Questions to Ask a Marketing Agency Before You Sign

The questions you ask a marketing agency before signing a contract will tell you more than their pitch deck ever will. Most agencies are skilled at presenting well. The ones worth hiring are the ones who answer difficult questions without deflecting.

This article covers the questions that actually separate capable agencies from expensive disappointments, organised around the commercial decisions you need to make: capability, accountability, pricing, and fit.

If you are still working out what type of agency relationship you need before getting into specific questions, the broader context on agency growth and the different models available is worth reading first. It will help you frame the conversations you are about to have.

What Should You Ask About Their Experience and Capabilities?

Early in my career I sat in enough agency pitches to know that the work shown in credentials meetings rarely reflects the work you will actually receive. The best case studies are always front and centre. The failures are nowhere in the room.

So start here: ask them to tell you about a campaign or engagement that did not go to plan, and what they did about it. An agency that cannot answer this question honestly either has no meaningful experience or is not the kind of partner you want making decisions on your behalf.

Specific questions worth asking on capability:

• Which of your current clients is closest to our situation, in terms of sector, budget, and business model? Can we speak to them?
• Who specifically will work on our account day-to-day, and what is their experience level?
• What do you not do well, or what would you refer out?
• How do you stay current on platform and channel changes?

That last question matters more than it sounds. The operational demands of running a content or digital agency have changed substantially over the last few years. Agencies that are not actively investing in how they work, including how they use emerging tools, tend to deliver yesterday’s approach at today’s prices.

On the question of who will actually work on your account: I have seen this go wrong repeatedly. A senior team wins the business, a junior team runs it, and the client does not find out until three months in. Ask for names. Ask for CVs if necessary. Make it a contractual requirement if the answer feels evasive.

How Do You Ask About Strategy Without Getting a Sales Pitch Back?

Most agencies, when asked about their strategic approach, will give you a version of their sales narrative. That is not their fault. It is what the question invites. So change the question.

Instead of “what is your approach to strategy?”, try: “What would you need to know about our business before recommending a channel mix?” or “What would make you recommend we do less paid media, not more?”

The second question is particularly revealing. An agency that sells paid media services has a financial incentive to recommend paid media. A good agency will acknowledge that tension and explain how they manage it. A less good one will pivot straight into a case study about ROAS.

I spent years overvaluing lower-funnel performance. When I look back at some of that work now, I think a meaningful portion of those conversions were going to happen regardless. We were capturing existing intent more than we were creating new demand. Growth, real growth, requires reaching people who were not already looking for you. An agency that only talks about conversion efficiency is telling you something important about the limits of their thinking.

Ask them directly: how do you balance brand-building activity with performance marketing? What does the channel mix look like at different stages of business growth? If they cannot answer that question without defaulting to “it depends on your goals,” push harder. It always depends on goals. That is not an answer.

What Questions Expose How They Think About Measurement?

This is where most client-agency conversations go wrong. Measurement is treated as a reporting function rather than a strategic one, and agencies often benefit from that confusion.

Ask these questions directly:

• How do you attribute results across channels, and what are the limitations of that model?
• What metrics do you report on that you know are imperfect, and how do you account for that?
• If our results are flat after three months, how will we know whether that is a strategy problem, an execution problem, or a market problem?
• What does success look like in year one versus year three?

Any agency worth hiring will be honest about the limitations of their attribution model. Last-click attribution overstates the contribution of bottom-funnel channels. Multi-touch models require clean data that most businesses do not have. Media mix modelling is powerful but expensive. None of these tools give you the full picture. An agency that presents any of them as definitive is either naive or hoping you will not ask.

I judged the Effie Awards for several years. The entries that stood out were not the ones with the most impressive dashboards. They were the ones where the team could clearly articulate what they were trying to change in the market, how they would know if it was working, and what they would do differently if it was not. That kind of clarity is rare. It is worth asking for.

How Do You Ask About Pricing Without Feeling Like You Are Negotiating Blind?

Agency pricing is genuinely complex, and the range of pricing models across digital agencies is wide enough that direct comparisons are often misleading. But that complexity is sometimes used as cover for opacity, and you should not accept that.

Ask for a breakdown of what you are paying for: how many hours per month, at what seniority level, allocated to which activities. If an agency quotes a monthly retainer without being able to show you what that buys, that is a problem. You are not buying a vague promise of marketing activity. You are buying specific work from specific people.

If you are considering a retainer structure, it is worth understanding what an inbound marketing retainer typically covers and how deliverables are scoped. Retainers can work well, but only when both sides are clear on what is included and what triggers a scope conversation.

Questions to ask on pricing:

• What is included in the monthly fee, and what is billed additionally?
• How do you handle scope creep? What is the process when we ask for something outside the original brief?
• Are there performance incentives in your model, and if so, how are they structured?
• What happens to our assets, data, and accounts if we end the relationship?

That last question is more important than most clients realise. I have seen businesses end agency relationships only to discover that the agency holds the login credentials to their ad accounts, their analytics setup, or their CMS. Always clarify ownership upfront. It should be in the contract.

What Should You Ask If You Are Evaluating a Specialist Agency?

