Insights on strategy, websites, UX, and digital growth

Businesses are under more pressure than ever to justify every dollar they spend on marketing. That has led to more conversations around performance-based marketing, outcome-based fees and contingency arrangements. It's a trend we understand and, in many situations, welcome.

If an agency is genuinely confident in its ability to improve commercial outcomes, why shouldn't it be prepared to share some of the risk, as well as the reward, for a successful outcome?

But that can only happen when accountability and control rest with the agency.

Increasingly, we're seeing businesses ask agencies to guarantee outcomes while simultaneously prescribing the method they expect the agency to follow. The conversation starts with a predetermined solution rather than an exploration of the problem. At that point, the dynamic of the relationship changes. The agency is no longer being asked to diagnose. It's being asked to execute someone else's diagnosis.

Imagine booking an appointment with your GP and saying, "I've already worked out what's wrong with me. I need these tablets."

Most of us wouldn't do that. We'd explain the symptoms, answer some questions and rely on the doctor's experience to determine both the diagnosis and the treatment.

Yet businesses do the commercial equivalent surprisingly often.

The result is that agencies are expected to take responsibility for outcomes while being denied the opportunity to follow the process that gives them the best chance of achieving them.

A strategy was requested. A diagnosis wasn't.

To illustrate, we were recently approached by a business that had experienced a noticeable decline in enquiries.

In an attempt to address this commercial challenge, they had already reached a conclusion about the cause. In their assessment, the problem was SEO. And so what they wanted from us was an SEO strategy, with the intention that this could then be executed by another provider.

They also wanted clear measures of success. If the strategy improved enquiries, it had worked. If it didn't, it hadn't. That seemed entirely reasonable.

On the face of it, the brief was straightforward.

What became apparent during our early conversations, however, was that the business had already decided on the treatment without asking anyone to confirm or even prove the diagnosis.

So we challenged this, proposing that we needed to run workshops with key stakeholders in the business before verifying the given diagnosis and corresponding treatment.

This presented a problem.

Within the previous 18 months, the business had completed a brand strategy with another agency, including stakeholder workshops and the development of an ideal customer profile. The resulting visual identity had also been implemented on their website. From their perspective, that work had already been done, so they questioned why we would need to revisit it before producing an SEO strategy.

That's an understandable question.

After all, if you've already invested time and money in strategy workshops, why would you want to pay for more strategy workshops?

The difficulty was that we weren't being asked to build on our own understanding of the business. We were being asked to produce a strategic plan and recommendations based largely on assumptions others had reached, for a different (albeit similar) purpose, without first validating whether those assumptions still reflected the commercial problem the business was trying to solve.

That distinction mattered.

While the requested deliverable was an SEO strategy, the actual business objective wasn't better SEO.

It was more relevant, commercially valuable enquiries.

Those are not necessarily the same thing.

Symptoms are not the same as diagnosis

The business believed it needed an SEO strategy because enquiries had declined. But a decline in enquiries is a symptom, not a diagnosis.

The same is true in medicine.

A persistent cough may be caused by a simple infection, an allergy, asthma or something far more serious. Treating the cough without understanding its cause might relieve the symptoms for a while, but it doesn't necessarily solve the underlying problem.

Businesses are no different.

Lower organic search rankings are a symptom. Fewer enquiries are a symptom. Poor quality leads are a symptom. Declining conversion rates are a symptom. Even increasing website traffic can be misleading if the visitors arriving aren't the people you're trying to reach.

The challenge is understanding why those symptoms exist before deciding how to respond.

Could SEO have been part of the answer? Almost certainly.

But it could just as easily have been a positioning issue. Or messaging. Or information architecture. Or content that answered the wrong questions. Or a website that no longer reflected how different decision-makers evaluated suppliers.

Even during our initial conversations, it became clear there was unlikely to be a single individual involved in the buying process. Different stakeholders had different priorities, concerns and measures of success. A procurement team might focus on cost and risk. A technical stakeholder might evaluate capability and compliance. A senior decision-maker might be looking at long-term value or strategic fit. Marketing and product teams other imperatives.

