How to Choose the Right Marketing Agency: Comparing Proposals

Short answer: To choose the right marketing agency from two or three proposals, rewrite each one into the same format: who does the work, how many hours, which deliverables, which KPIs, what it costs and how you exit. Score them against weighted criteria you set before reading. Then verify the winner with references, a look at real accounts and the contract terms before you sign.

This guide is for the final stage of hiring an agency. You have already found candidates, had the first calls and now have two or three proposals on the table. They look different, they are priced differently and each agency sounds confident. The question is no longer "which agencies are good?" but "which of these specific offers is right for us?"

We cover how to put proposals side by side, how to build a simple scorecard, how to read price properly, what to check before signing and how to break a tie. If you are earlier in the process, start with how to choose a marketing agency for the fit criteria, or our list of questions to ask a digital marketing agency for the first calls.

How do you compare marketing agency proposals side by side?

Rewrite every proposal into the same structure, line by line, before you judge any of them. Agencies use different words for the same thing and the same word for different things, so a direct comparison of the original documents rarely works.

Open a spreadsheet with one column per agency and these rows:

• People: who exactly works on your account, their role and their seniority. Names, not job titles.
• Hours or capacity: how much time per month the fee buys, and how much of it is senior time.
• Deliverables: what you physically get each month. Campaigns built, pages written, tests run, reports delivered.
• KPIs: which numbers they commit to report on and which ones they expect to move. Revenue, qualified leads and cost per acquisition count for more than impressions or clicks.
• Price: setup fees, monthly fee, tool costs, media spend handling and anything billed extra.
• Exit terms: minimum term, notice period and what happens to accounts, data and creative when you leave.

If a proposal does not answer one of these rows, write "missing" and ask. A gap is information. Agencies that leave hours and people vague usually do so because the answer would not compare well.

Why reading the documents side by side misleads you

Each proposal is built to make its own strengths easy to see and its weak spots easy to miss. One agency leads with a team photo, another with a growth chart, a third with a long list of services. Your attention follows the layout, so you end up comparing presentation styles instead of offers.

Normalising removes that effect. Once every offer sits in the same six rows, you are comparing facts with facts, and the differences that matter (fewer senior hours, a longer lock-in, KPIs that never touch revenue) stand out on their own.

How to normalise proposals in practice

1. Extract. Go through each proposal once and copy every concrete fact into its row. Leave out adjectives such as "strategic", "dedicated" or "data-driven". If a sentence contains no fact, it does not go in the sheet.
2. Mark the gaps. Any row without a concrete answer gets "missing". Most proposals have two or three.
3. Ask once, in writing. Send each agency a single email listing its missing rows and give everyone the same deadline. A written answer is easier to compare and harder to soften later.
4. Update and freeze. Fill in the answers, then stop editing the sheet before you start scoring.

Good output is a one-page sheet where every cell is something you could check after signing: a name, a number of hours, a list of deliverables, a metric, a euro amount, a notice period. If a cell could appear in any agency's brochure, it is not finished yet.

What should a marketing agency scorecard include?

A good scorecard has five to seven criteria, each with a weight you set before reading the proposals, and a clear description of what a top score looks like. Weighting first stops a polished presentation from quietly setting the rules.

Here is the scorecard we would use as a growing brand comparing agencies. Adjust the weights to your situation. If tracking is already solid in your business, move weight from measurement to channel depth.

Criterion	Weight	What a 5 out of 5 looks like
Diagnosis of your problem	25%	They name your real bottleneck, using your numbers, and explain why their plan addresses it first.
People and senior attention	20%	Named senior people do the work, with a realistic number of other accounts.
Measurement plan	15%	They explain how results will be tracked and attributed, and what they would fix in your setup before spending more.
Relevant proof	15%	Examples from a similar business model and budget, with context on what they did and what changed.
Commercial clarity	15%	Every euro is explained, nothing is bundled, and you can see what is included and excluded.
Terms and ownership	10%	Short notice period, no lock-in beyond a sensible first term, and full ownership of accounts and assets on your side.

Score each agency from 1 to 5 on every row, multiply by the weight and add up. Ask a colleague to score independently, then compare. Where your scores differ by two points or more, you have found the thing you still need to clarify.

Why the weights must come before the reading

Once you have seen a confident pitch, it is hard not to adjust the criteria in its favour. A beautiful deck makes "creativity" feel important. A low fee makes "value" feel important. Setting weights first commits you to what your business actually needs, before any agency has had a chance to shape that view.

