What to Expect in Your First 3 Months with a Marketing Agency

You’ve done it. You’ve raised a pre-seed or seed round. You’ve obsessed over the product, written every line of code yourself, and landed your first few design partners through your network. Your product doesn’t suck. But now you’re staring at a flat MRR chart and you’ve realized what got you here won’t get you there.

You know you need marketing, but you’re a builder, not a marketer. You’d rather spend your weekend fixing a nagging API bug than figuring out Google Ads bidding strategies or writing a blog post. So you’ve decided to hire a marketing agency.

Smart move. But let’s be blunt: hiring an agency isn't a silver bullet. It’s a partnership. And if you go into it with the wrong expectations, you’re going to burn cash and churn the agency in six months, leaving you right back where you started.

I’ve seen this happen dozens of times. Founders expect a firehose of leads on day one. They get frustrated when the first month is all about questions and spreadsheets. They don’t understand the difference between leading and lagging indicators.

This guide is your reality check. It’s what I tell every founder who asks me what to expect in the first three months with a marketing agency. No fluff, no jargon. Just the ground truth, broken down month by month.

Month 1: The Foundation - Onboarding, Audits, and Strategy

Your first month will feel slow, and that’s a good thing. If an agency promises to launch campaigns in the first week without doing this groundwork, run. Month one is all about building the foundation. Rushing this is like building a skyscraper on sand.

The Kickoff & Deep Dive

Your first real meeting after signing the contract is the kickoff. This isn’t a gentle meet-and-greet; it’s an interrogation. A good agency will grill you. Be prepared to answer questions like:

Who is your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? Be specific. “Tech companies” is not an answer. “Series A to C FinTech companies in North America with 50-250 employees using Stripe and HubSpot” is an answer.
What specific, burning pain point do you solve for them? How are they solving it now? (Hint: The answer is usually a messy spreadsheet or a manual process).
What is your core value proposition? Why are you 10x better than the status quo or your direct competitors?
What’s your current sales process? Is it a self-serve checkout? A demo request form? What happens after someone fills out that form?
Who are your top 3 competitors? What do you admire about their marketing? What do you think they do poorly?

This session is critical. The agency is downloading a year's worth of your product and market knowledge in a few hours. Don’t hold back. The more context you give them, the faster they can ramp up.

The Audit & Data Dig

Next, the agency will ask for access to everything. Your Google Analytics, Search Console, CRM, social media accounts, ad accounts, and any other tool you’ve cobbled together. They aren't being nosy; they're being archaeologists.

They're looking for baseline metrics:

Website Traffic: How many visitors do you get? Where do they come from (organic, direct, referral)?
Conversion Rates: What percentage of visitors take a key action (e.g., sign up for a trial, book a demo)?
Keyword Rankings: What terms do you currently rank for? Are they the right ones?
Past Performance: Have you run ads before? What were the results (CPC, CPL, CPA)?

This audit establishes the “before” picture. Without it, you can’t measure the “after.” It also uncovers low-hanging fruit. Maybe your demo page has a 90% bounce rate because it takes 10 seconds to load. That’s a quick win.

Building the Strategic Roadmap

The primary deliverable for month one is the Strategic Roadmap. This is the blueprint for the next 3-6 months. It’s a set of hypotheses based on the deep dive and the audit. It should clearly outline:

Channels: Where will we play? SEO, Content, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Cold Outreach? A good agency will recommend starting with 1-2 channels, not boiling the ocean.
Messaging: What core angles and hooks will we use? This should be tailored to the ICP and the channel.
Targeting: How will we reach the ICP on those channels? (e.g., specific keywords, job titles on LinkedIn, lookalike audiences).
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): How will we measure success? This must go beyond vanity metrics like 'traffic' and focus on business outcomes like 'Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)' or 'Demo Booked Rate'.
The 90-Day Plan: A timeline of what will be delivered and when. For example: “Month 1: Strategy. Month 2: Launch SEO-focused blog content and LinkedIn lead gen campaign. Month 3: Analyze initial data and launch Google Ads retargeting.”

Your Role as Founder

Your job isn't done after the kickoff. You need to be responsive. Provide access to tools quickly. Answer follow-up questions via Slack or email within a few hours, not a few days. The agency’s speed in month one is almost entirely dependent on you.

Your primary focus should always be on building a world-class product and talking to users. That’s why you’re paying for a 'done-for-you' marketing service that can own the growth engine. A specialized team like ours at AgentWeb handles the execution so you can stay focused on your core mission. This is a partnership, but one where you delegate the execution, not the vision.

Month 2: Liftoff - Execution and Early Signals

With the strategy approved, month two is about execution. This is when things start to go live. It’s exciting, but it’s also where you need to manage your expectations most carefully. You are planting seeds, not harvesting crops.

Flipping the 'On' Switch

The agency will start executing the plan. This could look like:

Publishing the first few SEO-optimized articles.
Launching the first LinkedIn Ad campaign.
Setting up tracking dashboards and conversion goals.
Performing technical SEO fixes on your website.

