Working with a new advertising agency can bring fresh ideas, specialized expertise, and new opportunities to your marketing strategy. But even the client-agency relationships need time to get up to speed.
During the first 30 days, your digital marketing agency should be learning about your brand and building the foundation for the work ahead. You may see early wins, but meaningful results typically develop as strategy, creative, and campaigns gain momentum.
When you know what a well-run agency onboarding process looks like, you can set realistic expectations and recognize signs of a productive partnership. Ahead, we’ll break down what to expect in the first 90 days with an ad agency, from initial discovery and strategic planning to campaign execution, optimization, and performance reporting.
The first month of the ad agency onboarding process is about building the foundation for the partnership. Your agency will spend this time getting immersed in your business. They’ll review what you’re currently doing and what you’ve done and establish clear expectations for the work ahead.
Your agency will learn how your business operates and what your marketing needs to accomplish. Discovery will likely cover:
A deep dive gives the agency the information they need to make recommendations that support your business priorities and goals.
Next, your agency will establish access to the systems and information required to manage your marketing. Depending on the scope of the partnership, this may include social media accounts, advertising platforms, analytics tools, creative libraries, and historical reporting.
Your agency will also evaluate your existing marketing efforts before developing its strategy. This review might include:
The findings provide a baseline for future decisions and help identify opportunities for improvement.
Broad objectives like “increase awareness” and “drive engagement” will become more specific. Your agency will work with your team to identify relevant KPIs, establish benchmarks, and connect marketing performance to broader business objectives.
Finally, both teams will establish primary contacts, responsibilities, approval processes, meeting cadence, and reporting expectations. By day 30, both teams should have a shared understanding of what success looks like, how progress will be measured, and how they will work together to achieve it.
With onboarding complete, the next 30 days are when discovery and performance insights begin turning into action. Your agency will use what it learned during the first month to develop a strategy around your audiences, business objectives, and existing marketing performance.
Strategy development will typically address:
An integrated agency like Socialfly will develop social media marketing, paid media, and influencer marketing as part of a connected strategy.
Your agency will begin translating the strategy into messaging, social-first concepts, platform-native formats, and creative variations designed for testing.
Campaigns may launch in stages to give your agency an opportunity to validate assumptions, gather audience data, identify early creative winners, and avoid putting significant budget behind an unproven approach.
Testing frameworks will also begin taking shape across creative, messaging, audiences, placements, and calls to action. These tests give your agency actionable data they can use to guide future campaign decisions.
By day 60, the partnership should be transitioning from planning into active execution. This is the period where the agency will run campaigns, test creative, and start gleaning insights based on the results.
By the third month, campaigns have had time to generate performance data, giving your agency more information to guide its decisions. The focus will increasingly shift from launching and testing to learning what works and optimizing the strategy based on those findings.
Your agency will analyze creative performance, engagement quality, click-through rates, conversion behavior, audience performance, and more. Rather than evaluating these metrics separately, the team will look for patterns that reveal how audiences are responding across campaigns.
As those patterns emerge, your agency should start making informed adjustments. This may include:
Each change creates another opportunity to learn and refine the strategy as more performance data becomes available.
Ninety days can provide valuable evidence of progress, but early indicators are not always the same as final ROI. The quality of engagement and traffic are signals the agency’s strategy is gaining traction. So are stronger conversion rates and better media performance.
A strong agency will explain what those results mean rather than simply presenting you with a report full of numbers. Your team should understand what changed, what the agency learned, and how those insights will inform the next phase of the strategy.
By day 90, you should have a clearer understanding of what is working, what requires further testing, and where the strategy should go next.
Revenue and ROI are key indicators, but they’re not the only ways to evaluate a new agency relationship during the first 90 days. At this stage, it’s important to evaluate at how effectively the agency communicates, executes, responds to data, and contributes to your broader marketing goals.
Here are signs of a strong agency partnership:
So, what are the warning signs your agency relationship isn’t working? If you’re constantly chasing updates, or your agency repeatedly misses deadlines, these are red flags.
If your agency isn’t providing strategic recommendations or submits reports that list activity without explaining its relevance to your business goals, these are signs something is amiss.
Ultimately, you want your agency relationship to function as a true partnership, not a vendor arrangement.
The first 90 days establish the foundation, but the reality is it takes time to develop a strong agency partnership. Both teams share responsibility for communicating effectively and creating the conditions for strong execution. Here are some best practices for building a strong partnership:
Keep your agency informed about business priorities, upcoming product launches, organizational changes, and new audience insights. The more context your agency has, the better equipped it is to anticipate needs and make relevant strategic recommendations.
Create a process for gathering feedback from internal stakeholders before sharing it with your agency. Consolidated feedback helps prevent conflicting direction, unnecessary revisions, and delays.
Establish who owns strategy, creative approval, media decisions, and final signoff. Clear ownership helps both teams keep projects moving and know who needs to be involved at each stage.
Use status meetings to keep projects on track and strategic reviews to address broader priorities. During strategic reviews, your team and agency can evaluate performance trends, identify new opportunities, discuss upcoming priorities, and plan future tests.
The strategy you establish during onboarding will continue to develop as both teams gather data and learn more about your audiences. Give your agency room to apply those insights, test new ideas, and refine its recommendations.
The first 90 days set the foundations for a long-term agency relationship. Socialfly prioritizes open communication and close collaboration throughout this critical period. Our team works alongside yours to define goals and KPIs, establish clear workflows, develop your strategy, and turn audience and performance insights into campaigns built to deliver measurable results.
Leading brands trust us to develop scroll-stopping creative and ad campaigns. Our integrated approach brings organic social, paid media, and influencer marketing together under one strategy. By connecting these channels, we create high-value assets that can work across campaigns and platforms.
Partner with Socialfly to make your marketing dollars work harder.