How to set your own weights

• Start from your bottleneck. If you do not know why growth has stalled, diagnosis deserves the biggest weight. If you know exactly what needs doing, shift weight to people and delivery.
• Keep it to six or fewer rows. With ten criteria, each one carries so little weight that the total stops telling you anything.
• Avoid equal weights. Giving everything the same weight is the same as not deciding what matters.
• Write down what a 1 and a 5 look like. Without that, two people can give the same proposal very different scores for the same reason.

To see how the arithmetic works, here is Agency B from the example below: diagnosis 5 × 25% = 1.25, people 4 × 20% = 0.8, measurement 4 × 15% = 0.6, proof 3 × 15% = 0.45, commercial clarity 4 × 15% = 0.6, terms 4 × 10% = 0.4. The total is 4.1 out of 5. The number itself is less important than the rows where the agencies differ most, because those are the rows that decide the outcome.

How can you tell if a proposal was written for you?

A tailored proposal uses your data, names your specific constraint and makes choices. A template proposal lists every service the agency sells and would read the same with another company's logo on the cover.

Signs the agency actually thought about your business:

• They refer to numbers you shared, such as your average order value, lead volume or current cost per acquisition, and draw a conclusion from them.
• They prioritise. A good proposal says what happens in month one, what waits until month three, and what they would not spend money on yet.
• They point out a risk or a weakness in your current setup, even if it makes the sale harder.
• The scope matches your budget. Proposing six channels on a budget that can fund one properly is a sign they are selling breadth, not results.

A useful test: cover the agency's name and read the first page. If you could not tell who it was written for, it was not written for you.

Why tailoring predicts how the work will go

A proposal is the one piece of work an agency produces when it is trying hardest to win you. If it is generic at that point, the monthly work is unlikely to be more specific once the contract is signed. The effort that went into understanding your numbers is a preview of the attention your account will get.

How to test it with one follow-up question

Ask each agency: "If our budget were half of what we discussed, what would you keep and what would you drop?" A tailored proposal has a clear answer, because the agency already knows which part of its plan does the heavy lifting. A template proposal produces a pause, then a smaller version of everything.

A common mistake is to confuse length with tailoring. A 40-page proposal can still be generic, with a few pages of your logo and data in front of a standard service catalogue. A short proposal that makes three clear choices about your business is usually worth more.

A performance marketing agency that shows its working.

Our proposals name the people, the hours, the deliverables and the exit terms on one page. If we think a channel is the wrong place for your money right now, we say so in writing.

See how our performance marketing agency works

Is the cheapest marketing agency proposal ever the right choice?

Sometimes, but only when it buys the same senior time and the same scope as the more expensive options. Most price gaps between proposals come from differences in who does the work and how much of it, not from one agency being more efficient.

Three ways to compare price fairly:

Cost per senior hour

Divide the monthly fee by the senior hours you will actually get. A lower fee that buys a few hours of a junior account manager can cost more per useful hour than a higher fee with an experienced specialist doing the work.

A simple example with round numbers. Agency A charges €3,000 a month for 10 hours of senior time and 20 hours of junior support. Agency B charges €4,500 a month for 25 hours of senior time. A looks cheaper, but its cost per senior hour is €300, while B's is €180. If the senior hours are where the thinking happens, B is the better deal.

Total cost, not the headline fee

Add setup fees, tool licences, creative production, and any percentage of media spend. A fee based on a share of ad spend rises as you scale, which can turn the cheapest offer into the most expensive one within a year.

For example, a fee of 15% of ad spend adds €1,500 a month on a €10,000 budget. If the plan works and spend grows to €30,000, the same agency now costs €4,500 a month for broadly the same amount of work. Ask each agency what its fee would be at your current spend and at two or three times that level, and put all three figures in your sheet.

Cost of a wrong choice

Include the cost of switching. A long minimum term with a weak agency means months of fees plus lost time before you can correct course. A slightly higher fee with a short notice period is often the lower-risk option.

Work out your worst case for each proposal. A 12-month minimum at €3,000 a month means you commit €36,000 before you can leave. A 3-month initial term at €4,500 means €13,500. If the agency turns out to be the wrong choice, the higher monthly fee is the one that costs you less.

What should you verify before signing with a marketing agency?

Verify the people, the proof, the ownership and the exit. These are the four areas where what a proposal says and what a contract delivers most often differ.

