Before you hire one, be sure an agency is the thing you need.
An agency solves a capacity problem well and a direction problem badly. Two minutes here saves a retainer that was aimed at the wrong thing.
Start herePick the sentence that sounds like your week.
Each one opens a free tool that gives you a specific read in a few minutes. Nothing asks for a card and nothing books a call before you have an answer.
- You are ready to hire a firm
You want two or three names worth calling, checked before they reach you.
A ranked list and one introduction - You think you need someone senior
There is a plan to write and nobody whose job it is to write it.
A straight answer on whether a fractional CMO fits - You cannot tell which part is broken
Leads, conversion, delivery and your own calendar all look like the problem at once.
Six questions and a named bottleneck - You want the work done
The plan exists. What is missing is the hands to build and run it.
A credit-based bench that ships
Five stages. One of them is costing you the most.
Companies between one and five million usually have every stage working a little and one stage failing hard. Spending on the wrong stage is the expensive mistake, and it is the one that looks like progress while it happens.
- Offer
What you sell, to whom, at what price. When this is the constraint, more traffic makes the problem louder.
- Demand
How strangers find out you exist. One channel carrying everything is the usual shape here.
- Conversion
What happens between interest and yes. Long gaps and quiet follow-ups live at this stage.
- Delivery
Whether the work ships without you. This is the stage that caps how much you can sell.
- You
Every decision routed through one person. The ceiling nobody writes down.
The questions people ask before they start
- Is this free?
- Yes. Every tool linked above runs in your browser and emails you the readout. Nothing asks for a card and no answer is held back behind a call.
- What happens to what I type in?
- The readout goes to you. If you ask to be matched to a provider, your request goes to one firm that fits what you described, and only then. We publish who we are and you can reply to any email and reach a person.
- Do you get paid if I hire someone?
- On the ranked lists, one card is marked Featured and is our own bench, Fracs. Every other firm on those lists earned its place and pays nothing. Where an introduction leads to work, Fracs is the party doing the work and charges for it.
- Why "i need a marketing agency"?
- It is the sentence people type when this problem gets loud enough to search. Naming it plainly beats a headline that sounds like a brochure, and it means the page you landed on is about the thing you asked.
- How long does the diagnostic take?
- Six questions, about three minutes, and the answer arrives on the page before anything is emailed. You can close the tab and keep the answer.
- I would rather just talk to someone.
- Write to hello@primortul.com and say what is going on. A person reads it. Doing the diagnostic first makes that conversation shorter and more useful, though it is not a condition of it.
Primortul, out of Ankeny, Iowa.
The tools are free and they answer to you. Two of the routes above lead to firms we have checked, and one leads to our own bench, which says so on the page. That is the whole business model, stated up front.
Ask a person instead →