Should we hire one agency or several specialists?

If you can find genuine depth under one roof, one system beats three vendors, because budget can follow performance across channels instead of defending territories. If you do split channels across agencies, force shared reporting and a single budget conversation, or you will pay the silo tax.

How big should the agency be?

Big enough for coverage during Q4 and launches, small enough that the people who pitched you actually work your account. Ask directly how many brands your pod covers.

What results should we expect in the first 90 days?

Efficiency first: wasted spend cut, tracking fixed, forecasts built. Compounding growth from content, rank, and creative comes after. A partner who promises hockey sticks in the first month is telling you what you want to hear, which is itself an answer.

Does beauty-only focus really matter?

The dynamics that decide profitability, like retailer price parity, review velocity gates, tentpole calendars, and prestige positioning, are all category-specific. A generalist can learn them on your budget, or you can hire someone who already paid that tuition.

Hiring Guide

How to Choose a Beauty Marketing Agency

Every agency pitch deck in beauty says the same three things: data-driven, full-funnel, results-focused. This guide is the filter we would use if we were on your side of the table. Yes, we are an agency, so read it with that in mind. The criteria still hold.

The structural questions matter more than the creative ones: who owns your P&L outcome, how many hands your money passes through, and whether anyone sees the whole system.

The three species of agency

Almost every option you'll evaluate falls into one of three buckets:

01Channel specialists: deep on one platform, like an Amazon agency or a Meta agency. Excellent depth, but nobody owns the whole, and you become the integration layer between them
02Full-service generalists: one roof, many categories. Integration exists, but beauty nuance usually doesn't; your brand manager may have spent last quarter on auto parts
03Category specialists: beauty-only shops that run multiple channels as one system. Rarer, and the model we obviously believe in, because beauty's channel dynamics (retailer price parity, prestige positioning, review velocity, tentpole calendars) are the whole game

The silo tax

When your social agency, Amazon agency, and search agency are different companies, three predictable things happen. Attribution fights: each claims the same sale. Budget stalemates: nobody recommends moving money away from themselves. And blind spots: the TikTok demand that converts on Amazon three days later belongs to no one's report.

The silo tax doesn't show up as a line item. It shows up as growth that costs more every quarter.

How to actually evaluate

Five checks that predict the relationship better than any case study reel:

01Ask what number they report to your CFO. Margin-literate agencies answer instantly
02Ask for a story about recommending a client spend less, with specifics
03Ask who, by name, will work your account and how many brands that person covers
04Ask how they measure the effect of one channel on another. Listen for method, not philosophy
05Check their category receipts: real brand names, real numbers, and rank movements you can verify yourself

When to switch agencies

The tell is rarely a single bad month. It is reporting that keeps describing activity instead of outcomes, recommendations that always require more budget, surprise at questions about margin, and a P&L that looks worse while the dashboards look great. Six months of that pattern is enough evidence.

Frequently Asked

Questions we get on the first call.

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Written by the Navigo team. Beauty, only beauty.

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