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

What to look for in a marketing agency comes down to three things: whether they understand your commercial problem, whether their model fits your budget and expectations, and whether the people who pitch you are the people who’ll actually work on your account. Most clients get one out of three. That’s why agency relationships fail at a rate that should embarrass the industry.

This isn’t a checklist of nice-to-haves. It’s a framework for avoiding the mistakes I’ve watched clients make for 20 years, and, if I’m honest, a few I’ve seen agencies exploit.

Why Most Agency Selection Processes Miss the Point

The standard agency selection process is theatre. A procurement-led scorecard, a 90-minute credentials presentation, a creative brief, a pitch, a decision. It feels rigorous. It rarely is.

I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve run agencies that won pitches we had no business winning, because we were better at pitching than we were at the work. I’ve also seen genuinely excellent agencies lose to competitors who simply performed better on the day. The pitch process selects for presentation skills, not delivery capability.

The irony is that the things clients should be evaluating, team stability, commercial alignment, process rigour, are almost never covered in a pitch. So let’s cover them here.

If you’re exploring the broader landscape of agency models, types, and what to expect from each, the Agency Growth & Sales hub on The Marketing Juice covers the full picture. What follows is specifically about how to evaluate an agency before you commit.

Does the Agency Actually Understand Your Commercial Problem?

The first thing I look for is whether an agency is solving a marketing problem or a business problem. Those aren’t the same thing, and agencies that can’t tell the difference will burn your budget efficiently while your revenue stays flat.

Early in my career I was obsessed with lower-funnel performance. Click-through rates, cost per acquisition, return on ad spend. It felt like accountability. What I’ve come to understand is that a significant portion of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. You’re capturing intent that already exists, not creating demand. If your growth has stalled, more efficient capture of existing intent won’t fix it. You need to reach people who don’t know you yet.

A good agency will ask about your growth constraint before they propose a channel mix. Are you losing to competitors at the consideration stage? Is your category awareness low? Are you over-indexed on existing customers and under-investing in acquisition? These are commercial questions. An agency that skips them and goes straight to tactics is telling you something important about how they think.

Ask them directly: “What do you think our actual problem is?” If they can’t answer that without a paid discovery phase, or if their answer is essentially a restatement of your brief, move on.

Are the Case Studies Actually Relevant?

Case studies are the currency of agency credentials. They’re also one of the most misleading signals in the selection process.

A case study proves an agency did something once, for a specific client, in a specific market, with a specific budget, at a specific moment in time. It does not prove they can replicate it for you. I’ve judged the Effie Awards, which are specifically designed to reward effectiveness rather than creativity, and even there, context is everything. A campaign that drove 40% sales uplift for a challenger brand in a low-involvement category tells you almost nothing about what an agency can do for a B2B software company trying to enter a new vertical.

When you’re reviewing case studies, ask three questions. First, is the commercial context comparable to yours? Category, margin structure, purchase cycle, competitive set. Second, what was the agency’s specific contribution versus the client’s internal team or other agencies? Third, what went wrong, and what did they do about it? Any agency that presents only successes is either lying or hasn’t been in business long enough to have failures. Both should concern you.

The full range of services a digital marketing agency can offer is broader than most clients realise. Understanding what’s in scope, and what isn’t, is part of evaluating whether a case study is genuinely relevant to your situation.

Who Will Actually Work on Your Account?

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

When I was running agencies, I knew exactly which senior people we’d put in a pitch room to maximise our chances of winning. A founder, a strategy director, a creative lead. Impressive, credible, commercially sharp. After the contract was signed, the account would typically be handed to a mid-weight team, sometimes a junior team, with the senior people checking in quarterly. This isn’t unique to agencies I ran. It’s standard industry practice.

Ask to meet the people who will actually be working on your account, not the pitch team. Ask for their CVs. Ask what their current client load looks like. Ask what the escalation path is if the day-to-day contact leaves. Staff turnover in agencies is high, and losing your account manager six months into a campaign is more significant than most clients anticipate.

If the agency resists this line of questioning, that tells you something. A confident agency with a strong team will have no problem introducing you to them.

Does the Pricing Model Align With Your Interests?

Agency pricing structures are not neutral. They encode incentives, and those incentives shape behaviour whether the agency intends it or not.

