Why Most Marketing Agencies Deliver Sweet FA (And How The Good Ones Actually Work)

If your marketing agency isn't delivering results, you're not alone. Most businesses that hire a marketing agency end up disappointed within six months. Not because marketing doesn't work — it does — but because the agency model is fundamentally broken in ways most clients never see until it's too late.

I run a marketing agency. I'm about to tell you exactly how the industry works, where your money actually goes and how to tell the difference between an agency that'll deliver and one that'll drain your budget while sending you pretty reports about impressions. This is the stuff agencies don't want you to know. I'm sharing it because honestly, the industry's reputation is in the toilet and someone needs to say it.

Here's how most agency retainers work in practice. You sign up for £2,000 a month. The agency promised you a senior strategist, dedicated account management, content creation, social media management and monthly reporting. Sounds reasonable. Here's what actually happens behind the scenes.

Your account gets assigned to the most junior person available. The senior strategist who sat in your pitch meeting? They're pitching the next client. They might review your account for twenty minutes before your quarterly call, but day to day, your marketing is being run by someone with eighteen months' experience who's juggling six other accounts simultaneously. The maths doesn't work any other way. If you're paying £2,000 a month and the agency needs margins of 60-70% to cover overheads and profit, that leaves roughly £600-800 of actual labour on your account. That's maybe two days of a junior's time. Per month.

This isn't speculation. This is how the vast majority of agencies operate. The ones charging £1,500-3,000 a month cannot afford to put senior people on your account full time. It's arithmetically impossible. So they don't. They put a graduate on it, give them a template strategy and hope you don't ask too many questions.

The really cynical agencies pad the retainer with "strategic oversight" and "account management" — which translates to a fifteen minute internal status check and a monthly call where someone reads your own analytics back to you. You're paying for the meeting about the meeting about your marketing.

Most agencies have between three and five template strategies they rotate depending on your industry. If you're a B2B company, you get the LinkedIn content calendar plus Google Ads plus "thought leadership" blog posts template. If you're B2C, you get the Instagram-heavy social template with some Facebook Ads thrown in. If you're local, you get the Google Business Profile optimisation plus local SEO template.

These templates aren't necessarily bad. The problem is they're not tailored to your business, your competitors, your market position or your actual commercial objectives. They're the marketing equivalent of a GP prescribing paracetamol for everything. Sometimes it works. Often it doesn't address the actual problem.

You can spot a template strategy easily. Ask your agency why they chose the specific channels they're using. Ask them what your top three competitors are doing differently. Ask them why they're posting three times a week instead of five, or why they chose those particular ad audiences. If the answers sound generic — "best practice suggests" or "our experience shows" without specific reference to your market — you've got a template.

A proper strategy starts with understanding your business model, your margins, your sales cycle, where your current leads come from and what actually converts. It should reference specific competitors by name. It should explain why certain channels will work for you specifically, not just why they work in general. If your agency can't tell you your customer acquisition cost by channel after three months, they're not running a strategy. They're running a schedule.

This is the big one. The thing that keeps agencies alive when they should have been fired months ago. Vanity metrics.

Impressions. Reach. Followers. Engagement rate. Website sessions. These all sound brilliant in a monthly report. Your social posts reached 50,000 people last month. Your website had 3,000 visitors. Your Instagram following grew by 200. Marvellous. How many of those turned into actual enquiries? How many became customers? What revenue did your marketing investment generate?

If your agency can't answer those questions clearly and specifically, they're hiding behind metrics that make them look busy without proving they're effective. It's the marketing equivalent of a builder telling you they've been really busy on your house extension but you can't see any new walls.

The metrics that actually matter are leads generated, cost per lead by channel, conversion rate from lead to customer and revenue attributed to marketing activity. Everything else is context, not evidence. A good agency leads with commercial metrics and uses vanity metrics to explain trends. A bad agency leads with vanity metrics and hopes you don't notice the absence of commercial ones.

Here's a real example. We had a client approach us who'd been paying an agency £3,500 a month for eighteen months. The monthly reports were beautiful. Lovely graphs showing increasing social followers, growing website traffic, impressive reach numbers. When we asked how many leads their marketing generated, the client didn't know. The agency had never tracked it. Eighteen months and £63,000 later, they couldn't demonstrate a single lead from their work. That's not an outlier. That's common.

Twelve month contracts with three month notice periods. They're standard across the industry. Agencies will tell you it's because "SEO takes time" or "strategy needs runway" or "consistency is key." All of which contain a grain of truth wrapped in a thick layer of self-interest.

Yes, SEO takes time. Paid advertising needs optimisation. Content marketing builds momentum. None of that requires a twelve month lock-in. What it requires is good work that delivers progressive results you can see and measure. If an agency is delivering genuine results, you won't want to leave. They don't need a contract to keep you — the results keep you.

