What to Look for in a Marketing Agency Before You Sign Anything

What to look for in a marketing agency comes down to a handful of things that most briefs never actually test for: commercial honesty, relevant experience, and whether the people pitching are the people who will actually do the work. The agency market is large, loud, and full of firms that are better at winning business than delivering it.

Getting this decision right matters more than most clients realise. A bad agency relationship costs you time, money, and often six to twelve months of market momentum you cannot get back.

Why Most Agency Selection Processes Miss the Point

I have been on both sides of this table more times than I can count. I have run agencies through pitches, and I have sat in boardrooms helping clients choose between shortlisted firms. The selection process most companies run is optimised for the wrong things.

A typical RFP asks about credentials, case studies, team structure, and day rates. These are reasonable questions. But they are surface questions. They tell you what an agency has done, not how they think, not how they handle a campaign that is underperforming, and not whether they will be honest with you when the data goes the wrong way.

Early in my career, I watched a client choose an agency almost entirely on the strength of a pitch deck. The deck was genuinely impressive. The creative was sharp, the strategic narrative was compelling, and the senior team who presented it were exactly the kind of people you want in a room. Six months later, that client was back on the market. The senior team had handed the account to a junior planner, the strategic narrative had not survived contact with the brief, and the relationship had broken down over a dispute about what the campaign was actually supposed to achieve.

The pitch had been designed to win, not to set up a working relationship. That is a more common problem than the industry likes to admit.

If you want a broader view of how agencies operate and what shapes their decisions, the Agency Growth and Sales hub covers the commercial mechanics behind how agencies grow, price, and retain clients. Understanding that context makes you a sharper buyer.

Does the Agency Have Relevant Experience, Not Just General Experience?

There is a difference between an agency that has worked in your sector and an agency that has solved your specific problem. Most credentials decks blur this distinction deliberately.

When I was running iProspect, we grew the team from around 20 people to over 100 across several years. One of the things that shaped how we won business was being honest about where our experience was genuinely deep and where we were learning. Clients who valued that honesty became long-term clients. Clients who wanted to hear that we had done everything before, perfectly, tended to be the ones who ended up disappointed.

When you are evaluating an agency, push past the logo wall. Ask specifically: what was the brief, what did you do, and what happened to the client’s business as a result? Not the campaign metrics. The business metrics. If an agency cannot connect their work to a commercial outcome, that is worth noting.

Sector experience matters, but problem experience matters more. An agency that has scaled a subscription business from 10,000 to 100,000 customers understands something specific about acquisition economics, churn, and lifetime value that a generalist agency does not, regardless of whether they have worked in your category before.

You can get a sense of the range of services different agencies offer by looking at how the market structures itself. The Semrush breakdown of digital marketing agency services is a useful reference point for understanding what different specialisms actually involve and where the boundaries tend to sit.

Who Will Actually Work on Your Account?

This is the question most clients forget to ask, and it is the one that matters most operationally.

The pitch team and the delivery team are often different people. In larger agencies especially, the senior strategist who presents your campaign thinking may have no ongoing involvement once the contract is signed. Your day-to-day contact might be an account manager who joined six months ago, supported by a team that is spread across multiple clients and working to utilisation targets that leave little room for deep thinking.

Ask directly: who will own this account? What does their week look like? How many other clients are they managing? What is the escalation path if something goes wrong? These are not rude questions. They are the questions a commercially serious client should be asking.

If the agency is evasive or pivots back to the senior team, that tells you something. Good agencies are transparent about their delivery model because they are confident in it.

Does Their Pricing Structure Align With Your Success?

Pricing tells you how an agency thinks about the relationship before you have even started working together.

A retainer model that charges for hours has a structural misalignment built into it. The agency earns the same whether your campaigns perform or not. There is no financial incentive for them to move faster, think harder, or push back on a strategy that is not working. That does not make retainers wrong, but it does mean you need to build accountability into the contract rather than assuming the agency will self-impose it.

Performance-based models sound appealing in theory. In practice, they are complicated by attribution disputes, external factors, and the fact that not all marketing activity has a clean, measurable output. I have seen performance contracts become adversarial very quickly when the client and agency disagree about what caused a result.

The Semrush overview of agency pricing models gives a clear breakdown of how different structures work in practice. Read it before you go into a commercial negotiation.

What you are looking for is a pricing model that creates shared incentives, with clear deliverables, defined review points, and a process for adjusting scope when circumstances change. Vague retainers with no output definition are a recipe for frustration on both sides.

Do They Think About the Full Funnel, or Just the Bottom of It?

One of the things I have become more clear-eyed about over the years is how much of what gets credited to performance marketing was going to happen anyway. Someone who was already in-market, already aware of your brand, already close to a decision, converts on a paid search ad and that click gets the credit. The awareness work, the brand building, the category presence that created the intent in the first place, none of that shows up cleanly in the attribution model.

Think of it like a clothes shop. Someone who has already tried something on is far more likely to buy than someone browsing from the street. Performance channels are often reaching the person who already has the item in their hands. The harder, more valuable work is reaching the person who does not yet know they want it.

When you are evaluating an agency, ask them how they think about demand generation versus demand capture. If their answer is entirely focused on conversion, retargeting, and lower-funnel efficiency, you are talking to an agency that will optimise what exists rather than grow what is possible. That might be exactly what you need. But you should make that choice consciously, not by default.

Good agencies have a view on where your growth is actually going to come from. They can hold a conversation about brand and performance together, not as separate disciplines managed by separate teams with separate budgets and no shared logic.

Will They Push Back When You Are Wrong?

