How to choose a social media agency that grows sales

How to choose a social media agency in 6 steps

1. 1

   Write down the one number that matters

   Revenue, orders, leads, installs or waitlist sign-ups, with a target and a date. An agency that hears 'more engagement' will sell you engagement.

2. 2

   Set the full budget

   Agency fee plus ad spend plus creator fees. Most agency quotes exclude the last two. Our social media agency cost guide has 2026 ranges for each line.

3. 3

   Decide what you need done

   Posting, paid ads, video production, creators, a landing page, or all of it. In HeyOrca's 2026 agency survey, 97% of social packages included content creation but only 18% included paid social, so never assume ads are in the price.

4. 4

   Shortlist three agencies

   Look for work in your category and at your budget, not the biggest logo wall. A team that has launched $40 products will think differently from one that sells $4,000 software.

5. 5

   Send all three the same brief

   Goal, product, audience, offer, budget, launch date. Use our campaign brief template so nobody can hide behind different assumptions.

6. 6

   Compare, then start with a test

   Line the proposals up using the table below. Sign for a 60 to 90 day first phase with agreed numbers before committing to a year.

Questions to ask a social media agency before you sign

Good agencies answer these in writing without fuss. Vague answers are the answer.

• Who makes the creative, how many finished videos do we get each month, and how many hooks or versions of each?
• Is ad management included, and how is it priced: flat fee or a percentage of spend?
• How many ad tests will you run per month, and how do you decide which one won?
• Where do the ads send people, and who fixes that page if it does not convert?
• Which metric will you report weekly, and how does it connect to revenue?
• Will our ad accounts, pixel and pages stay in our business account?
• How will you scale spend? (On TikTok, budget increases are capped at 40% per change during the learning phase and 30% after it, so a good answer is a staged plan.)
• How do you handle creator disclosure and product claims? (The FTC holds the brand responsible, even when an agency manages the creators.)
• Who exactly works on our account, and what happens if they leave?
• What is the minimum term and the notice period?
• Which costs sit outside your fee: ad spend, creator fees, shoots, product, software?

Social media agency red flags

How to compare social media agency proposals

An example of three real-world proposal shapes for the same brief. The cheapest headline fee is often the most expensive per result.

Illustrative. Divide the fee by the deliverables you actually need, then add ad spend and creator fees to see the full monthly cost.

What the first 90 days with a good agency look like

Weeks 1 to 4: plan and build. Concept, angles, scripts, creative production, ad account setup, tracking and the landing page. A campaign that goes live in under a week skipped something. One that takes three months is being overbuilt. For a typical launch, 3 to 4 weeks from an agreed brief is realistic.

Weeks 5 to 8: test. Several angles and hooks run side by side with enough budget per ad group to produce data. You should get a weekly note saying what won, what lost and what changes next, in plain numbers.

Weeks 9 to 12: scale and refresh. Budget moves to the winners in steps, new creative replaces fatigued ads, and the weakest step in the funnel gets fixed, whether that is the hook, the offer or the checkout. By day 90 you should know your cost per result and whether it works at a bigger budget. If the agency cannot tell you that, you have your answer.

Who should own the ad accounts, pixels and pages?

You should. Ad accounts carry your spend history, your pixel carries months of conversion data, and your audiences are built from both. Lose them and the next agency starts from zero.

Both big platforms are built for this. In Meta's Business Manager (now called a business portfolio), you add the agency under Partners and share only the ad accounts, pages and pixels they need, which does not hand them control of the portfolio itself. TikTok works the same way: you add the agency as a partner in Business Center using its Business Center ID, pick the accounts and assets to share and set permissions per asset.

If an agency says it needs to run ads from its own account to get better pricing, ask for that in writing and ask how you get the data back when you leave. In most cases, you do not.

One turnkey team or several specialists?

The other big choice is structure. A video studio, a paid social agency and a web freelancer can each be excellent and the campaign can still fail, because nobody owns the gaps between them: the hook that does not match the landing page, the ad set that launches before the creative is ready, the report that blames someone else.

A turnkey agency plans, makes and launches the whole campaign with one team and one report. It suits brands without a marketing team to coordinate vendors. Specialists suit brands that already have a strong in-house lead who can run the hand-offs. We break down the tradeoffs in one turnkey agency vs several specialists and freelancers vs agency, and explain the model in what is a turnkey marketing agency.

What real proof from an agency looks like

Ask for proof that matches your goal. If you need sales, a reel of viral videos is not proof. You want to see a starting point, what was done and a business number at the end: purchases, sign-ups, revenue, cost per result. Screenshots from the ad account beat slides.

Be wary of logos with no numbers, results with no timeframe, and testimonials you cannot trace to a real person. Here is ours: a new product we launched, and the results after 2 weeks. The details are in our case study.