There's a scene that repeats in almost every SME that hires a marketing agency. The first two months there's excitement. Then frustration kicks in. 'The posts don't represent the brand.' 'The leads coming in are useless.' 'We spent 3,000 dollars on ads and I don't know what happened.' And the conclusion is always the same: 'The agency doesn't work.' Sometimes that's true. But most of the time, the problem is something else.
The problem is that nobody directs the agency. Nobody gives them a clear brief with concrete objectives. Nobody reviews the assets before they're published. Nobody cross-references campaign results with what's actually happening in the business. The agency operates alone, with the information it has — which is almost always too little — and does what it can. Which isn't what you need.
The real cost isn't just the monthly fee. It's what you lose from everything that goes wrong without anyone detecting it in time. Posts that don't communicate what your business needs to communicate. Ad budget spent on audiences that don't buy. Campaigns launched without a landing page, without follow-up, without anyone knowing if the leads were contacted or left to rot in an inbox.
Do the math. If you're paying 2,000 dollars in agency fees, 3,000 in ad spend, and you have nobody directing that investment, you're putting 5,000 dollars a month into a car with no driver. It might go fast, but it's not going where you need it to. In 6 months that's 30,000 dollars. How much of that converted into real customers? If you can't answer that question, that's exactly the problem.
The agency isn't the enemy. The agency is a tool. A really good hammer is still useless if nobody knows where to nail. What you need between your business and the agency is a director: someone who translates your commercial objectives into clear briefs, who reviews before publishing, who demands reports that make sense, and who makes decisions based on what the numbers say.
An external director fulfills exactly that function. They don't replace the agency — they make it perform. They sit with them, give them context, set priorities, request adjustments, and make sure every dollar invested has a clear purpose. It's the difference between paying for marketing and paying for results.
If you've already switched two or three agencies and the result is always similar, the pattern is clear: what's missing isn't a better agency. What's missing is someone to direct. Next time you think about switching agencies, first ask yourself whether the problem is that nobody is telling them what to do.