There is no such thing as a “good” marketing agency

Article author: Damian  Article translation: Block unicorn

Recently, I had dinner with a friend in a small town in Hungary to talk about marketing in the cryptocurrency space. It was hard not to discuss crypto with others when you are in the same industry. After all, my family and old friends don’t understand this space, and I am sure many people reading this article will feel the same.

This friend told me about a painful experience he had with a crypto-native marketing agency (I won’t name them here). I was both amused and sympathetic to his concerns because he is not a marketer after all. I felt sorry for the time and money his team wasted. So, I reminded him: "Look, I told you not to hire a marketing agency because there is no such thing as a ‘good’ marketing agency."

I went on to explain to him that it is completely wrong to expect a marketing agency to proactively do the work for you. They won’t brand you, understand the nuances of your project, or push the creative envelope because their attention is split between multiple clients.

It’s a harsh reality that as a startup you’ll likely be prioritized less than a big-name client who may be more valuable to a marketing agency, and not just because of their existing retainer fees. Logos and influence on a website are a universal currency, especially in the cryptocurrency space. Retaining the most “valuable” clients is one of the most important things a marketing agency can do to keep their business running.

So, are marketing agencies really useless? Actually not. Most people I know who work on marketing agency teams are doing 8-10 hour full-time jobs every day, working on multiple clients. The value their clients receive stems from the fact that the client already knows or is aware of the narrative they want to exploit or the image they want to project. Marketing agencies should only be used when a larger short to medium-term output is needed to produce content or help run a planned campaign.

McDonalds Marketing Problem

Marketing agencies are a tool, a means to an end, not an X-factor that will magically make your marketing great through their own initiative. Don’t get me wrong; marketing agencies often advertise their expertise in branding and technical concepts, giving small projects the impression that the marketing agency will help them find their footing. Also don’t be fooled by another logo x logo collaboration on a marketing agency’s webpage, because you know they may have only been working with that big-name partner for a month before terminating the agreement.

A truly great crypto “marketer” needs to understand their company’s product stack better than the developers do. Yet, these marketing agency employees, at current salary levels, have little incentive to do more work beyond the 8-hour shifts they’ve already completed.

Imagine if you were paid the same as a McDonalds manager, but you had to learn about concepts like oracles, databases, ZK, MEV, AI, lending, staking, re-staking, etc. Would you take that job?

As far as the structure of a marketing organization is concerned, you probably have senior managers who are decent or even excellent at their jobs, but never have significant face-to-face interactions with clients. Good senior managers are busy delegating work to their teams and developing strategies based on client feedback. Some managers have to manage up to 7 or 8 accounts at once. Bad managers are on calls all day long… frankly, 8 hours a day, as far as I know? It’s a given.

On the other hand, junior employees who are paid a pittance but are truly eager to learn more about the domain and contribute value to clients never get the chance to do so. These serious juniors are ready to do the groundwork to learn the ins and outs of the project and build a proper narrative, but they are held back by mid-level managers who are more focused on quantity than quality. If every client demands a top-down marketing campaign, marketing agencies will be forced to make business decisions and sacrifice the prioritization of the company's time. This doesn't mean the marketing agency model is completely broken; it's that managers are not equipped to manage client expectations.

It's understandable that senior management doesn't want to lose business or get into arguments with clients, but in the long run, managers need to be more honest and say "no" more often for the benefit of the marketing agency and the clients themselves. It's also the responsibility of the project to understand that these agencies will never be able to fill the role of a good in-house marketer.

Think about the great marketers who have been in the field through their own determination to learn, engage, and make connections, and have been given opportunities as a result. You can see them in projects as community managers (@thisisfin_), heads of growth (@0xMista), heads of marketing (@lou3ee), or heads of narrative (@kramnotmark). The reason they are more successful than marketing agencies is that they are deeply embedded in the field.

My take on marketing is that you are either deeply embedded in the field or you are not. If not, you will have a hard time finding any creative juices flowing because after all, you may not understand or even communicate with your audience. This is a big problem because, you know, market research and “marketing” go hand in hand.

Marketing Extractable Value

If you are a project that is considering hiring marketing help, just hire a marketer. Your first hire of a good marketer is like promoting the first general of a new division in your army. They will be responsible for leading their division; whether it is hiring more marketers or a marketing agency is entirely up to them.

If you hire a marketing agency, they need to have a strong plan in place. The head of marketing needs to be at a stage where they can effectively hand off memos to the agency to execute in the best interest of your project.

Let’s say your head of marketing needs to publish four blog posts per month. If the head of marketing provides all the necessary resources, then a marketing agency can help them write half or even all of it. If the head of marketing can implement a good strategy, effectively delegate work to any supporting parties in the marketing department, and achieve results that help the business expand, then they are an excellent marketing hire. If the marketing agency can do the work required, they are a good agency. The key is that the effectiveness of the marketing agency is complementary to the success of the project, provided that their clients are "good".

For example, if the project that hired the agency is inherently boring or has not found product-market fit, then no marketing agency can save it. If a project has a lot of interesting things to say but doesn't know how to express it, a marketing agency can't solve this problem either. But if you are a project that knows exactly what it needs to be successful and only needs executors, then a marketing agency will be very good at this, provided that you can manage them like you manage an in-house team, that is, regular updates, guidance, and check-ins. Therefore, as a rule of thumb, it is best not to make an agency your first hire.

I guarantee you that marketing agencies that promise to operate at four times the performance level of an in-house hire are talking bullshit, and to be honest, that kind of self-promotion is itself poor marketing. Instead, the added value is much simpler (and boring), i.e. if you need an extra pair of hands to get the job done and have connections, they might be right for you. That’s why hiring in-house is better: you have the opportunity to teach or give the hire time to proactively learn, at which point they have little reason not to excel in the business they’re in.

Poor Communication

In general, agencies and projects have a problem that corresponds to each other: they’re all bad at communication, and it’s hilarious. Agencies that make it their job to communicate effectively oversell their services, leading to inflated expectations. Projects take that misleading information and raise their expectations, while not actively managing their external teams. It’s generally a lose-lose situation. There are no winners, and there are no “good” marketing agencies. You need to proactively ensure your own win as a project, whether you’re working with an agency or not. Ultimately, you are the only hero on your own journey.