How to choose a marketing agency in Libya

An agency can only plan and price what you tell it. Write down the answers below before the first call, and send the same answers to every agency you approach. You will spend less time in meetings, and the proposals that come back will be comparable.

• The problem, in one sentence. Describe what needs to change rather than the deliverables you have in mind. "Customers in Benghazi do not know we deliver there" gives an agency something to solve. "Ten posts a month and a video" only gives it something to price.

• The audience. Who you need to reach and what they think of you now. If you have more than one audience, rank them.

• What already exists. Logo files, brand guidelines if you have them, past campaigns, product photos, and a list of every page and account you run, with the name of whoever holds access to each. You will need that list again when you settle ownership.

• Who approves. One person with the final say, and an agreement on how quickly they will answer. A post that waits a week for approval often misses the moment it was made for. If the approver does not read Arabic, decide now how the Arabic posts will be checked. One way is a short English note on what each post says and why, plus a native speaker you trust reading the Arabic itself.

• The deadline. A launch, an event, a season such as Ramadan, or the date by which you want to see first results. The date decides what can realistically be produced.

• A budget range. Give a range, even a wide one. Without it, each agency guesses, and the proposals cannot be compared. With it, each agency can tell you what it would do within that range and what it would leave out.

Three kinds of supplier sell something called marketing. A page-posting service keeps your pages active with a set number of posts each month, which suits a business that already knows what it wants to say. A production house films, photographs, and edits to a brief you supply, which suits a campaign that is already planned. An agency that plans and produces starts from what your audience needs to understand, decides what to make and where it should appear, and then makes it.

Each is a fair purchase. Problems start when a company pays for one and expects another: a posting service asked to rescue a launch nobody planned, or a production house expected to write a strategy it was never hired for. The label "digital marketing" will not tell you which of the three you are getting, because it names channels and leaves open what goes on them. If you are still deciding between marketing and public relations, read our guide to PR vs marketing in Libya first.

Some checks apply to any agency, and our guide to choosing a PR agency in Libya covers them: published work you can inspect, Arabic written natively rather than translated, production held to one standard, and results measured against indicators agreed before work starts. Be wary of any agency that guarantees results.

A monthly content calendar is the easiest thing for an agency to produce and for a client to approve. It has dates and captions, so it looks like a plan. Its value depends on the decisions behind it, and if those decisions were never made, a month of well-designed posts leaves your audience with nothing in particular to remember.

Before you approve any calendar, ask the agency to explain in a few sentences who the work is for, what those people should understand after a month of it, and why it chose these channels. If the answer comes back as a list of post types, the planning has not happened yet. For social media management, ask to see the platform strategy before the editorial plan, because the plan should follow from it.

Then ask what the agency would produce first, and why. A considered answer names one piece of work and ties it to your problem. If the agency lists everything at once, it has not chosen yet.

Some agencies plan in-house and pass the filming or editing to freelancers and production houses. The arrangement can work, but it ties your deadline to someone else's calendar, so you should know about it before you sign.

Ask which parts of the proposal the agency will buy in, and who directs the shoots for those parts. Then ask whether the quoted price already includes the subcontractor's fee or will rise once the brief is final.

Your social media pages, ad accounts, website domain, and the material made for you are company assets. Keep them in your company's name, and give the agency only the access the work needs, which you can withdraw at any time.

• Pages and accounts. Created under your company's business account, with people from your own team as owners and the agency added as an admin or partner. If a page was opened years ago from a former employee's or a freelancer's personal account, fix that before a new agency starts.

• Source files and raw footage. Agree in writing that editable design files and raw footage belong to you, and how they will be delivered. Exported images alone will not let anyone change a design later.

• The exit. Before you sign, ask what happens to your pages, accounts, and files if you stop working together. A good answer is short: everything stays with you, and the agency's access is removed.

Paid advertising adds a second budget on top of the agency's fee: the money that goes to the platform itself. Whoever runs your ads, ask them for these four things:

• An ad account in your company's name. Ads should run from an account your company owns, so its history and results stay with you if you change agencies.

• The fee and the spend on separate lines. The proposal should show what goes to the agency and what goes to the platform. One bundled figure makes it hard to know how much was actually spent on ads.

• Receipts from the platform. If the agency pays the platform on your behalf, ask for the platform's own invoices or billing records as well as the agency's summary.

• Reports that say what was tested. A useful report says what was tried and what will change because of it. Reach figures on their own cannot show what worked or why.

Once you sign, the proposal is the document you will hold the agency to, so read it for its commitments. Five things should be written in plain words:

• Deliverables you can count. How many posts, videos, designs, or shoots, per month or per campaign. "Full management of your pages" cannot be checked; "twelve posts and four short videos a month" can. Count outputs the agency controls, and treat a promised number of followers with suspicion, since followers can be bought.

• Review rounds and sign-off. How many rounds of changes each piece includes, and who on your side gives final approval.

• What is excluded. Ad spend, printing, influencer fees, translation, travel. A proposal that excludes nothing leaves the exclusions to surface later as extra charges.

• How the price changes. What happens to the fee if you add a piece of work, drop one, or pause for a month.

• Who owns what is made. A line confirming that pages, accounts, and source files belong to your company.

Pattrix is a strategic communications and PR agency in Tripoli, Libya, with full production capability, and we deliver marketing execution (campaigns, social media, content, and events) through the same process. We start with a working session where we understand what your business needs its audience to understand. We then present a clear strategic direction, and we produce nothing until it is agreed.

Film, photography, and post-production are all in-house, under one roof in Tripoli, Libya, as our page on content and video production describes. Paid media buying is not on our published service list, so if your plan includes ads, ask whoever runs them for the four things listed above. Our publicly listed project range runs from $500 to $10,000, depending on scope. Where an engagement lands within that range is agreed before work begins, along with the scope and deliverables it covers.

Our published commercial work includes Hyundai Libya, where we designed the showroom identity system and the campaign visuals that connect the space to the market. For Albaraka Insurance, we set the commercial visual direction and produced the campaign system across digital and print. Our case studies describe our approach and scope of work. We do not publish client-confidential figures or invented results.

To find the best marketing agency in Libya for your business, apply this guide to every agency you are considering, and ask each one the ownership questions before you sign. Our page on hiring a marketing agency in Tripoli, Libya sets out what our marketing work covers.