How to Choose a B2B Marketing Agency – Ask The Smart Question

How to Choose a B2B Marketing Agency: Where to Start

How to choose a B2B marketing agency is a question every wealth management, asset management or professional services firm eventually has to answer, and most run the same best-practice checklist to do it.

It tends to start the same way.

You and the team have done your homework and invited your shortlist of agencies or consultants to pitch. It probably took more time and energy than you expected.

Most of the pitches sound good. 

The teams presenting are enthusiastic. You may even be shown some speculative creative you weren’t expecting.

The decks all have polished case studies and glowing testimonials. The slide with the client logos is impressive and everyone’s happy to work to your budget.

Thankfully, there are one or two easy nos, because the rest are close.

So how do you begin to narrow it down?

Fast forward to the decision. You’ve chosen. The chemistry feels right. The contracts are signed.

And yet, six months in, the work looks like everyone else’s.

You wonder did we pick the right agency partner? 

But sometimes, it’s a question that never got asked at the start.

How to Choose a B2B Marketing Agency – The Checklist Everyone Runs

The basics checklist does matter. 

There’s no shortcut here and you need to run proper due diligence to weed out the agencies who on closer inspection are not a good fit (this may be easier if you’re paying for an intermediary such as the AAR).

Sector experience means real experience, not ‘we’ve done B2B before,’ and not a case study the agency points to but didn’t actually work on. What about the actual people who delivered these case studies? Are they still at the agency, or have they left? Will they work on your business, not just the pitch?

Ask what they actually think of your industry right now. You’ll know within thirty seconds whether they’re genuinely interested.

What’s their actual process for finding the proposition that will make your firm distinctive and memorable? Not the workshops, the stakeholder interviews, the competitor reviews, but the strategic thinking underneath it, how they get from a room full of opinions to a single, defensible idea, and how that idea gets tested before it’s presented back to you.

Interrogate the case studies. Ask what the proposition was, who arrived at it and over what timeframe. What were the challenges and how did they work through them? A logo on a slide proves nothing on its own.

This checklist will help. But there’s something missing that actually helps you decide…

What question does that checklist never ask?

The hard truth – most of your buyers aren’t listening yet.

At any given moment, around 95% of your potential buyers are out of market. Not just this quarter. Maybe not even this year. That’s not a Find Your Angle stat. It’s a well-established finding in B2B marketing research.

So the game is being remembered for when a buyer is ready.

And that’s the question most shortlists never ask an agency directly – how will you make sure we’re remembered at that key moment, the point of consideration?

It’s worth asking outright and listening closely for whether the answer is about your sector specifically, or about marketing in general.

A good answer needs two things: knowing exactly where your buyers actually form an opinion of you and proof it’s worked in a sector that is scrutinised. 

For us, that means being able to show this working in sectors where the scrutiny is real – from Argon & Co to Ascot Lloyd and M&G Wealth.

Where we’ve seen it go wrong

We’ve been on pretty much every side of this process: pitching, defending our position as the incumbent, and watching clients bring in specialist support alongside us.

A firm hires an agency that ticks every box. A thorough process is followed and the work is considered. They may even have had the time and budget to run some research. The new positioning is rolled-out across all comms.

And yet, a year later, nobody outside the building can remember a single thing the brand said.

Not because the work was wrong. Because it was invisible, safe and to the buyer, sadly forgettable.

What to actually listen for

Worth deciding before you brief anyone – do you want to see creative at all?

Leave it open and the bigger, better-resourced agencies will show it regardless, because they can afford to. They know a visual is hard to look past in the room, it’s emotive and it quietly shifts the decision from who has the right process for us to who has excited us. If you’re trying to assess a strategic partner, it may be worth saying no to creative explicitly in the brief and judging everyone on the same thing.

In addition, no agency pitching you should claim to already know what your brand should say – though they may share some thought starters. They should acknowledge they haven’t done the work yet. What you can assess is whether their process would actually get them there.

Belief. Ask how they’d go about finding out what your firm genuinely stands for, not what they’ve assumed from the brief. What’s their process for testing whether it’s differentiated, rather than just plausible?

Moments. Ask how they’d identify where your buyers actually form an opinion of you. They may from experience guess at channels, but what is the actual process for finding out – with consideration to your targets and possible media budget.

Distinctiveness. Ask how they’d know if what they land on is genuinely ownable, rather than something any competitor’s positioning could also claim.

Consistency. Ask how their process protects a proposition once it’s been through several rounds of stakeholder review. Examples of how they’ve done it before, not a promise.

An agency that can walk you through a rigorous process for all four, with real regulated-sector examples of it holding up, is worth more of your time than one that jumps straight to answers they haven’t earned yet.

Can a regulated brand really afford to be distinctive?

You’re running a professional brand with an expectation of the highest standards, so the instinct to play it safe is a reasonable one.

We’d ask it differently…can you afford not to be?

Compliance governs what you’re allowed to claim. Not how memorable you’re allowed to be.

First Direct has topped UK bank NPS rankings for years running, all while operating under the same FCA rules as every other bank. The constraint was never on distinctiveness. It was on substance.

So what’s the one question worth asking?

The basics checklist does matter. You need to know who’s actually doing the work, what experience they have, how they measure success and whether their process makes sense for your business.

But there’s another question worth asking, particularly in a category where firms can start to sound remarkably similar: what will make your brand the one your buyers remember?

Not ‘can you get to a proposition everyone can sign off on,’ most can. But ‘will anyone remember us when it counts.’

Because 95% of the people you’re trying to reach aren’t listening yet. And the ones who eventually are will only remember the firms that gave them something to remember.

That’s what sits behind our Un4gettable Framework: Belief. Moments. Distinctiveness. Consistency.

Those aren’t just the four questions to ask an agency. They’re the framework we built to answer them ourselves – each one grounded in published research across cognitive science, marketing effectiveness and brand strategy, not opinion.

Together, they show whether a brand is built to be remembered, or just built to blend in.

If you want to know where your firm sits against all four, before you run another pitch, we’ll happily walk you through it.

Frequently Asked Questions