An owner comes to me and says: "we've engaged an agency to build us a plan." I ask, a plan for what? He says: "who we sell to, how we price, where we expand."
That is not a marketing plan. That is a business plan. And the difference between them is the difference between letting someone execute for you and letting someone decide in your place.
What does an agency actually do?
An agency's job is to take a decision you have made and translate it into execution: channels, messages, content, campaigns, and numbers to measure by. That is real work, it needs expertise, and not everyone does it well.
But they cannot determine for you: what to charge and what your margin is, how much you can afford to spend acquiring a customer, when to refuse unprofitable work, and whether your next expansion should be a new product or a new market.
Those decisions require knowing your numbers from the inside: true unit cost, fixed expenses, cash position, and production capacity. You are the only one who sees all of that.
Why does the order matter?
When an agency picks the market and the price, it picks what is easiest for it to market, not what is most profitable for you. That is logical, because it is judged on campaign performance, not on your year-end accounts.
The outcome I see often: campaigns bringing plenty of customers, but customers who buy the cheapest product, exhaust the team, and never return. The advertising succeeded and the business lost.
There is a second, more dangerous outcome: building a reputation in a segment you did not want. A year later you find yourself known to a type of customer that is hard to move away from, because the content, the pricing and the image were all built for them.
The minimum you need before signing
- Which customer makes you money. Not all customers, the segment that genuinely performs, described by name and characteristics rather than in generic terms.
- The margin on the product or service. Without it, no advertising number means anything.
- The maximum you can afford to acquire a customer. That figure is what judges whether a campaign succeeded.
- The goal for the coming period. More volume, higher profitability, or entering a new market? Those are three different plans.
- Your delivery capacity. How many new customers a month can you serve without quality dropping?
Those five points need neither a consultant nor a month of work. They need a serious session with your own numbers and the last six months of accounts.
How do you produce those numbers yourself?
Start with a simple table: every product or service, last year's revenue, its direct cost, and the time it takes from your team. You will usually find that one or two things produce most of the profit, while others eat time and return crumbs.
Then run the same exercise on customers: who are the top five by profit? What do they have in common? Where did they come from? Those answers are the foundation of any real marketing plan.
The exercise takes two days and changes every decision afterwards.
Can someone help me with this?
Of course, but that is a different role: a consultant or partner who works on the business itself, sits with your numbers, and is not paid to execute the campaigns they propose. Conflict of interest is the thing to watch here.
If the same party sets the strategy and is paid to deliver it, the recommendation will lean towards what they sell, not necessarily out of bad faith, but that is what happens.
When the big decision is clear, the agency works much better, because now they know who they are reaching, what to say, and why.
A business plan is not a huge document
When I say business plan, I do not mean a hundred-page file. I mean written answers to six questions: who we sell to, what problem we solve for them, how we differ, why we price the way we do, how we reach them, and how we will know we succeeded.
Those six answers fit on two pages and get reviewed every six months. Companies that have those two pages take decisions faster and waste less money.
And if you feel the answers are not clear, that is not a weakness, that is exactly the work to do before spending on marketing.
What does an agency help with in planning?
Let me be fair: there is a large part of planning an agency does better than you. Channel selection, the shape of the message, splitting budget across campaigns, and performance forecasting based on market data.
The dividing line is simple: decisions whose result shows up in your bank account over the long term are yours. Decisions whose result shows up in campaign performance are theirs.
The brief you should hand the agency
Instead of asking them for a plan, hand them one page with: the target customer, the product you most want to sell, its price and margin, the maximum acceptable acquisition cost, what you have tried before and what happened, and the capacity you can serve.
That page turns the meeting from a generic pitch into a real discussion, and lets you compare proposals on the same basis.
It also exposes quickly which agency understands and which works from templates: the one that reads the brief comes back with questions about your numbers; the one that does not comes back with a content calendar.
An example that repeats every month
A small furniture company engaged an agency for sales campaigns. The agency chose to focus on the cheapest products because they were easier to advertise, and the result was plenty of orders with almost no margin, and a delivery team overwhelmed.
When we reviewed the numbers, it turned out seventy percent of the company's profit came from higher-priced pieces sold after a showroom visit. The campaign was running efficiently towards the wrong goal.
The mistake was not the agency's, they delivered what was asked. The mistake was that nobody told them the goal was profit, not order count.
Signs you handed over decisions you should not have
- When you ask why we target this segment and the answer is "the agency said so."
- When you learn your new price from an ad that went live without you agreeing the logic behind it.
- When you discover you are selling an unprofitable product because "it gets engagement."
- When you can no longer answer the question: why does a customer buy from me?
And if you are right at the beginning?
If you have not started selling yet, do not engage an agency at all. Your first ten customers should come from you, because they are not just revenue, they are the source of the information everything else will be built on.
From those ten you learn: why they bought, which objection recurred, what convinced them, and what price they did not resist. That is the raw material any agency will need, and nobody can produce it for you.
Then, when you do contract, you are buying execution of something you have tested, not buying an experiment.
In short
An agency is an excellent execution tool once a clear direction reaches it. Let it choose your direction and you will pay money to learn that the market you entered was never your market.
Spend two days with your numbers, settle the four or five points above, and then go to the agency. The meeting will be completely different, and so will the result.
This is part of a series on choosing a marketing agency, which also covers the questions to ask before signing, and how to judge the quality of the work you receive.