How to Manage Multiple Marketing Agencies

Build a complete picture of what you have bought.

List every agency, the problem it is meant to address, its current scope, the internal sponsor and its next important commitment. Include freelancers and internal teams when another supplier depends on their work.

Then look for overlap and missing responsibility. Two agencies may both include strategy while neither maintains the overall plan. One may assume the other supplies product copy. The invoices will not reveal those gaps by themselves.

Keep contract dates, recurring fees and notice deadlines alongside the operational record. A supplier can be performing well while its engagement is approaching a renewal decision. Budget management and delivery management need to use the same view of the relationship.

Separate the combined plan from each agency's task list.

Ask agencies to maintain their own detailed production plans. Your combined view should show business priorities, cross-team dependencies and decisions that require client action.

For each initiative, record the next externally meaningful milestone. That might be an approved concept, an accepted landing page or a completed measurement check. Recording every design adjustment makes the client dashboard harder to use.

Use one status definition across suppliers. Explain whether a date is confirmed, conditional on an input or already at risk. A color without the reason for it provides little help when you need to decide what changes.

Delegate coordination with explicit limits.

You can assign a capable employee, an independent project lead or a lead agency to maintain the combined schedule. Confirm the time and fee for that work.

Give the coordinator permission to request updates, convene the relevant people and surface conflicting commitments. Specify whether they can move deadlines or only recommend changes. Keep approval of material spending and business priorities with the authorized client owner.

The strategy-ownership guide explains the distinction between developing the plan, coordinating it and approving the commercial choices. A person can hold several roles, provided everyone understands which role they are exercising.

Spend meeting time on decisions that affect several teams.

Circulate routine updates before a joint meeting. Discuss only the dependencies, risks or choices that need input from more than one party. Invite the specialists needed for those items.

For example, an email agency does not need to attend an entire technical migration discussion because it is on your roster. It does need advance notice if the migration changes customer events used by its flows.

Use a separate commercial review to examine total spending, duplicate work and forthcoming commitments. Ask what should be stopped as well as what should be added. Funding every agency's recommendation can exceed both your budget and your team's implementation capacity.

Keep agency evaluation connected to the work.

Review each supplier's delivery and its effect on the wider plan. An agency that meets its own deadlines while providing unusable inputs to another team has not completed the handoff successfully.

Invite feedback on your own organization. Conflicting instructions, slow approvals and unavailable internal experts can create the same delays you are asking agencies to prevent. WFA's 2022 relationship-evaluation findings support including client-side behavior in these conversations.

Review the roster when responsibilities or business needs change. Adding another specialist may be appropriate, but first check whether the existing problem is a lack of expertise or a failure to use expertise you already buy.

Use this management worksheet.

Create one entry for each current initiative and review the entries together with your coordinator.

• [Initiative] supports [business objective], and [client sponsor] owns the business decision.
• [Agency] is responsible for [specific contribution] under [scope reference].
• The next shared milestone is [accepted output] on [date].
• Delivery depends on [input] from [owner], which is due on [date].
• The decision we need is [decision], and [approver] must make it by [date].
• The committed cost is [amount and period], with [additional exposure] still unapproved.
• The current risk is [risk], and the proposed response is [action].
• We last reviewed this entry on [date], using [evidence].

Start with a level of detail you can maintain. If your system requires hours of copying information between agency reports, reduce the fields or arrange for the coordinator to update it. The client-time worksheet will help you account for that workload.