Choosing the best
marketing agency.

"Someone gave me a name, I am checking it out".

To choose the right marketing agency for your company, check projects relevant to the service you need, client experiences and who will coordinate the work. If you want one team to handle several activities, assess how it connects strategy, channels and spending priorities. This page gives you selection criteria and a survey of the services Italian agencies declare.

To answer it we needed to know what the market is really made of, beyond how it describes itself. Between June and July 2026 we collected 3,103 Italian marketing agencies from their public Google Maps profiles, recording declared services, tags, rating and number of reviews. The limit of the survey has to be said straight away: these are public declarations and ratings, not checks in the field. They are enough, though, to take apart the two signals almost everyone chooses on.

The first criterion is a knockout round.

If the agency or freelancer you are considering belongs to a community of marketers with a leader, or follows a guru, stop there. It is not a judgement on the people, it is three mechanisms that concern you closely. The visibility of the group is artificial, because the community cites itself, reviews itself and gives itself awards. By joining it you join it too, and from that moment a thousand other members have a reason to sell you something. And quality has nobody answering for it, because the method comes down from the leader as doctrine: when the data contradicts it, the group changes subject instead of changing method.

This criterion comes before all the others. If the answer is yes, the others are not needed.

What a 4.9 on Google really means.

A 4.9 rating alone is not enough to choose an agency. In the June-July 2026 survey, 74.1% of the 3,087 profiles with a rating scored at least 4.9. Read the score alongside the number, dates and content of reviews, then look for experiences relevant to the service you need.

Deep Marketing survey of 3,103 public Google Maps profiles of Italian agencies, June and July 2026. The rating is present on 3,087 profiles.

The median number of reviews in the sample is 14. This describes the distribution of reviews; it does not tell you how many reviews a particular agency with a 4.9 rating has. Check its review count, dates and platforms before comparing scores.

You can apply the same check to Deep Marketing on the client reviews page, which links to the review platforms. Read the experiences and check which work they describe before comparing scores.

What full-service agencies declare.

A full-service agency coordinates several disciplines around your goals. The survey records the services agencies declared on public profiles in June-July 2026; it does not certify the quality of their work or which activities they deliver in-house.

Press office work is the least declared service among the categories in the sample: 184 agencies out of 3,103. The real jump, though, is in the combination. Web design, advertising, SEO, branding and press office all five declared together: 54 agencies out of 3,103, 1.74%. Adding social, content and e-commerce brings it down to 24. Those declaring themselves international are 6.8%, and international with a press office 1.3%.

Ask who will handle each activity, which skills are in-house and which partners take part. Check who coordinates strategy, channels and spending priorities, so you know who is responsible when the project needs a joint decision.

Price: the two extremes say the same thing.

A quote far above the average usually makes you pay for things that do not touch the result: the representative office, the events, the sales network that brought you there. One far below is inexperience, or land-grabbing below cost, with the fee rising once changing supplier has become hard work.

The defence is the same in both cases: two or three comparable quotes, and every figure explained line by line. If a line cannot be explained, you have already learned something.

What has to be written down before you sign.

Five things, and you can ask for all of them without looking difficult:

• A project built on your case, instead of a generic quote. The in-depth study is done inside the work and on your real data: no serious supplier gives it away before signing, and demanding it makes you choose whoever promises most.
• The baseline of the starting numbers, put in writing by the first month at the latest, with the reports always compared against it.
• The name of the person who will follow the work, written into the contract, so you know what you have bought.
• What comes out at the end: which content and data, in what format, in how long, with what written guarantee.
• The minimum duration and the exit conditions, read before and not after.

One thing, though, you should not demand: a phone call with another client. Confidentiality agreements often prevent it, and a no on that request is more often seriousness than concealment. Look instead at who the clients are, how long they stay, and whether the published cases carry numbers with the context around them.

On brand work there is one more warning: the return shows over years, and a monthly report there measures only intermediate signals. When the result is far away, the check moves from the report to the supplier.

Lock-in is not judged by the licence.

"Proprietary platform" as an accusation is convenient and wrong, and it would be friendly fire for us too, given that we wrote the CMS our sites run on. Declared openness is often fake: supplier databases shared between several clients, content scattered across the formats of twenty plugins, themes and licences that work as a padlock, migrations that take weeks.

The criterion that holds is another one, and it applies identically to anyone, us included: what comes out, in what format, in how long, with what written guarantee. Here the answer is an SQLite database you can download whenever you want and final handover as a contractual obligation, in the format you ask for, and you find it written on the DeepCMS page. Ask everyone else the same question and compare the faces.

And us, measured by these criteria.

With Deep Marketing you can coordinate advertising, websites, SEO, branding and press office work through one contact. Check the published case studies, client experiences and awards with their issuing bodies, years and sources. These help you assess the work; an award alone does not establish which agency suits your company.

If you need a specific activity, compare skills and relevant projects. If you want an outsourced marketing department, also assess how the team coordinates its services. Explore digital advertising, professional websites and press office work. Our Verona office and Veneto projects page is in Italian.

In the first 20-minute call, tell us about your company and the work you want to entrust to the team.