It can feel like a flurry of activity. You’ll see new pages on your site and ad spend starting to tick up. Your role here is to provide final approval on creative and copy. They’re the experts, but you’re the ultimate brand guardian. Give clear, consolidated feedback.

The Waiting Game & Leading Indicators

Let me be crystal clear: You will not see a flood of new MRR in month two. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling snake oil.

Marketing, especially for B2B SaaS with longer sales cycles, has a ramp-up period. SEO takes 6-9 months to show significant results. Paid ads need time to gather data and optimize. You are looking for leading indicators, not lagging indicators.

Lagging Indicators: Revenue, Closed-Won Deals, Customer LTV. (These come later).
Leading Indicators: Website Traffic, Keyword Ranking Improvements, Ad Impressions & Clicks, Click-Through-Rate (CTR), Cost-Per-Click (CPC), Content Downloads, Demo Page Views.

These early signals tell you if your strategic hypotheses are on the right track. Are we reaching the right people? Is the message resonating enough for them to click? A good agency will report on these leading indicators and explain what they mean for the long-term goal.

First Feedback Loops

The data that comes in is the first real-world feedback on your strategy. The agency should be analyzing this weekly.

Example 1 (Content/SEO): “Our new blog post on ‘SOC 2 Compliance Checklist’ is already ranking on page 3 for its target keyword and drove 50 new users to the site. This tells us this topic is a high-priority area to create more content around.”
Example 2 (Paid Ads): “Our LinkedIn campaign targeting VPs of Engineering has a high CTR (2.5%) but the Cost-Per-Lead is too high ($250). We’re going to test a new ad creative with a more direct value prop to see if we can bring that down.”

For some founders who want to be more involved in the tactical execution, it's possible to manage this process in-house. If you have the time and technical aptitude, you could use a platform to build your own campaigns and run these experiments yourself. But for most, this is exactly what you’re paying the agency to manage.

Month 3: The Flywheel - Optimization and Proving the Model

Month three is where the magic starts to happen. It's not a tidal wave of success, but the flywheel begins to turn. You have two months of work and one month of initial data under your belt. Now it's time to get smart.

From Data to Decisions

An average agency reports on data. A great agency turns data into decisions. Month three is all about optimization. This is an active, not passive, process. The agency should be:

A/B Testing: Trying different ad headlines, landing page copy, and calls-to-action to improve conversion rates.
Audience Refining: Narrowing or expanding targeting based on which segments are performing best.
Keyword Analysis: Identifying new keywords that are driving high-intent traffic and creating content for them.

This is the scientific method applied to marketing. Hypothesize, test, analyze, iterate. You should see the leading indicators from month two start to improve. CTR goes up. CPC comes down. More importantly, you should start seeing the first few lagging indicators trickle in: your first MQLs from a campaign, a demo booked from a blog post, or a trial started from an ad.

Doubling Down & Cutting Losses

By the end of month three, you should have enough data to make some intelligent calls. The agency should come to you with recommendations like:

“The LinkedIn campaign is generating MQLs at a cost of $150, which is well within our target CPA. We recommend increasing the budget by 50% for next month.”
“Our content efforts are starting to rank for bottom-of-funnel keywords. We should now build a downloadable guide to capture leads from this new organic traffic.”
“The Google Ads campaign on broad terms is not performing. The clicks are expensive and unqualified. We recommend pausing it and reallocating that budget to retargeting.”

This is what you pay for: strategic allocation of capital based on real-world performance data, not just a gut feeling.

The 90-Day Review: What's the ROI?

At the end of the first quarter, it’s time for a formal review. The goal is to answer one question: “Is this working?”

Success at 90 days is NOT a massive positive ROI. It is proof of a viable go-to-market motion. You should have clear, data-backed answers to these questions:

Have we identified a channel that can predictably reach our ICP?
Do we have messaging that resonates enough to generate engagement (clicks, views, etc.)?
Have we generated any marketing-sourced leads (MQLs, demos, trials)?
What is our initial Cost Per Lead (CPL) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)? Is it within a reasonable range of our target?

If the answer to these questions is “yes,” you don’t have a firehose of revenue yet, but you have something more valuable: a machine. It’s small, maybe a little clunky, but it’s a machine you can now pour fuel into (i.e., budget) to scale. When evaluating your investment, look at the agency fee and ad spend versus these proven outcomes. A clear understanding of your marketing pricing and the results it drives is essential for making smart decisions about your next quarter's budget.

If the answers are “no,” a good agency will have clear hypotheses about why not and a plan to test new channels or messaging. If they are defensive or blame the algorithm, it’s a red flag.

This 90-day mark is the moment of truth. You’ve laid the foundation, launched the first campaigns, and gathered enough data to see the path forward. The uncertainty of early-stage marketing is starting to be replaced by the predictability of a scalable growth engine. And for a founder, that predictability is priceless.

Ready to put your marketing on autopilot? Book a call with Harsha to walk through your current marketing workflow and see how AgentWeb can help you scale.