Hiring a Marketing Agency: The Cost of Choosing the Wrong One

When assessing your company’s marketing agency costs, you must consider more than just your budget. Successful digital marketing results from a long-term partnership between your company and the right marketing agency. When you find a perfect fit, the potential for growth and increased online presence is virtually limitless. 

But what about when it doesn’t work out? Trying to stay with an agency that doesn’t share your vision can stunt your company’s growth and make it harder for people to find you online. 

Our digital marketing experts at Big Leap are passionate about each client’s success, so we understand the importance of trusting the right agency. We also know that making the ideal connection can be a long, arduous journey.

So, we asked the agency hoppers themselves. Using surveys and Connectively (formerly Help A Reporter Out or HARO), we’ve gathered insights and discovered the four most painful digital marketing agency costs associated with hiring the wrong partner. 

And now, we’re sharing those insights with you.

1. Time

46.7% of professionals said the most significant cost of hiring the wrong agency is time. 

Of all respondents, 26.7% have used three different marketing agencies. For every individual and business alike, time is the most precious resource—when you discover you’ve hired the wrong agency, you suffer the cost of lost time two-fold. It isn’t just time wasted with the wrong agency; it’s also the time spent to start from scratch in search of the right option.

“Whenever we change our agency, the hassle and the stress of handing over documents and ongoing projects is really time-consuming and, of course, tiring. It is also disappointing that we could not get the result that we wanted right away, but it’s okay because there’s no instant way to success.”—Connor Brown, After School Finance

We never take the value of our clients’ time for granted. Our team focuses on helping companies for which we know we can be the most effective.

2. Results

When the company and marketing agency work well together, a direct connection between time and results is evident. Long-term trust is the best foundation for incredible results that support the success of businesses across various industries. Take these results from our clients as examples.

The trend doesn’t guarantee every agency’s long-term results, but it shows just one example of what the right agency can do.

What Do Long-Term Results Look Like?

We’re glad you asked! According to our survey, respondents said it takes time to see results that positively impact the bottom line:

• 60% said it takes 1–3 months
• 33.3% said it takes 4–6 months
• 6.7% said it takes 7–9 months

Results might take longer for enterprise, multi-location, and franchise companies because of the customization for local SEO presence and high competition. Here’s how we look at a general timeline for results when your digital marketing team properly applies SEO principles.

• 1–3 months: With technical SEO and keyword optimization, Google indexes your site, comparing it to others that have been around longer. You’re on the map now, working toward the next steps in the marketing journey.
• 3–6 months: Google recognizes your site and starts rewarding your new high-quality, accurate, and relevant content with ranking improvements.
• 6–12 months: After establishing several months of quality content on your site, you should see an increase in traffic and domain authority, which proves relevance, and you see more significant results that impact your bottom line.
• 12+ months: Competitive keywords take 2–3 years to reach top search results. It takes continuing maintenance and effort to dominate results and compete with other companies.

You can see that time has a direct link to results. The wrong partner can set that calendar of success back by months or even years.

3. Cost

6.7% of our respondents stated that the financial burden is the most significant pain point of agency hopping. The impact on your marketing budget hits hard in four primary ways:

1. Finding New Agencies: Time, money, research, and resources that all add up.
2. Onboarding Costs: Learning each new agency’s process, sharing tools and resources, and negotiating contracts all incur added expenses.
3. Exit Costs: Breach of contract, cancellations, and unrecoverable expenses impact costs.
4. Performance & Strategy Costs: Revenue losses due to poor performance and starting from scratch will all take a toll.

As difficult and expensive as it is to make the switch, it’s better to power through the struggle to find the right marketing team. As Kathleen Ahmmed points out, choosing the appropriate agency is worthwhile, even when the marketing agency cost increases when making a change.

“It took us almost 10 months and tens of thousands of dollars spent on research and review, before we were finally able to find an agency that fit our standards, both strategically, culturally, and financially over the long term.

However, we also saw this as a worthwhile investment, because ultimately, taking the time to offer a number of agencies the chance to prove their commitment is what saved us the trouble of having to waste even more time and resources trying to find a new agency again.” Kathleen Ahmmed, USCarJunker

4. Morale

More goes into connecting with your digital marketing team than money and time. The human cost can also be a blow to company morale. 

Our research shows pressure on employees to build relationships, and when those relationships are under stress, your team may experience mental and emotional fatigue. If your team is suffering, there’s a good chance it will also impact your bottom line.

Sherry Morgan shared how an agency’s lack of transparency struck at the heart of her team’s morale.

“When they [an agency] started working for us, everything went smoothly during the onboarding and planning stages but red flags started to appear when our marketing campaigns started.

The agency was not that transparent when it came to their processes and also wouldn’t share access to tools in tracking our marketing metrics. We were basically kept in the dark, and the projects they launched did not really improve our online presence.

At this time, the morale of the internal team was significantly affected because we weren’t sure what we were doing wrong. Not to mention, we already paid a non-refundable retainer to the agency so we thought that switching agencies might just be a waste of money.“ Sherry Morgan, Petsolino

Get It Right the First Time with Big Leap

Finding the best marketing agency that meets your cost constraints and company needs can take time and effort, but experience suggests that the challenging journey to get there is worth it when you find the right partner. 

Want to learn more? Read the full article, Finding the Right Client-Agency Fit.

We love being part of our clients’ success, so we’re selective in the businesses we choose to work with. We believe every company deserves the absolute best efforts for their marketing dollars. 

Although we can’t protect you from the tough journey of agency-hopping, we can at least do our part when you come to us. That means we only invest our time and resources into companies to whom we can bring the greatest value and serve as an excellent partner.

Either we believe we’re a great fit for your company and can help you reach your long-term goals, or we won’t waste your time. Our goal is to help your team find the success you deserve.

Want to get an idea of what it’s like to partner with Big Leap? Great—we can’t wait! 

Get in touch today!