This is the one that is hardest to evaluate in a pitch, and the one that matters most in a working relationship.

I spent my first week at Cybercom in a brainstorm for Guinness. The founder had to leave for a client meeting, turned to me, and handed me the whiteboard pen. I had been there five days. My internal reaction was something close to panic. But the situation required me to have a point of view, defend it, and move the room. That experience shaped how I think about agency value. An agency that just reflects your thinking back at you is not an agency. It is an expensive mirror.

The best agency relationships I have seen, and the ones I am most proud of from my own time running agencies, were built on constructive disagreement. The agency brought a perspective the client had not considered. The client pushed back. Something better emerged from the friction. That dynamic requires an agency that is confident enough to hold a position and a client that is secure enough to hear it.

In a pitch, you can test for this. Present a brief that has a flaw in it. A flawed assumption, a budget that does not match the ambition, a target audience that is too narrow. See if the agency spots it and says something. If they build their response around the flawed premise without questioning it, they are telling you something important about how they will behave when the campaign is live and something is going wrong.

What Does Their Measurement Approach Look Like?

An agency’s measurement framework is a window into how commercially serious they are.

Vanity metrics are still everywhere. Impressions, reach, engagement rate, share of voice. These numbers are not meaningless, but they are not business outcomes. An agency that leads with these metrics in reporting is telling you that they are more focused on demonstrating activity than demonstrating impact.

Ask any agency you are considering: what does success look like at 90 days, at 6 months, at 12 months? How will you measure it? What would cause you to recommend a change in strategy? How do you handle a campaign that is underperforming?

The answers will tell you a great deal. An agency that can articulate a clear measurement framework, that acknowledges the limits of attribution, and that has a defined process for course-correcting is an agency that has thought seriously about delivery. An agency that promises specific ROI figures before they have seen your data is one to be cautious about.

Having judged the Effie Awards, I have seen the work that wins effectiveness prizes. The common thread is not brilliant creative or clever media buying in isolation. It is rigorous thinking about what the work is supposed to do, and honest measurement of whether it did it. That thinking should be present in any agency you hire, not just the ones chasing awards.

Specialism Versus Full-Service: Which Do You Actually Need?

The full-service agency proposition is appealing. One relationship, one invoice, integrated thinking across all channels. In practice, it often means mediocre execution across multiple disciplines rather than excellence in any of them.

Most businesses are better served by a specialist agency for their primary channel or challenge, with clear coordination across any other partners they use. An SEO agency that lives and breathes search will outperform the search team inside a full-service agency almost every time. A social-first agency will do more interesting, better-performing social work than the social department of a generalist shop.

The coordination cost of managing multiple agencies is real, and it should not be dismissed. But the performance gap between a specialist and a generalist is usually larger than that coordination cost, particularly for businesses where one channel is disproportionately important to growth.

If you are building out a social media presence from scratch, for example, Buffer’s overview of social media agency structures gives useful context on how these firms are typically organised and what genuine specialism looks like in that space.

The honest question to ask yourself is: what is the one thing I most need to get right in the next 12 months? Find the best agency for that thing. Do not let the appeal of simplicity lead you to a generalist who is adequate across the board and excellent at nothing.

Cultural Fit Is Real, But It Is Not the Same as Liking the People

You will hear a lot about cultural fit in agency selection, and it is a legitimate consideration. But it is frequently confused with personal chemistry, which is a different thing entirely.

Liking the people in the pitch room is not a reliable indicator of whether the relationship will work. Some of the most productive agency relationships I have seen were between clients and agencies who had very different personalities and communication styles but shared the same standards for work quality and the same intolerance for excuses.

What you are actually looking for is alignment on how you work, not whether you would enjoy having dinner together. Do they share your expectations around response times, reporting cadence, and escalation? Do they have the same definition of a good brief? Do they value the same things in a piece of work?

The agencies I have seen fail in client relationships almost always failed on process and expectation alignment, not on creative or strategic capability. The work was fine. The relationship fell apart because no one had agreed upfront on how decisions would be made, how feedback would be given, and what would happen when things went wrong.

Spend time on this in the selection process. Ask for a sample status report. Ask how they run a briefing session. Ask what happens when a deadline is missed. The answers are more revealing than any case study.

There is more on how agencies structure their client relationships and what drives retention versus churn in the Agency Growth and Sales section of The Marketing Juice. If you are making a significant agency investment, it is worth understanding the commercial dynamics on the other side of the table.

The Questions Worth Asking Before You Sign

To pull this together practically, here are the questions that cut through the pitch theatre and get to what you actually need to know.

Ask them to walk you through a campaign that did not work and what they learned from it. Any agency worth hiring has had campaigns that underperformed. How they talk about failure is more instructive than how they talk about success.

Ask them what they would do differently with your brief if the budget were half the size. This tests whether they understand priorities or whether they have just spec’d out the maximum possible scope.

Ask them to name a client they lost and why. This is uncomfortable, and a good agency will answer it honestly. An agency that claims they have never lost a client for performance reasons is either very new or not being straight with you.

Ask what they are not good at. Agencies that can articulate their limitations clearly are agencies that know themselves. That self-awareness is a strong predictor of whether they will be honest with you when it matters.

And ask who specifically will be on your account, what their experience is, and how their time will be allocated. Get this in writing in the contract. It is a reasonable ask and any serious agency will accommodate it.

Choosing a marketing agency is a significant commercial decision. Treat it like one. The firms that win pitches are not always the firms that deliver the best work. Your job in the selection process is to find the gap between those two things before you sign, not after.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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