When to Fire Your Marketing Agency? 4 Warning Signs
Most business owners in Poland wait too long to decide to end a cooperation with an agency, hoping for a sudden breakthrough. The truth is brutal: if after three months the only effect is colorful charts in a PDF, and not new orders, that breakthrough will never come.
Reports full of empty numbers instead of real inquiries
In March 2024, we analyzed the situation of Mr. Robert, who runs a window manufacturing company near Poznań. For eight months, he paid an agency 4,800 zlotys net per month to run campaigns. Every report showed impressive growth: post reach up by 145%, 300 new page likes, and thousands of ad impressions. The problem was that during that whole time, only 4 inquiries flowed in from the website form, two of which were mistakes. The agency explained this as building an image, but for a production company, a specific installation order matters, not virtual thumbs up.
If your agency focuses on so-called vanity metrics, it's a sign they don't understand your business. A plan on paper must translate into profit in the bank. A real analyst won't just show you how many people saw the ad but will tell you exactly that the 2,350 zlotys spent on Google Ads brought 14 calls from customers ready for measurement. At Strategies and Visions PL, we check the numbers before we propose anything because we know you can't pay electric bills or factory floor salaries with reach alone.
Pay attention to whether the agency asks you about sales at all. If their only goal is to deliver Facebook posts three times a week, they are treating your marketing like an administrative duty, not an investment. In 2023, we saw 34 cases where changing the approach from 'pretty pictures' to a concrete sales strategy allowed reducing customer acquisition costs by an average of 38% in just 11 weeks from starting new actions.
Marketing that only looks pretty is the most expensive hobby a business owner can afford.
Lack of contact and fluff in response to difficult questions
Another alarm signal is response time and communication quality. The standard in our industry should be responding to ongoing matters within a few hours. Meanwhile, many entrepreneurs complain that they wait 12 working days for a simple site change, and the account manager is constantly 'in a meeting'. At Strategies and Visions PL, the average response time to an inquiry is 2h 14min, because we respect the time of people who risk their own money. If you feel you have to beg for the attention of an agency to which you transfer several thousand zlotys every month, the hierarchy of importance is upside down.
Listen carefully to how the agency explains shortfalls in results. If you hear phrases about Google algorithms that changed again, or that 'the season is now difficult for everyone', and you don't see suggestions for campaign changes, you are dealing with avoidance of responsibility. A solid marketing firm, seeing a worse week in the ad panel, comes to you with an idea: 'We see the cost per click grew by 1.20 PLN, so we're changing the graphic and testing a different audience group'. Concrete tasks, not empty promises – that is what you should demand.
Remember that the agency is your external marketing department, not a distant planet. In October 2024, we conducted an audit for a construction wholesaler in Warsaw. It turned out the agency hadn't noticed for three months that the contact form on the site wasn't sending emails. They lost about 56 potential orders with a total value over 200,000 zlotys in this way. No one looked there, no one tested the customer path, yet the invoice for 'service' always arrived punctually on the first day of the month.
Not knowing your margin and company operating costs
It's impossible to do good marketing without looking into the client's Excel tables. If your agency doesn't know how much you earn on one sold product and how much you can maximally pay to acquire a new customer, they are shooting in the dark. We count every zloty from marketing, which is why we always start with the question about numbers. If an agency proposes a 10,000 zloty campaign without asking whether, with your 15% margin, that has any chance of paying off, they are playing with your capital without any risk on their part.
A good example was the cooperation with Ms. Anna's catering company in February 2024. The previous agency boasted that the cost per click for an ad was only 40 cents. It sounded great until we calculated that for one person to order a box diet, as many as 450 people had to click. The real cost of customer acquisition was 180 zlotys, with a margin on the first order of about 60 zlotys. The company was losing 120 zlotys on every customer, which the agency 'forgot' to mention in its joyful reports. Only analysis of dry facts allowed stopping this cash leak.
An agency that deserves your trust should be your business partner. It must understand that if you sell services for 2,000 zlotys, you can't spend 1,500 zlotys on marketing, because after paying taxes, social security, and fuel, you'll be left with nothing. At Strategies and Visions PL, we base our work on hard data from 134 projects we have completed so far. We know marketing must add up in a spreadsheet, otherwise it's simply a redundant cost that needs to be cut as soon as possible.
Marketing without knowing the margin is a straight road to bankruptcy, even with high turnovers.
Lack of initiative and waiting for your instructions
You hire an agency because they are supposed to be the experts. If you have to call every week and tell them what to put on the site or what promotion to mention in ads, what exactly are you paying them for? The agency should come to you with a plan for the next quarter. In our work, we apply the principle: we check numbers before we propose anything. If we see a market trend or a drop in the effectiveness of current actions, we react immediately. The client is not there to watch over the graphic designer or copywriter.
In June 2024, we took over the service of an online interior decoration store. The owner was tired of having to personally monitor the deadlines of all seasonal campaigns. The agency woke up two days after the sale started. After implementing our work system, where the schedule is ready 3 weeks in advance, the time the owner had to dedicate to marketing fell from 10 hours a week to just 45 minutes of monthly results control. This is real time saving that you can use for offer development or rest.
Check when your agency last came out with an idea that surprised you or opened a new way to reach customers. If they've been doing the same thing for a year, with the same methods, even though the world and your competition are moving forward, it means they've rested on their laurels. The advertising industry changes every month. We at Strategies and Visions PL test new solutions on small budgets before we propose them to the client as a permanent part of the strategy. Thanks to this, our clients are always one step ahead of those using the services of 'professional teams' working according to 2018 patterns.
