Why Your Current Marketing Agency Sucks

Ever feel like your marketing agency is ripping you off? They might be. Most marketing agencies – at least in my experience – try to maximize their profits at the cost of their clients. 

After all, if your business fails, it is no skin off your back. 

Since they are good at marketing, they have a steady stream of new customers lining up for their business. You just become an unfortunate side effect of their churn game. 

I’ve been on the other side of the table. Powerless. Taken advantage of. 

And it didn’t feel good. 

With the rise of Influencers like Tai Lopez and Iman Gadzhi an entirely new generation of young, untrained “marketers” are flooding to the market. Today, your “marketing agency” might only be someone with 10% more digital savviness than you have. 

Here are the most common ways that marketing agencies can take advantage of you. intentionally, or not. 

Want to keep from being scammed? Check out our article on 15 Questions To Ask  Your SEO Company.

Black Box Phenomenon: Everything is “Mysterious” 

This one is native to every industry. The more mystery there is in your field, the more you can charge. The “black box” prints money. 

I am not that good at installing garage doors. (There’s no way that you could get me to touch a torsion spring, that’s for sure!)

Granted, with Google and Meta, there are plenty of “blackbox” elements. Their algorithms are closely held trade secrets that even their high-level internal employees don’t fully understand. 

However, I am a firm believer in education. Experts should be breaking things down to the level that you can understand. 

Experts should be teaching you how to watch metrics. How to read your graphs, and how to get the most out of your investment.  You should regularly be discussing leading and lagging indicators.

Many marketing agencies don’t educate, though, because then you will hold them accountable. 

Find an expert who educates. 

Attention to Detail 

We are seeing this a lot with big agencies like WebFX and Real-Time Marketing. While they have SOPs and a dedicated account manager, the work being done is very surface-level.  Often, campaigns run for months before a dedicated account manager is assigned. And often those account managers know very little about marketing. 

Often, these agencies can get results when everything on your account is “just right”. However, campaigns are quick to stagnate and move sideways while under their care. 

In many cases, I’ve stepped into stale campaigns, tweaked two things, and had the campaign working again. 

(One of these big issues is targeting: all too often, these ads are simply targeting the wrong areas). 

Where Garage Door Marketing Syndicate shines is in our smaller size, our long-term employee retention, our industry expertise, and our attention to detail. 

From the number of Header tags, to the sales copy, to heatmaps,  to how items are interlinked, to using college-educated US-based writers on our content team, we find ways to improve our attention to detail. 

It is this attention to detail that often sets a winning campaign apart from a losing one. 

Lack of Tracking 

This is a problem that tends to plague the smaller agency, rather than the large ones. 

In an era where privacy is at an all-time high and cookies are being killed, the ability to track campaign performance is everything. 

We are constantly working with the latest in Google Tag, Google Analytics, and third-party software, such as Go High Level, to create real-time tracking. 

Now, with the advent of first-party cookies, you can own your data in a new way. 

Tracking informs every area of your campaign. 

Lack of Transparency 

Deliverables are the leading indicator. A performance-based marketing team should have a strong argument for why they are choosing a specific course of action. 

Unfortunately, there are a lot of agencies that take a “trust us, bro” approach to reporting their deliverables.

When I was coming up in the industry, I worked for many agencies that did not report on the content they created, or the backlinks they built.  Whenever you got on a sales call with their ad managers, there was a strong lack of direction and vision for what their next steps were. 

Granted, there are aspects of marketing that are drudgery. Elements of “playing to the algorithm” that don’t make intuitive sense. 

But all of these elements should be highlighted and reported on. Your marketing agency should be extremely transparent in their efforts. 

Lack of Access (Google Ads)

I am still seeing a surprising amount of this on the campaigns that we assume. Agencies have two options when it comes to managing their campaigns. 

Option 1: Be added as a manager to your Google ads account. This is the proper way to do it. This keeps you in control of your account but allows them the ability to optimize your ads. 

Option 2: You pay them, and they “magically” run your campaigns. You have no access to the ads account, no record of what campaigns work, and no real way to hold them accountable on ad spend. 

There are a lot of reasons why agencies choose option 2. The most innocuous one is that the owner enjoys getting the credit card miles from having his card on file. 

In every case, option 2 hurts the business owner in the long run. Always insist on maintaining full ownership of your ads account.

Proprietary Website Platform

This one is going out of style, however, in 2025, we ran into it again. 

Often, these web designers will build your site on something so outdated that only the most sophisticated developers can operate the systems. 

Even worse, they use their proprietary backend to prevent anyone from having full access to their source code. 

This system locks you into their contract, as moving off of their platform would require a full website redesign. 

Lack of Access (Website)

This is extremely common. Most business owners don’t know how to log into their websites. 

At the very least, you should be able to log into your site and have full administrative access to the site. 

About 4-5 times per year, we have a client who is trying to leave their old agency. When they ask for logins and cancel their old contract, their old agency deletes the site. 

It’s petty. But it happens. 

Always insist on having logins to your website. 

12-Month Contracts

This has become a common practice by the largest agencies. By locking you into a 12-month contract, they guarantee their profit margins. 

After all, it doesn’t matter if they do not perform. You are stuck with them. 

I’ve seen a few small business owners completely sunk by these high-cost, long-term contracts. It’s one reason why we never do contracts here at Garage Door Marketing Syndicate. 

High Margins

As with any business, the goal is to increase profit margins. When I started in the industry, I worked for an agency – and knew of many by industry reputation –  where the owners pocketed 70% of the client’s investment as profit. 

Unfortunately, many clients would invest with these agencies for a year or more before moving on. 

Margins make the business. Here are Garage Door Marketing Syndicate, we are stealing Jeff Bezo’s motto “Your margin is my opportunity.” 

By stating clear deliverables, building transparent roadmaps, and then deploying our clients’ budgets aggressively, we are able to outperform every other marketing agency in our niche. 

No OODA LOOP

The OODA loop, developed by military strategist John Boyd, is a decision-making framework consisting of four stages: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. 

This might be one of the most blatant issues I’ve seen. We have excellent insight into the leading indicators on your marketing campaigns. We can see the traffic. We can see the conversion rate. We can see how the site is moving higher in Google. 

What we generally have poor visibility into are the sales. Even with the advent of CRMs such as Zoho and Go High Level, we are limited to how well the in-house team is tracking sales. 

To combat this, we spearhead frequent conversations around sales, closing the gap between the data we are seeing, and the sales you are experiencing. 

Closing the feedback loop is everything when it comes to marketing. 

Current marketing agency not delivering results? Let us help you craft a new game plan. Book a free marketing audit.