5 Questions to Ask Before
Hiring Any Marketing Agency.

Most agency "interviews" are theater. The agency pitches, you nod, you sign. You find out 90 days in whether they were any good. These five questions flip the dynamic, and the answers tell you everything.

1. "What does month one actually look like, week by week?"

This is the single most revealing question you can ask. Good agencies have a clear, specific answer involving discovery, audits, baseline measurement, and a real plan for first deliverables. They'll talk about reviewing your sales data, understanding your offer, and getting onto your ad accounts to see what's actually happening before they change anything.

Bad agencies say something like "we hit the ground running." Translation: there's no discovery phase because they're going to apply the same playbook they used for the last 50 clients. You're not a project. You're a template.

The follow-up question that seals it: "Can you show me the deliverables from week one for your last new client?" If they can't, that's the answer.

2. "Who will actually be working on my account day to day?"

The pitch team and the delivery team are almost never the same people. This is the agency world's oldest bait-and-switch. The senior people you meet during sales are billable elsewhere. Your account gets handed to a junior the day the contract is signed.

Get specific names. Ask for LinkedIn profiles. Ask how many other accounts that person manages. Ask whether they'll be on the weekly call, or just sending the report.

If the answer is "we have a team approach", that's code for "no one specific is accountable."

3. "What are you not willing to do for a client?"

This tests whether the agency has a point of view or whether they're just a vendor.

The wrong answer: "We're flexible, whatever you need." (Translation: no principles.)

The right answer sounds like: "We won't promise specific rankings." Or "We won't bid heavily on your own branded keywords unless competitors force us to." Or "We won't take a retainer if the math doesn't support a real return, we'll tell you to your face."

Boundaries signal expertise. Agencies that won't say no to anything are agencies that don't know what works.

4. "How do you decide what to test next?"

This separates execution shops from strategists. Every campaign needs ongoing optimisation, but how that optimisation gets prioritised matters a lot.

Bad answer: "We're constantly optimising." (How? Based on what? Toward what?)

Good answer: "We run a weekly review where we look at these specific metrics, identify the biggest gap between current and potential, and pick the highest-leverage test for the next sprint. Here's what we tested for our last client, why we picked it, and what it produced."

You're looking for a system, not just enthusiasm.

5. "When would you fire us as a client?"

This one flips the power dynamic and almost no one asks it. The answer tells you what they actually value.

Healthy answers include things like:

• "If you stopped giving us access to the data we need to do the work."
• "If we agreed on a strategy and you kept overriding it without explanation."
• "If the math stopped making sense and the relationship wasn't worth the time."

Unhealthy: "We'd never fire a client." Translation: they'll keep cashing your cheques long after the work has stopped being good for either of you.

The pattern

These questions all do the same thing: they force the agency to stop reciting their pitch and actually think. The agencies that field them comfortably are the ones with real experience and a real point of view.

The ones that get squirmy or evasive: that's exactly why this list exists.