Each of those audiences needs different questions answering before they feel confident enough to make a purchasing decision.

That is why we couldn't simply accept the diagnosis and write an SEO strategy.

Before recommending any treatment, we first needed confidence that we understood the problem we were actually trying to solve.

Why the groundwork mattered

Hence why stakeholder workshops were needed before producing the strategy.

However, that process added time and cost to the project and required further involvement from senior people in the business. The client's concern was understandable. They had already been through workshops as part of the earlier brand strategy and did not see the value in repeating what appeared to be the same exercise.

But we were not proposing repetition for the sake of it.

We needed to understand the commercial objective, the people involved in the buying journey, the questions they needed answering and the reasons an enquiry might be won or lost. We also needed to test whether the assumptions inherited from the earlier strategy still held true and identify the gaps, particularly given that enquiries had declined since the revised visual identity had been introduced on the website.

That did not mean the previous strategy was necessarily wrong. It meant we could not responsibly treat its conclusions as proven facts without seeing the evidence behind them or validating them against the current commercial challenge.

The single ideal customer profile was one example.

A business may have a clearly defined type of company it wants to work with, but that does not mean there is only one person involved in the buying decision. In B2B sales, several people may influence the outcome, each with different priorities, concerns and reasons for choosing one supplier over another.

A lead generation strategy built around only one of those people risks overlooking the needs of everyone else involved in the decision.

The workshops were therefore not an additional layer placed on top of the work. They were the means by which we would reduce uncertainty before deciding what the work should be.

Without that groundwork, we could still have produced an SEO strategy. We could have completed technical audits, identified keyword opportunities and made recommendations about content and site structure.

What we could not have done was claim with confidence that those recommendations addressed the real cause of the decline in commercially valuable enquiries.

And if we could not establish that, it would have been difficult to accept responsibility for the outcome.

Sometimes the right answer is to walk away

In the end, we decided not to pursue the project.

Not because we doubted our ability to produce an SEO strategy.

And not because we disagreed that search visibility could form part of the solution.

We stepped away because we couldn't honestly accept responsibility for an outcome without first being allowed to follow the process we believed gave us the best chance of achieving it.

The business was comparing our proposal with others that were less expensive. From what we understood, those proposals accepted the brief largely as it had been presented and moved quickly into technical audits and SEO recommendations.

There will always be agencies prepared to work that way.

Equally, there will always be businesses who prefer that approach.

Our concern wasn't that it was cheaper.

It was that the cost saving came from removing the investigation rather than improving the outcome.

If your objective is simply to produce a strategy document, there are faster and less expensive ways of doing it than ever before. Today, AI can generate audits, recommendations and reports in minutes.

But producing a document has never been the difficult part.

The difficult part is knowing whether you're solving the right problem.

That is where experience still matters.

Not because experienced people write longer reports or ask more questions, but because they know when not to accept assumptions at face value. They know that the quality of the diagnosis will almost always determine the quality of the outcome.

Walking away from work is never an easy commercial decision.

But accepting responsibility for results while compromising the very process designed to achieve them would have been harder to justify.

Accountability starts with trust

Performance-based marketing, outcome-based fees and contingency arrangements will almost certainly become more common over the coming years.

In many cases, that's a positive development. Agencies should be prepared to stand behind their work, share risk where appropriate and be rewarded when they deliver meaningful commercial outcomes.

But accountability only works when responsibility and authority sit together.

If you ask an agency to own the outcome, you also have to trust it to challenge assumptions, investigate the problem and recommend the approach it believes will give you the greatest chance of success. That doesn't mean accepting every recommendation without question. It means recognising that expertise is more than execution. It's knowing what questions to ask before deciding what needs to be done.

The cheapest proposal is often the one that asks the fewest questions.

Sometimes that's exactly what's needed.

But when the stakes are high and the outcome matters, the questions are often where the value lies.

So, if you're asking an agency to put some of its fee at risk, ask yourself one question first.

Are you also prepared to trust the process that gives that agency the best chance of succeeding?

Because if the answer is no, it may be unfair to ask it to guarantee the result.