Consumer packaged goods brands in the ‘50s had it easy. Hire an ad agency to shoot a 30-second commercial (complete with a catchy jingle). Spend millions to run the ad on the three major television networks. Then, watch the dollars come rolling in.
Fast forward seventy years and marketing has gone digital. The old plays are dead, and an ad agency isn’t enough.
Today you need a website agency, and a PPC agency, and a content agency, and a TikTok agency and… or do you?
Instead of focusing on just one piece of the marketing puzzle, growth agencies use data to evaluate the entire sales funnel and identify the best opportunities for profitable growth.
If you’re thinking about hiring a growth agency, this post will lay out the exact steps to take to ensure that you find the right partner for your unique business.
When you hire a growth agency, you get to work with an entire growth team, including marketing strategists, copywriters, designers, developers, videographers, and more.
The best growth agency is a partner whose primary goal is to help your company grow. They are experts in growth, having helped many business owners like you scale their businesses profitably.
Depending on your business and customers, your outsourced growth agency will implement tactics like SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, Google PPC advertising, and website optimization.
To determine the right tactics for your business, you need to look to your customers: where do they hang out online? Where do they go for answers or solutions? What is their buying process?
The key is to meet your customers where they are.
A high-quality growth agency will evaluate and improve all aspects of your digital and traditional marketing. They’ll make strategic recommendations for what to cut, what to do more of, what new tactics to test, and how to achieve your ambitious growth targets.
Choosing a growth agency should not be a decision you take lightly. Typically these engagements represent a significant investment of time, capital, and energy. If you’re not ready to be an active partner in growth, then it’s probably not the right time.
The best growth partner will take the time to develop a deep understanding of your business: what industry are you in? Who is your ideal customer? What specific problem do you solve for them? How does your product or service work?
This understanding isn’t something any growth agency can build instantly. It will require multiple conversations with experts at your company to get it right. However, skipping over this step is almost guaranteed to result in disappointing results and inadequate growth.
Developing a “growth mindset” is an essential first step in achieving success. Without the right mindset in place, any agency engagement will be rocky.
First, you must set realistic expectations. Growth doesn’t happen overnight.
Sustainable growth is built in layers: first, you lay a strong foundation by building an awesome product that users love. Second, you build on top of that a sales experience that guides prospects to make the right decision for them. Prospects should be excited to have the opportunity to buy from you. Next, you layer on a marketing engine that attracts your ideal customer and then educates and inspires them to take action.
Skipping steps and throwing up a hail mary is just gambling on growth, which is a recipe for disaster.
Adopting a growth mindset also means focusing on the right growth metrics, not vanity metrics. Thousands of website visitors who never become customers or hundreds of “likes” on a LinkedIn post without any clicks to the next step don’t drive business results.
Instead, identify and track the metrics that matter for your business. We recommend focusing on the six levers of growth. These levers are awareness, acquisition, activation, revenue, retention, and referral. You should track one or two metrics at each stage of the customer journey to ensure that you are achieving sustainable growth.
It’s essential to understand the conversion rates at each stage. How many people are aware of your brand? How many of those become leads? How many of those leads ascend to customers? What is the churn rate of those customers? How many of your existing customers refer you to their colleagues?
Tracking and optimizing the right metrics gives you a map to follow to achieve growth, rather than wandering around and hoping for results.
The best growth agency will make it easy for you to determine whether they are the best fit for you. Some of the main green flags to look for include
Many agencies, while good-intentioned, don't necessarily have systems, processes, and people in place to achieve outsized results.
The reality is that it's quite easy to throw up a website and claim to be a growth agency. And with thousands of potential vendors, it's important to do a thorough evaluation and make sure to choose a partner that’s going to be reliable and effective.
Some common red flags to watch out for include
If you don’t know where you’re starting, how can you know where you’re going? Establishing your growth baselines is the first step of a successful growth marketing engagement. Review the last six or twelve months of data in your analytics system to determine
Use your baseline growth rate to project where you can expect to be in six, twelve, and twenty-four months. Ideally, partnering with an outsourced growth team will help you accelerate growth, which would mean you can hit your goals sooner. However, it’s important not to set unrealistic expectations. If you’ve been generating five sales-qualified leads each month, no growth agency will be able to instantly move that to fifty.
Define your minimum success criteria for the engagement. How will you know if the agency you work with is on track to help you hit your goals?
What are you looking for in a growth agency? How will you know that the provider you meet with is the right fit for your business? How can you objectively compare different agencies?
One simple solution is to score each candidate based on a pre-set list of criteria.
Gather leadership from sales, marketing, ops, and product to decide what are the 3-5 most important qualities to look for in a growth agency. Then, after meeting with providers, give them a quick grade on each of the criteria. Use the composite scores to rank the alternatives and guide your decision-making.
