Hiring a tattoo marketing agency, and what to ask first
Most agencies that pitch tattoo studios have never run a tattoo campaign. The portfolio is dentists and gyms, and the plan is a funnel with a lead form. Here is what the work should look like in this niche, and how to check whether the agency in front of you knows it.
What the work actually is
Running ads for a studio is four things: turning artist clips into ads, keeping one campaign aimed at a sensible radius, watching what a conversation costs each week, and making sure inquiries get answered. Everything else is decoration.
If an agency talks about brand awareness, follower growth or a content calendar before it talks about conversations and follow-up, it is selling you the wrong product.
Six questions to ask
What will you measure? The answer should be cost per conversation, or cost per booked session if they can see your calendar. Reach, impressions and follower growth are not answers.
How will you use our artists' work? Raw video uploads into one campaign, not boosted posts, not stock footage, not a slideshow of photos with music.
What radius will you target, and why? They should ask where your clients actually drive from before answering. If they name a radius before seeing your booking data, they are guessing.
Who answers the DMs? Ads create conversations, and someone in the shop has to reply within a day. An agency that ignores this will show you cheap conversations and no bookings.
What happens to the ad account if we stop? You should own the ad account, the page and the pixel. Agencies that run your ads from their own business portfolio are holding your history hostage.
Can I see the numbers, not a case study? A screenshot with a big revenue figure means nothing. What a conversation costs and how many of them there were per week is the useful answer. Ours are published on what tattoo studio ads actually cost.
How pricing usually works
Most agencies charge a monthly fee for managing the ads, and you pay the ad budget directly to Meta or TikTok. Be careful with two structures: a percentage of ad spend, which rewards the agency for spending more of your money, and long contracts with a setup fee, which is where an agency protects itself against its own results.
Month to month is normal in this niche and you should expect it. If the work is good, nobody needs a twelve month lock.
When you do not need an agency
If your books are full for three months, you do not need ads, you need better pricing. If you have no healed work to show yet, ads amplify nothing. And if nobody in the shop can answer messages within a day, fix that first, because it is free and it is the thing that turns conversations into money.
If you would rather run it yourself, the whole sequence is written out in the tattoo studio marketing playbook, and the campaign structure is on meta ads for tattoo artists.
What we do
We run Meta and TikTok ads for tattoo studios in the US, in English and Spanish, month to month, and we take on three new studios a month so each one gets real attention. You keep the ad account and everything in it.