I’m trying to grow my business with a joint venture and need help finding the right agency partner. What should I look for in potential partners, and where’s the best place to begin my search?
We partnered with an agency that had an email list in our space but targeted different customers. Before jumping in, we tested it - they promoted our lead magnet to part of their list, we did the same for them. Open rates looked good, but the real test was tracking who actually bought something over the next 60 days. That small test told us way more about their audience quality than looking at their portfolio ever would.
Had a client go through three agencies before we learned the key lesson: ask for proof they can drive actual conversions in your specific niche, not just traffic or leads. One agency showed us a case study with 2.3x ROAS improvement for a similar business - complete with before/after screenshots. That level of detail saved us months of wasted time with generic agencies.
Had a client whose previous agency built thousands of trash backlinks that killed their domain authority. Found the smoking gun in their log files - Google was wasting 80% of crawl budget on spam pages instead of actual products. Now I always check an agency’s link building case studies and demand Search Console data showing they can keep organic traffic stable for 12+ months.