries a lot of weight.
I have sat in reviews where an owner said the leads were rubbish, and they were right, and the reason they were right was that for nine months nobody had told the account which ones were rubbish. It was doing exactly what it had been taught.
There is a version of this failure that goes much further. One agency I heard describe their worst client had taken a business to several million in revenue at a strong return, watched it decline month after month, and could not get an answer out of the owner about anything happening inside the business, because the owner had stopped looking. They had handed over marketing and quietly assumed that meant handing over the outcome.
Somebody Still Has to Make the Thing
Here is the failure mode that ends more engagements than bad strategy ever has.
The agency writes the scripts, or the angles, or the shot list. Everyone agrees on the call. The owner needs to film four short videos, or send twenty photos of finished work, or write three sentences about the new service. Then two weeks go past, and the ads still running are the ones from launch, and performance is sliding because every audience gets tired of the same thing eventually.
Then the message arrives: results are down, what are you doing about it.
I do not say that with any contempt, because the reason is always the same and it is always true. You were busy. You run the business. Filming yourself talking to a phone is nobody's favorite Tuesday. But there is no version of this where the creative gets made without you, and there is no amount of media buying that compensates for having nothing new to run. Creative is not the decoration on the campaign. On most platforms now it is the campaign.
If you know you will not do it, say so at the start rather than at month four. That is a real constraint and it is a solvable one. It costs money to solve, and the honest conversation is about which of those two you would rather spend.
One Person Who Can Say Yes, and Say It This Week
Marketing dies of committee more often than it dies of incompetence.
The pattern is easy to spot from the outside. Four people from your side on every call, none of whom can approve anything. Copy that goes off for review and comes back eleven days later with three contradictory sets of comments. A landing page waiting on a decision nobody has been given the authority to make.
Meanwhile the money is still going out of the door every day, into whatever was live before the queue formed.
You need one person who can look at an ad and say yes. Not a person who has to check, a person who can decide. If that is you, then it is you, and you have to make room for it in a way that survives a busy week. If it is not you, say who it is on day one and then let them decide without relitigating it afterwards.
The same applies to plain honesty about the constraints. If your budget is really eighteen hundred a month and you have said three thousand to see what comes back, everything built for you is built wrong. If you are talking to two other agencies, say so. Nobody is offended by that. What causes damage is the version where the information arrives three months late.
Trust Is Not the Same as Not Looking
Now the opposite failure, because it is just as common and it is more expensive.
Ask any media buyer about their worst accounts and a version of this comes up: the owner who cannot leave it alone. They go in at the weekend and pause the test campaign because two days of data looked bad. They launch their own ad set alongside the agency's, without saying, to see who wins. They change the budget on Friday and change it back on Monday.
Every one of those is an understandable impulse. It is your money and watching it leave is uncomfortable. But an account with two people steering is not being optimized by either of them, and a test that gets killed on day two never produced the answer you were paying for. You cannot buy a learning and then refuse to sit through it.
The distinction worth holding is between checking and interfering. Checking is asking what a number means and what happens next. It is entirely reasonable and you should do more of it, not less. There are genuine tells that separate people doing real work from people producing activity, and they are worth knowing, which is why I wrote a whole piece on how to tell if the people running your ads are any good.
Interfering is reaching into the account and moving something because you got nervous on a Sunday. If you find yourself doing that, the real problem is upstream: either you do not trust them, in which case fix that properly rather than by sabotage, or nobody has explained what you are looking at, which is their failure and you should say so.
The Part No Amount of Traffic Fixes
Everything so far has been about inputs you can send. This last one you cannot send, because it is not information. It is the business itself.
Whoever you hire is an acquisition specialist. They can put the right person in front of you, at a cost you can afford, in useful numbers. What they cannot do is anything that happens after that person arrives.
They cannot make people buy twice. If nine out of ten of your customers never come back, that is not an advertising problem and no campaign will paper over it, and the moment you stop paying, the revenue stops with it. They cannot fix a four-day dispatch time, or a phone nobody answers after five, or a quote that takes a week to go out. They cannot make an offer compelling if it is genuinely no better than the one down the road.
Advertising raises the volume on whatever you already have. That is a wonderful property when the thing is good and a brutal one when it is not, and it charges you per unit either way.
This is the part where I would rather lose the work than take it, because a business that fixes one of those things gets a permanently better result from every dollar it will ever spend, and a business that does not is renting its revenue.
What You Are Owed in Return
I have spent this whole article describing what you should be handing over, so let me be straight about the other side of it.
If you have never been asked for any of this, that is not your failure. It is ours. An agency that did not ask what a customer is worth to you, did not set up a way to get lead quality back, did not tell you what creative it needed and by when, and did not name a single decision-maker on either side, has skipped the part of the job that makes the rest of it work. Then when results are thin it reaches for the client cooperation line in the contract. I have watched that happen and it is indefensible.
So the trade is specific, and you should hold the other end of it hard.
Ask what good, bad and likely look like as numbers before you sign, and get the answer in writing rather than in a slide. Ask what work will actually be performed each month, because you can check that long before results are readable, and if the work is not happening you already know how the results end. Ask for reporting that arrives without you chasing it, in language you can follow. If you cannot understand the report, it is not a good report.
And be careful about paying a long way ahead of delivery. A retainer paid at the start of the month for work that has not happened yet quietly removes the only incentive that matters.
Everything in the list above is reasonable to ask of us. Everything in the list before it is reasonable to ask of you. The relationships that work are the ones where both halves are written down early, while everyone is still optimistic, rather than reconstructed from memory in a difficult meeting in month five.
What to Send Them This Week
If you already have someone running your marketing and you want to change the trajectory of it, there are three things worth sending before Friday.
The gross profit on a typical sale, and your honest guess at how many times a customer buys. Even a rough version beats the silence.
A list of every lead from last month, marked for which ones turned into work. If that is thirty rows in a spreadsheet, it is still the most valuable thirty rows they will get this quarter.
And the name of the one person who can approve things, with a realistic answer about how fast that person can turn something around.
None of that takes an afternoon. It is the difference between paying someone to guess and paying someone to work.
The best agency in the country pointed at inputs it never received produces a very efficient version of not much. That is worth knowing before month four, whether the person running your ads works somewhere like us, works for you, or is you.