Long contracts exist to protect agencies from accountability. They guarantee revenue regardless of performance. The worst agencies know that most clients won't actually go through the hassle of terminating a contract, especially when the agency can point to those lovely vanity metrics as evidence they're "doing work."

We work on rolling monthly agreements. Three months is reasonable as a minimum commitment to give a strategy time to gain traction. But after that, if we're not delivering, you should absolutely leave. The fact that we have to earn your business every single month keeps us honest. It also means we don't take on clients we don't think we can help — there's no incentive to sign someone up if we know we can't deliver, because they'll just leave.

You meet the agency. The founder or a senior director presents to you. They're knowledgeable, impressive, they understand your business. You sign up. Then you never see that person again.

Your day to day contact becomes an account manager who wasn't in the pitch meeting, doesn't know your industry and is essentially a project manager relaying messages between you and the production team. The strategic thinking that sold you? It walked out the door the moment you signed the contract.

This is the agency bait and switch and it's so common that most clients expect it. But it doesn't have to work this way. At a well-run agency, the person who understands your strategy should be involved in your account. Not necessarily doing every task — that's what a team is for — but reviewing work, setting direction, available when strategic questions come up.

Ask during the pitch: who will actually work on my account? Can I meet them? What's their experience? How many other accounts do they manage? If the agency is evasive about this, they're planning the vanishing act.

This one makes my blood boil. Agencies that run your advertising through their own ad accounts. Agencies that build your website on their hosting without giving you admin access. Agencies that create social accounts connected to their business manager. Agencies that won't share raw analytics data, only their filtered reports.

All of this means that if you leave, you lose everything. Your ad history, your pixel data, your audience insights, your website, sometimes even access to your own social media accounts. You're starting from scratch. And the agency knows this. It's the ultimate lock-in — not a contract, but a practical inability to leave without significant pain.

Your ad accounts should be yours. Your website should be on your hosting or at minimum you should have full admin access. Your analytics should be connected to your own Google account. Your social media accounts should be owned by you with the agency having managed access. Any agency that structures things differently is either incompetent or deliberately creating dependency. Neither is acceptable.

After all that, you'd be forgiven for thinking the whole industry is a con. It's not. There are agencies that do genuinely brilliant work. The difference is in how they're structured and how they think about client relationships.

Good agencies start with diagnosis, not prescription. Before they propose a strategy, they need to understand your business properly. Not a thirty minute discovery call — a proper deep-dive into your numbers, your market, your competitors, your sales process. If an agency proposes a strategy in the first meeting, they're selling you a template.

Good agencies are transparent about who does the work. You know the team. You can talk to them. The strategist is involved, not just the account manager. There's genuine expertise being applied to your account, not just task execution.

Good agencies obsess over commercial metrics. They set up proper tracking from day one. They report on leads, cost per acquisition and revenue contribution — not just reach and impressions. They want to know whether their work is generating money because that's how they prove their value and keep your business.

Good agencies own their mistakes. Something didn't work? They tell you, explain why and what they're changing. They don't bury underperformance in a sixty-page report full of charts. Honest communication — even when the news is bad — is the hallmark of an agency that's in it for the long term.

Good agencies make it easy to leave. Not because they want you to, but because they're confident enough in their work that they don't need a twelve month contract as insurance. They earn your business every month through results, not paperwork.

If you're currently working with an agency and some of this sounds painfully familiar, here's what to do about it. Don't panic and don't fire them tomorrow — but do start asking better questions.

Ask for a meeting specifically about commercial results. Not impressions, not reach — leads and revenue. If they can't provide this data, ask why not and what needs to change. If they get defensive, that tells you everything.

Check who owns your ad accounts, your website, your analytics. If the agency owns any of these, request a transfer. If they resist, that's your answer about their intentions.

Request access to raw data, not just their reports. Google Analytics, Search Console, ad platform dashboards. You should be able to see everything they see. Any resistance to this is a red flag the size of a cricket pitch.

Review your contract. What's the notice period? What happens to your assets if you leave? What deliverables are they actually contractually obliged to provide? Most clients never read their agency contract properly. You should.

And if you're shopping for a new agency, use this as your evaluation framework. The agencies that welcome these questions are the ones worth hiring. The ones that get uncomfortable are telling you something important.

If you want to compare agencies side by side and see how they stack up on the things that actually matter, Compare.Agency ranks UK marketing agencies by results, not fees. It's independent, no pay-to-play and worth a look before you sign anything.

Or if you just want a straight conversation about what's working and what isn't in your current marketing, book a call with us. No pitch deck. No pressure. Just an honest assessment from someone who'd rather tell you the truth than sell you a retainer.