The first 90 days with a new marketing agency will both feel slower than you want and faster than you expect. You'll spend more time on onboarding than actual work. You'll question whether you made the right choice. And if things go well, you'll hit your stride right around day 75.
Here's what actually happens during those first three months, what you should expect from your agency, and how to set things up so you don't waste the first quarter of your partnership.
The reason it will feel slower than you want at first is that most of the first month of working together is administrative. You're getting your agency access to your systems, briefing them on your business, and establishing how you'll work together.
What your agency should be doing:
What you should be doing:
The biggest mistake companies make in month one is rushing this phase.
It’s understandable, you’ve just committed to a major investment: you want to see creative work or campaign launches. Your agency wants to demonstrate its value. But if you skip the discovery work, you'll spend months three through six fixing problems that could have been prevented.
Red flag: If your agency isn't asking hard questions about past performance, competitive threats, or internal challenges, they're not doing real discovery. They're just checking a box.
In month two, you should begin to see the agency's perspective. They should present strategic recommendations based on their discovery process.
What your agency should deliver:
What you should be doing:
This is the hardest month of the partnership.
The agency is making recommendations that could conflict with your existing approach or internal sacred cows. You're evaluating whether their strategic thinking matches what you expected when you hired them.
Some tension here is normal. If your agency agrees with everything you're already doing, you hired an order-taker, not a strategic partner.
What good conflict looks like: Your agency pushes back on a channel you love because the data doesn't support it. You defend the channel by explaining the context they're missing. You reach a compromise that tests the channel with clear success metrics.
What bad conflict looks like: Your agency dismisses your team's past work without understanding why decisions were made. Or you reject their recommendations because "we tried that before and it didn't work," without examining what's changed now or any nuances added to the agency's approach.
Month three is when your agency relationship should really start delivering. Campaigns are live. Content is being published. You're reviewing performance data together and making optimization decisions. The agency should now feel like an extension of your team.
What your agency should be doing:
Executing the prioritized initiatives from month two
Reporting on performance with clear insights, not just data dumps
Identifying what's working and what needs to be adjusted
Flagging roadblocks or dependencies that require your intervention
Proposing next-phase work based on early results
What you should be doing:
By day 90, you should know whether the partnership will work. Not whether they've revolutionized your marketing (they haven't, it's only been 90 days), but whether they understand your business, deliver quality work, and communicate in a way that makes your job easier.
Most first-90-day failures aren't about creative quality or strategic thinking. They're about misaligned expectations or poor communication.
The agency overpromises: They sold you on the idea of immediately transforming your marketing during the pitch process. Now they're explaining why everything takes longer than expected. You feel misled. They feel like you don't understand how marketing works.
You underinvest in onboarding: You hired an agency because you don't have time to do the work yourself. But then you don't make time to brief them properly or answer their questions. They guess at what you want. The work misses the mark. You blame them for not understanding your business.
No one defines where the “goal posts” are: You want best-in-class work. Your agency delivers solid work that's better than what you had. You're disappointed. They're confused about what you actually wanted.
Decision bottlenecks: Your agency needs approvals from legal, sales leadership, or the executive team. Those approvals take weeks. Progress stalls. The agency bills you for time spent waiting. You're frustrated about paying for inactivity.
The agency treats you like every other client: They give you their standard process, standard reporting template, standard communication cadence. It doesn't match how your company operates. Integration friction builds.
The team you got isn't the team you hired: The agency pitched your business with senior leadership in the room. You felt like a priority. Then you signed the contract, and your day-to-day team turned out to be junior staffers you'd never met. The senior people who won the business show up occasionally for quarterly reviews and not much else.
You should treat a new agency hire similarly to how you would treat a new internal hire. After all, you wouldn't offer someone a job and then let them sink or swim, right? ...right? Be as transparent and open as possible right from the outset of the relationship. Your goal should be to get on the same page as soon as possible:
Be clear about what you want to accomplish. Not just "increase leads" or "build brand awareness." Specific, measurable outcomes: "We need 50 qualified leads per month by Q3." "We need to own the conversation around [topic] in our industry."
Identify your decision-making bottlenecks in advance. If brand work requires CEO approval, tell your agency that upfront. If legal review adds two weeks to any launch, factor that into timelines.
Make someone on your team the point person. Your agency shouldn't have to navigate your internal politics or figure out who to ask for what. One person owns the relationship and routes requests internally.
Share your failures, but stay open. Tell your agency what you've tried before that didn't work. Context matters, and they need to know what's already been attempted. But don't let past failures close the door on an approach entirely. A tactic that didn't work two years ago, executed differently with better data or a stronger offer, might perform very well today. Your job is to give them the history. Their job is to determine whether there's a better way.
Give feedback in real time. If something isn't working, say so immediately. Don't wait for a monthly review to surface problems. Course corrections are easier when issues are small.
Protect the relationship from internal chaos. Your company will have competing priorities, budget cuts, leadership changes, and strategic pivots. Don't make your agency absorb all that turbulence. Filter it. Give them stability to do good work.
You won't have transformed your marketing yet. But you should have:
If you have those things, you're in great shape. The next 90 days will be about optimization and scaling what's working.
If you don't have those things, you need to quickly diagnose why. Is it an agency capability problem? An internal resourcing problem? A misalignment on strategy? Most issues are fixable if addressed early.
Getting the first 90 days right sets the trajectory for the entire partnership. Most agencies can execute the work. The difference between a good partnership and a great one is how well you integrate them into your business, how clearly you communicate what success looks like, and how honestly you address problems when they surface.
If you're evaluating agencies now or about to start a new partnership, our RFP Guide walks through how to structure the process to find the right fit. Or talk to us about how we approach client onboarding at Mighty Roar.
Plan for 5-10 hours per week in month one (mostly meetings and onboarding), 3-5 hours per week in month two (feedback and approvals), and 2-3 hours per week in month three (reviews and planning). If your agency needs more of your time than that, either your team isn't supporting them properly or they're not operating efficiently.
You should see directional progress, not transformational results. Campaigns should be live. Content should be publishing. You should have baseline performance data. But marketing takes time to compound. The work your agency does in month two might not show a measurable impact until month five.
Most contracts have 30-60 day out clauses for exactly this reason. If you're confident the fit is wrong, act fast. But make sure you're evaluating the right things. Slow progress in month one isn't necessarily a red flag; poor communication or strategic thinking that doesn't match your needs is.
Your agency should attend any meeting where marketing decisions are being made or where they need context to do their work well. They shouldn't attend meetings just to "stay informed." Be strategic about their time.
Be specific about what's not working and why, not just "I don't like this." Tie feedback to business goals or brand strategy. If your feedback is "this doesn't feel right," you need to do more work to articulate what "right" looks like.
Both. You should set the strategic direction and priorities. Your agency should proactively identify opportunities, flag risks, and recommend optimizations within that direction. If you're micromanaging execution, you hired an order-taker. If your agency is making strategic pivots without your input, they're overstepping.
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