Questions to ask before you hire a marketing agency

Before you hire a marketing agency, ask six questions: who owns what you pay for, what number they report, where your ad money goes, who answers the leads, who makes the ads, and what happens if you part ways. The answers tell you more than any sales deck.

Who owns the website and the ad accounts?

The answer you want is you. The domain, the site and the ad accounts should be in your name, with the agency working inside them. If the agency owns them, leaving means starting over from nothing, and that keeps a lot of businesses paying for work they are not happy with.

What number do you report?

Look for leads, and what each lead cost you. Impressions, reach and clicks are easy to grow and hard to pay a bill with. Ask to see a sample report before you sign, and read it the way you would read your own numbers: could you tell whether the month went well?

Where does my ad money go?

Your ad spend should go to Google and Meta, and you should be able to see it there yourself. Ask how the agency charges: a fee for the work, kept separate from the spend, is easy to understand. A single blended number is not.

Who answers the leads?

Many agencies stop at the click. Ask what happens after someone fills in the form or calls: who calls them back, and how soon. The first business to call back usually gets the job, so a lead that waits until tomorrow is often a lead someone else already booked.

Who makes the ads?

The answer you want is people, matched to your budget and what you sell. For a bigger campaign that can mean professional photographers and videographers. For a smaller one it can mean photos of your own crew and your own work, which often beat anything staged. AI can speed up testing and reading the results. It should not be inventing your brand for you.

What happens if we part ways?

You should keep everything: the site, the domain, the accounts, the data and the leads. Ask how the handover works before you need it. Be wary of anything that makes leaving expensive or slow.

These are the questions we would want asked of us. If you want to hear our answers, book a call.