Some criteria to consider include
It’s typically best to start your growth agency search by going broad, and then narrow down from there. The goal here is to generate a list of five to twenty potential service providers to consider.
Not every agency that can help with growth will call itself a “growth agency”. Broaden your search to include growth marketing agencies, growth consultants, demand generation agencies, and lead generation agencies.
You can certainly use Google to start your search, but don’t stop there. Lean on your network to add to your list.
Ask your LinkedIn connections for recommendations. Call up colleagues and friends. Write a post in industry groups or forums like the Exit Five Community asking members for recommendations.
Step 5: Narrow Down your List
Now it’s time to cut down your list. No one has time to meet with fifty service providers for thirty minutes each.
Visit each company’s website and social media pages. Read through their site pages and blogs. Visit sites like G2, Capterra, or HubSpot to read 3rd party reviews. Watch their case study videos.
For some providers, it will become apparent that they are not a good fit. Maybe they only work with smaller companies than yours. Or their reviews are mostly negative. Or their values clearly don’t align with yours. Remove these from your list.
Use your selection criteria to rank your list. Decide which growth agencies on your list to meet with. Most agencies have a call-to-action on their website to schedule a meeting, contact us, or request a quote. For example, ours looks like this.
Reach out or schedule some time to chat.
Prepare for your meetings by generating a list of questions to ask the reps. What do you need to understand to make an informed decision? Some good ideas for questions to ask a growth agency include
Get together as a team to compare scores and notes. Discuss which providers seem like they’d be a good fit. Remember that nobody is going to be perfect, and at some point, you’re going to have to make a decision and go for it.
Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis. If you’ve followed these steps and narrowed your list down to two or three candidates, then there’s probably not a wrong answer. Just pick the one you feel best about and move forward.
We’ve been a growth agency for quite a while… over ten years at the time of writing! And in that time, we’ve met a lot of other agencies. Some of them are awesome, and we confidently refer them when we’re not the right fit.
Unfortunately, many others are less reliable. Some are unproven, some just aren’t as effective as they claim, and some are straight-up dishonest. And it’s not always easy to tell which is which.
That’s why we want to help jump-start your search for a growth agency by reviewing a few of our favorites.
Tuff Growth is a growth marketing agency focused on data-driven growth for teams of all sizes. They believe that “growth is a process, not an outcome” (we couldn’t agree more!).
“Tuff is a true growth agency. They are highly skilled in all aspects of performance marketing and specifically what it takes to win at Facebook Ads… we saw immediate results growing our revenue by 50% MoM!”
Kurve is a London-based growth agency focused on scaling tech scaleups and corporations. They do both consultation and done-for-you marketing services.
“Oren and the team at Kurve were vital in providing a digital strategy that got us excellent results within our budget and within impressive timeframes. His experience and insight were matched by his enthusiasm and dedication to helping us grow, as he consistently went above and beyond to provide valuable support.”
Lean Labs is an outsourced growth team for Tech and SaaS startups and scaleups. We drive growth for our clients with data-driven, full-funnel growth strategies. Our growth team has driven over $100 million in net new revenue for clients.
“I am normally skeptical of marketing agencies but Lean Labs is a team of solid individuals that have become an extension of our internal team. I have recommended them to friends already because they deliver on what they say they will and have provided amazing results for us. Solid team that understands inbound marketing, delivers solid content, and designs webpages that convert.”
You are now equipped with the process and tools you need to go out and find the right growth agency for your unique business. By following the steps laid out in this article, you can avoid the most common mistakes that companies make when hiring a 3rd party vendor.
At the end of the day, only you can know which of the thousands of agencies is the right growth partner for your unique business.
We recommend looking for a growth agency that is an expert in your industry and type of business. Generalists can be great, but a specialist will have the context and expertise to make a big impact.
And no matter who you choose, make sure that you’re not just writing a check for growth. True sustainable growth cannot be completely outsourced. You must take an active role, as the leader and subject matter expert, to set your growth partner up for success.
That’s why we actually consider ourselves a “hybrid” growth team. We fill strategic, technical, and creative gaps in our clients’ growth teams to work with them to accelerate growth. And because all of our marketers are experts, you’re guaranteed to work directly with the marketer that’s actually doing the work, with no phone tag through project managers.
To see how our hybrid growth team operates, visit our solutions page. And if you're ready to scale your growth and impact by profitably acquiring customers, schedule a Growth Mapping Session with one of our Growth Consultants.
If you want to see exactly what we’d do if we were your growth team, check out our top resource, the Growth Playbook. This free training will show you how to plan for growth, budget for growth, and accelerate results.