Seven questions to ask a marketing agency before you pay them a cent

But we get a version of the same conversation constantly: someone’s been burned, paid six months of a retainer, and still can’t tie the spend to a single new job. They’re not stupid. They just didn’t know what to ask, because nobody had told them.

So here are the seven. Ask us the same ones.

1. “What will change in my business, and by when?”

The answer you want is a number and a date. More enquiries, in this range, within this window.

The answer you don’t want is a list of activities. “We’ll be posting three times a week, optimising your profile, and running a content strategy.” That’s a description of effort, not a promise of a result. You can be extremely busy on someone’s behalf and change nothing.

Watch for the swerve to vanity metrics. Impressions, reach, followers, “brand awareness.” None of those pay a supplier. If someone leads with reach, ask them to translate it into enquiries. If they can’t, that’s the whole answer.

2. “What happens if it doesn’t work?”

Most agencies have no answer to this, because the honest answer is “nothing happens to us, you just paid.”

There’s an asymmetry in this industry that people accept without noticing. You take all the risk. They take none. You pay in advance, and if the results don’t arrive, you’ve lost money and time and they’ve lost a client who was probably leaving anyway.

You don’t necessarily need a written guarantee. But you need to see them think about it. Someone who says “if we’re not shifting your numbers by month three, we’d tell you and we’d stop charging you” is telling you something real about how they operate. Someone who looks uncomfortable is telling you something too.

(We put ours in writing: more enquiries in 90 days than the 90 days before us, or we keep working free until you get them. That’s not a flex. It’s just the answer to this question, and you should demand one from everyone you talk to.)

3. “Who actually does the work?”

You’ll meet a good salesperson. Ask who does the work after you sign.

It’s a fair question and a good agency answers it plainly. What you’re testing for is the gap between the person who won you and the person who’s got you. Sometimes the work goes to a junior, sometimes offshore, sometimes to a subcontractor you’ll never meet. None of that is automatically bad. Not being told is.

Follow-up: “Who do I ring when something’s wrong?” If the answer is a support desk and a ticket number, you’re a small account in a big system. Decide if you’re okay with that.

4. “Do I own everything?”

Website. Domain. Google Business Profile. Ad accounts. Content. Photos. Analytics data.

Get it in writing that you own all of it and can take it with you.

This is the one that quietly ruins people. We regularly meet businesses who want to move on and discover the ad account with three years of history was built inside the agency’s own account, or the domain is registered to a company they’ve never dealt with, or the website is on a proprietary platform that can’t be exported. They have to start from zero. Some of that is deliberate lock-in. Some is laziness. It costs you the same either way.

Ask flat out: “If I left in twelve months, what do I walk away with?”

5. “What have you done for someone like me?”

Not a portfolio of logos. A specific business, roughly your size, in roughly your industry, with a before number and an after number.

An agency that has genuinely moved the needle for a local service business will tell you the story immediately and in detail, because it’s the thing they’re proudest of. A strong answer names the business and the numbers straight away. If instead the reply stays up at process, methodology and approach in the abstract, that gap is your answer.

Then ask the follow-up almost nobody asks: “Can I ring them?” Watch what happens next. That single question sorts the field faster than anything else on this list.

6. “What do you need from me?”

This one’s a trap in the nicest way, and it reveals more than the others.

An agency that says “nothing, we’ll handle it all” is either lying or about to produce generic work. Nobody can market your business well without your photos, your job details, your knowledge of what customers actually ask, and half an hour of your time now and then.

The right answer is specific and slightly demanding. We need photos from your jobs. We need to know your five most profitable services. We need you to answer the phone. We need twenty minutes a month.

That answer tells you they intend to do real work, and it tells you where it’ll fall over if you don’t hold up your end. It also lets you decide honestly whether you’ve got the capacity. Half the failed engagements we hear about failed because nobody said this bit out loud.

7. “What are you not going to do?”

A good answer sounds like: we’re not going to run ads until your site converts, because you’d be paying to send people somewhere that doesn’t work. We’re not going to do TikTok, because your customers aren’t there. We don’t do rebrands.

Anyone who does everything for everyone specialises in nothing. And an agency willing to talk you out of something is demonstrating the only thing that actually matters in this relationship, which is whether they’ll tell you the truth when the truth costs them money.

We turn down ads work regularly, because running ads to a broken foundation is the fastest way to spend money and learn nothing. That’s not restraint for its own sake. It’s just the order the work has to happen in.

The one you ask yourself

Before any of the seven: do you know what a customer is worth to you?

If you don’t, you cannot evaluate a single proposal you’re given, because you have no way of knowing whether $2,000 a month is expensive or a bargain. You’ll end up choosing on price, or on who you liked, which is how most of these decisions actually get made.

We wrote about working out that number. Do it before you take the meeting. It changes the meeting.

Use these on us

Ring us and ask all seven. If we fumble any of them, don’t hire us.