How to choose a marketing agency that brings you clients

The biggest mistake I see in companies is a founder who watches a podcast, or finishes a free three-hour Google course, and decides marketing is understood. If that were true, I could throw my 25 years of experience in the bin. Seeing an ad does not tell you why it works, or the chain of decisions that produced it. Doctors know the feeling. For years they told patients to stop searching Google for their symptoms. Now people arrive having talked to AI first, because it is easier than talking to the doctor. I still learn every day, but I learn on top of a foundation. If you do not have that foundation, bring in people who do, in the same way you hire a finance director rather than running the accounts yourself, and rent an office rather than building one.

Twenty years ago I might have said 80% of marketing was art. Today I would say 95% is science: statistics, psychology, applied psychology, economics and mathematics. The best marketers in the world studied psychology or mathematics. Most of them did not study marketing, and most did not study business. I apply this to myself. Before September I took 200 videos made by people working in my space, downloaded every one and analysed them: how each video worked, how each channel worked, which topics worked, and what the audience responded to and replied to. All of it happened in spreadsheets. My videos now get ten times the views they used to. That did not come from talent, and it did not come from luck. It came from the data.

Talk is cheap. Delivery is what's expensive.

Many marketing agencies were started by one person who spent a year or two in marketing, saw some ads and decided it would be easy. Others sell the gift of the gab. So if you hired an agency, it charmed you with fine words and nothing changed, it is not your fault. You were focused on your own business. Most of the clients we work with today came to us after exactly that experience. Be wary of any pitch built around a viral video. I have viral videos that meant nothing for the business. Going viral is closer to the lottery than to a strategy, because the algorithm decides. A consultancy does not exist to go viral. It exists to win clients. Judge an agency on the meetings, leads and opportunities it brings you. Likes on LinkedIn and followers on TikTok are a pleasant feeling and little more. For the first eight of our ten years we did not run a single ad, and every client came from a recommendation.

Five years ago, I would say 60 to 70% of the results we brought our clients came from social media. Today it is no more than 20%, and sometimes 10 or 15. We still use those channels for clients, but in a completely different way. Facebook's goal has always been to keep you in the app, because every minute you stay is a minute it can sell to advertisers. Five years ago a company video took two or three weeks to make, and high quality set you apart. Now the same video takes hours, so everyone makes them, much of the feed is AI content and quality no longer stands out. On social media people respond to what is different, and to what is real. No AI can imitate my broken Arabic. For more on how I rethought my own content, see why I stopped posting content.

Start with your goal. Unless your business is being an influencer, fame on its own does not matter. You want to be known by the people who might buy from you, and for a legal adviser that is a small group. If you run a company, the answer is almost always more clients. Then look at where your existing clients came from. If they came from people you know, contact everyone in your phone and tell them what you do. If they came from ads, run ads. If they came from email, send email. Choose the channel from evidence, and be wary of anyone who promises the first page of Google the easy way. When you meet an agency, the basic question is not who they have worked with. It is how they got their results. If the answer is a viral video and some content, that is patter. If they tell you they studied the data, ran six tests, kept the ones that worked and scaled them up, you are talking to someone who understands. We use AI in the same way, as a tool to find what works, which we cover in our episode on AI for small businesses. Ask the same question of us: here is how our outsourced marketing department gets its results, and here is the marketing retainer cost, stated openly.

Most marketing does not fail because you did not spend enough money. It fails because the first decision was wrong. Before you hire anyone, find out what your core problem actually is. Even if you never hire an agency, that is enough to ask the right questions inside your company, or of the agency you already work with.