Choose an agency for several brands with a weighted scorecard: eight criteria, a score from 1 to 5 for each, a weight that reflects your priorities, and evidence you ask for before you read the pitch. Give every agency the same test brief, have two people score separately, then compare. That takes most of the charm out of the decision and leaves the work.
TLDR: Score agencies on strategy, brand governance, creative, workflow, reporting, team, platform expertise and commercial terms. Weight them so they add up to 100. Ask for evidence behind every score, and run a paid test brief with your shortlist of three.
The scorecard
Change the weights to suit you. This is a starting point for a multi-brand team.
| Criterion | Weight | What a 5 looks like | Evidence to ask for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strategy | 15 | Ties content to your goals and to each brand's audience | A strategy for your test brief, with the reasoning |
| Brand governance | 15 | Handles several voices without any bleed between them | How they store voice, assets and rules for each brand |
| Creative quality | 15 | Distinctive work that sticks to the brief in your category | Two relevant case studies and some unpublished drafts |
| Workflow and approvals | 15 | Clear stages, named approvers, set turnaround times | A walkthrough of one live approval flow |
| Reporting | 15 | Reports tie back to goals and compare brands fairly | A real report with the client details removed |
| Team and capacity | 10 | Named people, backup cover, a realistic workload | The org chart for your account, with hours |
| Platform expertise | 10 | Knows the quirks of each platform first-hand | How they'd handle your top two platforms |
| Commercial terms | 5 | Clear scope, a change process and exit terms | A draft contract and rate card |
Multiply each score by its weight and divide by 5 to get a total out of 100. Treat anything under 70 as a no, and any single 1 as a stop.
Run the test brief before you score
Pitches tell you little, because agencies pitch with their best people. Instead, give your three finalists the same one-week test, paid or at least clearly scoped:
- One real brand, one real campaign goal.
- A two-week content plan, three sample posts and a one-page reporting outline.
- A deadline of five working days.
Score what comes back, and count the questions they asked you. Good agencies ask about your audience, your approval chain and what has failed before.
What to ask about each criterion
Brand governance. For a multi-brand client, this is where agencies differ most. Ask: "How do you stop brand A's voice leaking into brand B?" A good answer involves separate workspaces, guidelines for each brand and review steps, not "our writers are careful."
Workflow and approvals. Ask how a post gets from draft to live, and who can stop it. Look at your own side too: the approval-to-publish scorecard checks the handoffs at your end. For reference, in Mydrop's data on posts that went through client approval, the median time from submission to approval was 6 hours, and 66% were cleared within 24 hours.
Reporting. Ask to see a real report. It should answer "did this move our goal?", compare each brand with its own median, and make sense without the agency in the room. White-label reports with share links and scheduled delivery are a good sign. Have a look at social media reports to see what that looks like.
Red flags
- No named team. "We'll assign your team once you've signed."
- Metrics that stop at reach and followers, with nothing linking them to leads, sales or the goal in the brief.
- Guaranteed growth numbers. Nobody controls the algorithm.
- No references you can call, or only the ones the agency picked.
- Its own tools only. You can't see the calendar, approvals or analytics yourself.
Make visibility part of the contract
Whatever the scorecard says, ask for read access to the calendar, approvals and reports. If the agency works on a shared platform, you can see what's scheduled and what's waiting for sign-off without waiting for a monthly deck. Mydrop's client portal is built for exactly this: clients review and approve posts without needing a login. If you're an agency reading this, the same scorecard makes a good checklist for your next pitch, and our agency solutions page shows the tools.
Once you've chosen, use the onboarding checklist and ramp plan to agree SLAs, and write the goals from the creative brief KPI list into the contract.
Next step: copy the table into a spreadsheet, set your weights, and send the same test brief to your shortlist this week. Score each response on its own before anyone discusses it.
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