The questions shift slightly depending on the type of agency you are evaluating. A specialist social media agency, for example, should be asked different things than a full-service operation.

If you are considering whether to outsource social media marketing, ask how they handle brand voice consistency across platforms, what their process is for reactive content during a reputational issue, and how they measure community health beyond follower counts. These are not trick questions. They are the questions that separate agencies with genuine social expertise from ones that post content and call it a strategy.

If you are a B2B business, or operating in a sector with specific dynamics, ask whether the agency has worked in your space before. A business that operates more like a staffing or professional services firm, for example, has very different marketing dynamics from a consumer brand. The approach to marketing for staffing agencies is a useful example of how sector-specific context changes what good looks like.

For any specialist agency, ask: what would make you recommend a different specialist for a particular part of our brief? An agency that claims to do everything well within their specialism is usually overstating. Good specialists know where their expertise ends.

How Do You Assess Whether an Agency Is Commercially Grounded?

There is a version of marketing that exists to celebrate itself. Award submissions, creative for creative’s sake, campaigns that generate buzz but no business impact. I have worked in agencies where that culture was dominant, and I have worked in agencies where commercial outcomes were the only thing that mattered. Neither extreme produces great work. But if you are a business with a P&L to protect, you want an agency closer to the commercial end of that spectrum.

Ask them: what is the most commercially successful campaign you have run, and how do you define that? If the answer is full of awards and impressions but light on revenue or customer acquisition data, that tells you something. Ask what the client’s business situation was before and after the engagement. Ask whether the client is still with them.

One of the things I look for when assessing an agency’s commercial maturity is how they handle their own finances. An agency that cannot manage its own accounting and financial operations sensibly is unlikely to be rigorous about yours. It sounds like an odd proxy, but agencies that are chaotic internally tend to be chaotic in how they manage client budgets too.

Ask how they track and report on budget utilisation. Ask what happens if a channel underperforms and budget needs to be reallocated mid-month. Ask who in their organisation has commercial authority to make those calls. The answers will tell you whether you are dealing with a commercially literate partner or a creative shop that treats the numbers as someone else’s problem.

What Questions Should You Ask About Process and Communication?

Process questions are often treated as administrative. They are not. How an agency communicates, escalates problems, and manages the day-to-day relationship is a significant determinant of whether the engagement produces good work.

Ask:

• How often will we meet, and what is the agenda structure for those meetings?
• What is your escalation process if something goes wrong?
• How do you handle disagreements about creative or strategic direction?
• What do you need from us to do your best work?

That last question is one most clients never think to ask. A good agency will have a clear answer. They will tell you they need timely feedback, access to internal data, a single point of contact with decision-making authority, and a brief that reflects actual business priorities rather than a committee’s wish list. If an agency cannot tell you what they need from you, they probably have not thought carefully about how the relationship works in practice.

I have also found it useful to ask agencies how they handle the pitch-to-delivery transition. There is often a significant gap between the team that wins the business and the team that runs it. The pitch process is designed to impress. What happens after the contract is signed is what actually matters. Ask them to walk you through the onboarding process in detail. Ask who is in the room on day one.

When I was at Cybercom early in my career, I found myself running a brainstorm for Guinness after the founder had to leave for a client meeting and handed me the whiteboard pen. No briefing, no handover, just: carry on. It worked out, but it was a reminder that agencies often ask their people to operate in conditions that clients never see. The question is whether the agency has built systems that mean quality does not depend on who happens to be in the room that day.

How Do You Evaluate Whether They Are the Right Fit for Your Business Size and Stage?

Agency fit is not just about capability. It is about whether your business is the right size and stage for the agency you are considering, and vice versa.

A large agency with a roster of FTSE 100 clients will likely assign your mid-market business to its most junior team. A boutique agency that has only worked with early-stage startups may not have the operational rigour for a more complex brief. Neither is a bad agency. Both are a bad fit.

Ask directly: what is the typical size and stage of your clients? Where would we sit in terms of budget relative to your other accounts? What proportion of your revenue do we represent? That last question matters. If you are a small account at a large agency, you will not get the attention the pitch implied. If you are a large account at a very small agency, you may be carrying them operationally in ways that create dependency and risk.

If you are evaluating whether a full-service model is even the right structure for your needs, it is worth being clear on the full-service marketing agency definition and what that model actually commits you to. Full-service is not inherently better than a specialist. It depends on whether your brief is genuinely integrated or whether you are paying for capabilities you will rarely use.

If you are going through a formal procurement process, the structure of how you frame your requirements matters as much as the questions you ask in the room. A well-constructed RFP for digital marketing services will surface the right information before you get to the pitch stage, which makes the live questions sharper and the decision cleaner.

One last thing worth asking: what does a successful first six months look like from their perspective? Not from yours. Theirs. An agency that has thought carefully about this will give you a specific answer about what they need to learn, what they need to build, and what they expect to be able to show you by the end of the period. An agency that cannot answer it is telling you their onboarding process is improvised.

There is a lot more on how agencies operate, how they are structured, and how to get the best from them across the Agency Growth and Sales hub. If you are working through a major agency decision, it is worth spending time there before you commit.

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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