Can Marketing Agencies Guarantee Results?

If you’ve built some product or honed your skill in delivering a certain service that customers can benefit from, and you’ve founded your company and started looking for a digital marketing agency to help you market your business and attract customers, along the way you’ll come across some agencies that offer promises to their clients and guarantee positive results and big returns on investment within a certain period of time.

So can digital marketing agencies really guarantee profits for the companies they work with? Or are there many factors to take into account when shaping the relationship between companies and marketing agencies? That’s what we’ll talk about in this article.

The short answer to that question is No. Any digital marketing agency with experience and standing won’t guarantee results, because it’s impossible to predict what will happen in the market. There are many variables in digital marketing that make it a fluid field whose results are hard to predict.

Any relationship between a company and a digital marketing agency built on the basis of guaranteeing profits will be an unstable relationship and will run into many problems — and together we’ll go through the details that make offering up-front guarantees a mistaken and unethical thing.

Why Is It Impossible for Marketing Agencies to Guarantee Results?

Agencies work to make companies’ marketing campaigns succeed with every bit of experience and market knowledge they have, but there are many factors outside their control. Among the reasons that make guaranteeing results impossible:

1: The Algorithms of Search Engines and Social Media

You can trust that a good marketing agency will apply best practices and dedicate its effort and time to making the marketing campaigns on social media platforms succeed and to setting up the website to be in the top positions in search results. But in the end, these platforms’ algorithms are the decisive factor in what the audience sees and how and when they see it.

Platforms like Google, Facebook, and others constantly update their algorithms to offer the best user experience and show results that align with the user’s activity on them. In other words, if two people search for the same topic, they may see different results depending on their geographic location, search history, and many other factors. That makes it difficult to predict the results these algorithms will produce — and, therefore, impossible to offer guarantees.

What can be done is choosing the right marketing agency that has the experience and knowledge in dealing with these platforms, and that will apply best practices and strategies to give the company the best chance of making its marketing campaigns succeed.

2: Competitors in the Market

Just as you strive to have your website’s pages at the top of search results, other companies are competing for a spot in those results too. Digital marketing is an open, competitive field that gives everyone a chance.

Even if a company held its spot on the first page of search results for a stretch of time, or had a strong presence on some social media platforms, competing companies can hire agencies specialized in search engine optimization (SEO) and social media marketing, and invest in marketing campaigns on these platforms that let them take the top positions and build a stronger presence and visibility than that company.

Marketing agencies can do everything in their power to optimize the company’s website for search engines and set up paid ad campaigns and more to try to restore the company’s position, but they can’t control the market or what competitors are doing.

3: The Company’s Goals May Not Align With Field Benchmarks

Every company has its own goals and situation. There isn’t a single set of goals and solutions on the market that fits every company in the same field  and draws a clear path of work for it. If a company operates this way and relies on the goals and solutions of other companies in the same field, it may find it isn’t achieving the progress it needs and the growth it aspires to.

For example: let’s suppose a marketing agency provided a guarantee to raise the open rate of marketing emails by 10%. What if the problem isn’t the open rate, but the conversion rate is what needs improving? The steps the agency needs to take to improve the conversion rate compared to those for lifting the open rate are entirely different — and this example is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are dozens, maybe hundreds, of goals a company can pursue. A good digital marketing agency will invest the time and effort to study the company’s current situation and identify the goals suited to each growth stage the company is going through — not offer up-front guarantees without knowing the company’s marketing needs and the challenges it faces.

4: Offering Guarantees Sets Illogical Expectations

True, a marketing agency’s experience and competence play a big role in making a company’s marketing campaigns succeed, but there are many other factors outside the agency’s control that also play a role. That’s why offering guarantees sets expectations the agency may not be able to meet, which makes the relationship between the company and the marketing agency prone to problems and instability.

The healthy relationship between a good marketing agency and the company is built on integrity and transparency, setting logical goals and expectations, and cooperating side by side to secure a productive working relationship.

5: Offering Guarantees Is an Unethical Act

A marketing agency doesn’t have absolute control over the channels and platforms on which it runs the marketing campaigns — so how could it guarantee the results?

An agency that offers positive promises just to secure the working relationship with clients — that can only be described as an unethical practice. The ethical thing to do in this case is to give the company a clear picture of the situation,  explain the options available, and offer everything the agency has of knowledge and experience to help the company’s marketing efforts succeed.

The Questions You Should Ask

When an entrepreneur running a company works with a marketing agency, they may ask questions of this sort:

• If I spend $10,000 on marketing campaigns, will that come back as sales equivalent to $30,000?
• If I increased the marketing emails sent to the mailing list by ten emails a month, would that double the number of customers?
• If I increased the company’s posts on social media platforms by ten posts a month, would the number of followers double?
• By how much do we need to increase the articles published on the site’s blog each week to grow site traffic by four thousand visits?

These and many other questions are built around Return On Investment. The entrepreneur wants to make sure their investment of time, effort, and hope will pay off in profits — and that’s logical from their point of view. But on the ground, these questions aren’t logical, because there are many variables that can’t be predicted and that fall outside the marketing agency’s control.

Instead of asking questions directly about return on investment, you should ask questions specifically about the agency, such as:

• What experience do you have working with companies in my field?
• Give me examples of previous successes you’ve achieved with other companies, and what your role was in them.
• In addition to the companies you currently work with, are there previous companies that can attest to your competence?
• What will you do to get to know my company’s current situation?
• For the fees I’ll pay you, tell me about the strategies you’ll apply to help my company achieve its goals.

The questions should be of this kind — their goal being to measure the agency’s experience, competence, and ability to achieve the set goals — and not questions about matters outside anyone’s control that no one can guarantee, such as return on investment.

Before turning to marketing agencies, ask yourself first:

• Is the quality of the products you sell satisfactory enough?
• Is the service you offer competitive with the other companies in the market?
• What is the level of customer satisfaction with the products or services they receive?
• Is the company you own built the right way, or is it unstable and there are many problems that need fixing?

Marketing is a tool for spreading brand awareness, attracting customers, and other goals — but the foundation and essence a company’s work rests on is the quality of the product or service the customer receives. Marketing isn’t a magic wand that solves every problem if the company isn’t at the required level, no matter how much experience and competence the agency has.

The wiser thing is dedicating the effort to refining the service delivered to the customer and preparing a good product to compete with products in the market, before turning to a marketing agency and wasting time and resources.

Choosing the Right Marketing Agency

Instead of looking for a marketing agency that gives you empty hopes and promises of instant results, here are a number of things an agency can guarantee and that you should look for:

• A collaborative, strategic working relationship built on trust and centered on achieving the company’s goals and helping it make decisions.
• An in-depth study of the company’s current situation, its goals, its target audience, the nature of its field, and the competition in the market.
• Transparency and clarity in dealing — a good marketing agency educates the entrepreneur about the process and keeps them in the picture of the company’s situation and how time and resources are being spent.
• Conducting tests, monitoring performance metrics, and suggesting ideas to make the best use of the available resources.
• The agency’s experience working with companies in the same field, and previous success stories with other companies.
• Evidence and trust testimonials from previous clients that attest to the marketing agency’s competence in its work and its dedication to achieving success for the company.

In Summary

What should you do if you come across a marketing agency promising you results and big returns on investment? Steer clear and keep looking. Choosing a marketing agency is an important decision that needs careful study, and you deserve an honest, straightforward agency that starts a healthy working relationship with you built on trust and transparency. There’s no investment in this world completely free of any risk — and if that were the reality, the field of digital marketing wouldn’t be so fiercely competitive.