Hiring a marketing agency is one of the few significant purchases where you cannot inspect the product before you buy it, cannot easily judge quality after you buy it, and won’t know for roughly ninety days whether you made a mistake.
You can, however, ask questions. And the useful thing about this particular industry is that the bad actors are not subtle. They have tells. They say specific sentences, in a specific order, with a specific expression on their face.
Here are the eleven questions, and more importantly, the answers that should end the meeting.
1. “Who is actually doing the work?”
The person selling you is frequently not the person doing it. That’s normal and fine. What’s not fine is not knowing.
Good answer: names, roles, where they sit, who you’ll email at 4pm on a Thursday.
Answer that should worry you: “You’ll have a dedicated account manager.” That’s a person who relays messages. Ask who they’re relaying them to.
2. “How many hours a month does this retainer buy?”
This is the single best question on the list and nobody asks it. Your retainer is hours. Everything else is packaging.
Good answer: a number, plus a rough split across strategy, production, and reporting.
Answer that should worry you: “We don’t really think about it in hours.” They do. Everyone does. That’s how payroll works.
3. “What happens in month four?”
Months one through three are setup, and setup always looks busy. Month four is when you find out whether you bought a project or a partnership.
Good answer: a specific ongoing cadence. What ships weekly, what gets optimized monthly, what gets revisited quarterly.
Answer that should worry you: anything that describes month four using the word “monitor.”
4. “Show me a client in a business like mine, and tell me the number.”
Not a logo wall. Logo walls are a decorative art form.
Good answer: a named client, the situation, what they did, and a result with a number attached. Ours look like this: Southern Charm Limos to #1 in Google with double the peak-season bookings. Angwin Academy doubling enrollment inquiries in a single semester. A law firm that put $8,000 into Local Services Ads and closed $31,000.
Answer that should worry you: “We increased their engagement by 300%.” Three hundred percent of what? Engagement pays no invoices. Ask what happened to the phone.
5. “What do you need from me, and how often?”
Every agency needs something from the client. Photos, approvals, access, the answer to “wait, what do you actually charge for that?” The bad ones don’t tell you until they’re behind and it’s suddenly your fault.
Good answer: a clear list and a rhythm. “Fifteen minutes a week, photos when you’ve got them, approvals within two business days.”
Answer that should worry you: “Nothing! We handle everything.” Nobody can market your business without ever talking to you. That answer is either a lie or a description of very generic work.
6. “What are you going to stop doing?”
A strategy is a set of choices, and choices exclude things. If nothing is being excluded, nothing has been decided.
Good answer: “You’re on five platforms and two of them are wasting your time. We’d cut TikTok and X and put those hours into local search.”
Answer that should worry you: a proposal where every service they offer is somehow exactly what you need. Remarkable coincidence. Happens constantly.
7. “How do I get my stuff back if we split up?”
Website, domain, Google Business Profile, ad accounts, analytics, social logins. You should own all of it. Some agencies build on accounts they control, which means leaving costs you your entire digital presence and you get to start over at zero.
Good answer: “It’s all in your name. Here’s how we’ll set that up on day one.”
Answer that should worry you: any version of “we host it on our platform” that doesn’t come with a clear, cheap exit. Hostage-taking is a business model in this industry and it is rarely announced as one.
8. “What’s the contract length, and why that length?”
Long contracts aren’t automatically predatory. SEO genuinely takes months, and an agency that can be fired in week three can’t responsibly plan for month nine. But the reason should be about the work, not about their revenue predictability.
Good answer: a real explanation tied to how long the work takes to compound. Or, like us: month to month, because we’d rather earn the next month than pre-sign it.
Answer that should worry you: twelve months, no exit clause, and a shrug.
9. “What does reporting look like, and what’s on it?”
Good answer: organic sessions, calls, form fills, closed business where trackable, tied back to what changed and what’s next.
Answer that should worry you: an automated dashboard with impressions, reach, and a graph that goes up and to the right because the axis starts at a number they chose. If the report can’t be read as “here’s what you spent and here’s what came back,” it isn’t a report. It’s an alibi.
10. “What have you gotten wrong?”
My favorite question, because almost nobody has an answer rehearsed for it.
Good answer: an actual story. A campaign that underperformed, why, what they changed. Anyone who has run marketing for real has a graveyard, and being willing to walk you through it is the strongest possible signal that you’re talking to a practitioner instead of a sales process.
Answer that should worry you: “Honestly? Nothing comes to mind.” Then either they’re new, or they’re not telling you the truth, and it doesn’t much matter which.
11. “What would you do if I only had half this budget?”
The most revealing question of the eleven. It asks them to prioritize in front of you.
Good answer: instant and specific. “Local SEO and reviews. Drop the ads until the site converts.” A real strategist has a ranked list in their head at all times.
Answer that should worry you: “We’d have to scale everything back proportionally.” That means there was never a ranking. It means the proposal was a menu, not a plan.
The meta-tell
Ask all eleven and watch for one thing: does this person get more specific under pressure, or less?
Real operators get sharper. You ask a harder question and they lean in, because you’ve finally asked about the part they find interesting. Sales operations get smoother and vaguer. More reassurance, fewer nouns, and at some point the phrase “at the end of the day.”
Specificity is the whole signal. It’s very hard to fake and almost impossible to fake for an hour.
One thing to do before any of these meetings
Walk in knowing what’s actually wrong with your marketing. Otherwise you’re evaluating three different diagnoses of a problem you can’t independently describe, which is how people end up buying whatever was pitched most confidently.
Get a free Visibility Scorecard first. We’ll check your website, your Google presence, and who’s currently outranking you locally, then send you a plain-English read on where you actually stand. Twenty-four hours. No call, no pitch, no packages.
Then take that report into every meeting, ours included, and ask these eleven questions. If we’re not the right answer, you’ll know fast, and you’ll have gotten a free audit and a decent list out of it.
That seems like a fair trade for eleven minutes of your afternoon.
Keep it flyt. 馃殌