• The named people are in the contract The people from the proposal are written into the agreement, with a commitment to tell you before anyone is replaced.
• You spoke to a reference you picked Ask for a client list and choose one yourself, ideally a former client. Curated references only show you the best case.
• You saw real work, not only slides A screen share of a live account, report or content plan (with client details hidden) tells you more than any case study page.
• You own every account and asset Ad accounts, analytics, tag manager, pixels, creative and content sit under your company, with the agency added as a user.
• The KPIs and reporting cadence are written down The contract or statement of work names the metrics, the baseline and how often you will review them together.
• The exit is clear and affordable You know the minimum term, the notice period and the handover process, and you can live with the worst case.

How to run a reference call that tells you something

Reference calls often stay polite and general. Make them useful by asking about specific moments rather than overall satisfaction:

• "What happened the first time results dipped, and how did they tell you?"
• "Are the people who pitched you still the people doing the work?"
• "What did they push back on, and were they right?"
• "If you hired an agency again tomorrow, would it be them? Why or why not?"

Listen for hesitation and for praise that stays vague. A client who is genuinely happy usually gives concrete examples without being asked.

What to look for in the contract itself

A frequent mistake is signing the agency's standard terms with the proposal attached as a loose appendix. If the proposal and the contract disagree, the contract wins. Make sure the agreement includes a statement of work with the deliverables, people and KPIs from the proposal, a clause confirming that you own all accounts, data, creative and content you paid for, and a termination clause that matches what you were told in the sales process. If anything you were promised verbally is missing, ask for it to be added before you sign.

What if two agency proposals score the same?

Break the tie with a small paid test or with the quality of the working relationship so far. When the documents are equally strong, how each agency behaves in practice is the best predictor of the next twelve months.

• Run a short paid diagnostic. Ask both agencies for a small, fixed-price piece of work, such as a tracking review or an audit of one channel. You learn how they think, how they communicate and how fast they deliver. Agree the scope, deadline and format in advance so the two outputs are directly comparable, and judge them on whether they found something specific in your data, not on how long the document is.
• Look back at the process. Who answered questions clearly? Who pushed back on something you said? Who kept to the dates they promised? Agencies rarely get more responsive after signing.
• Prefer focus to breadth. If one agency is clearly stronger in the channel that addresses your main bottleneck, that usually matters more than a longer service list. Our overview of digital marketing services shows how we split specialist work by channel.

If you are still split, choose the agency with the shorter initial term. It costs little to be wrong, and you keep the second option warm.

Frequently asked questions

How many marketing agency proposals should you compare?

Two or three is the right number. Fewer gives you no real comparison, and more usually means you have not narrowed your criteria enough. If you have five proposals, cut to three using your scorecard before going deeper.

Should you share one agency's proposal with another to negotiate?

No. Proposals often contain thinking the agency considers its own, and sharing them damages trust with both sides. You can say that another offer is cheaper or includes more senior time, and ask whether they can adjust scope. That gives you the same negotiating position without breaking confidence.

Can you negotiate the terms of a marketing agency proposal?

Yes, and terms are often easier to change than price. Shorter minimum terms, a performance review point after three months or clearer exclusions are all reasonable requests. An agency that refuses any change to its terms is telling you how flexible it will be later.

Is it fair to ask agencies for free work before choosing?

A short audit or a point of view on your account is normal and many agencies offer one. Asking for full campaign builds or content plans for free is not, and it tends to select agencies with time to spare rather than the best ones. If you want real work to compare, pay a small fixed fee for it.

How long should the decision take once proposals arrive?

As a rule of thumb, two to three weeks is enough. That allows time for follow-up questions, one reference call per agency and a review of the contract. Much longer and agencies may reassign the people they proposed.

Who in your company should be part of the final decision?

The person who will work with the agency every week, and the person who owns the budget. If they score the proposals independently, you get a second view without slowing things down. Involve legal or finance for the contract review, but keep the scoring group small.

What if none of the proposals feel right?

Then do not sign any of them. Go back to your brief and check whether it was clear about the problem, budget and goals, because vague briefs produce vague proposals. You can also go back to finding a good marketing agency and widen the shortlist.

What to do next

Put your proposals into one spreadsheet this week and set the weights before you score anything. Most decisions become obvious once the offers are in the same format.

1. Rewrite each proposal into the six lines: people, hours, deliverables, KPIs, price and exit terms.
2. Score them with your weighted scorecard and list the open questions for each agency.
3. If you want a second opinion, or a proposal of your own to compare, ask us for a free written audit. You get it within 48 hours, and we reply within one business day. You can also read how we work as a digital marketing agency.