A retainer model rewards stability and relationship management. It doesn’t inherently reward performance. A commission-on-spend model rewards higher spend, which may or may not correlate with better outcomes for you. A project model rewards scope management and delivery speed. A performance-based model sounds appealing until you realise that defining what counts as performance, and attributing it correctly, is genuinely difficult.

None of these models is inherently better. The question is whether the model you’re being offered aligns with what you actually need. Understanding how digital marketing agencies price their services is worth doing before you enter any negotiation, because pricing conversations reveal a lot about how an agency thinks about value and accountability.

I’d also look carefully at what’s included and what’s not. Agencies are skilled at writing scopes of work that look comprehensive but exclude the things that end up costing you money later. Creative production. Reporting. Strategy reviews. Platform fees. Ask for a worked example of what a typical month looks like in terms of actual deliverables, not just a list of services.

Can They Separate Strategy From Execution?

Strategy and execution are different disciplines. Agencies that are excellent at one are often mediocre at the other, and the ones that claim to be world-class at both usually aren’t.

I’ve seen this play out many times. A boutique strategy consultancy produces a genuinely insightful brand positioning. Then they hand it to their production team, who turn it into creative work that’s technically competent but commercially inert. Or a highly capable performance marketing agency delivers excellent channel efficiency but has no view on whether the channel mix is actually right for the growth stage the client is in.

Before you brief an agency, be clear about what you’re actually buying. If you need someone to think, hire thinkers. If you need someone to execute, hire executors. If you need both, either find a genuinely integrated agency (they exist, but they’re rarer than they claim) or manage two separate relationships and take responsibility for the integration yourself.

One useful test: ask the agency to critique your current marketing. Not in a flattering, “here’s how we’d improve it” way, but genuinely. What’s wrong with it? What would they stop doing? An agency that can give you a clear, commercially grounded answer to that question is demonstrating strategic thinking. An agency that hedges and compliments is demonstrating that they want to win the pitch.

What Does Their Measurement Approach Look Like?

How an agency thinks about measurement tells you almost everything about how commercially serious they are.

There are agencies that measure inputs, activity, impressions, clicks, posts published, emails sent. There are agencies that measure outputs, leads generated, cost per acquisition, revenue attributed. And there are agencies that try to connect their work to actual business outcomes, market share, customer lifetime value, incremental revenue. These are very different things, and most agencies operate at the first level while presenting as if they operate at the third.

Ask them: “How will we know if this is working?” Listen carefully. If the answer is primarily about platform metrics, be cautious. Platform metrics are a perspective on reality, not reality itself. Google Analytics tells you what happened inside Google Analytics. It doesn’t tell you whether your brand is getting stronger, whether you’re reaching genuinely new audiences, or whether the people you’re reaching are the ones most likely to drive long-term growth.

I’m not suggesting agencies should only be measured on revenue, that’s often too blunt and too slow to be useful. But there should be a clear line of sight between what they’re doing and what you’re trying to achieve commercially. If they can’t draw that line, you’ll spend a lot of money on activity that feels productive but isn’t.

Specialist or Full-Service: Which Model Fits Your Situation?

The full-service agency model is seductive. One relationship, one invoice, integrated thinking across all channels. In practice, it often means you’re getting average capability across everything rather than excellence in the areas that matter most.

Specialist agencies, whether that’s SEO, paid media, content, social, or brand, tend to have deeper expertise in their domain and more current knowledge of how their channels are actually performing. The trade-off is that you’re managing more relationships and taking on more of the integration work yourself.

My general view, shaped by watching a lot of client-agency relationships from the agency side, is that most businesses are better served by one or two specialist agencies than by a full-service agency that’s spread thin. The exception is when integration genuinely matters, when your brand, media, and content strategies need to be developed in lockstep, and you don’t have the internal resource to manage that integration yourself.

If you’re evaluating social-specific agencies, Buffer’s breakdown of social media marketing agency models is a useful reference point for understanding how these businesses are typically structured and what to expect from them.

Do They Push Back, or Just Agree?

My first week at Cybercom, there was a brainstorm for Guinness. The founder had to step out for a client call and handed me the whiteboard pen. I was new, the room was full of people who’d been working on the account for years, and my first instinct was to defer. I didn’t. I asked a question that reframed the brief entirely, and the room went quiet for a moment before someone said “that’s actually the right question.” That moment taught me something I’ve carried ever since: the most valuable thing someone in a room can do is say the thing that challenges the assumption everyone else is working from.

The same principle applies to agency relationships. An agency that agrees with everything you say is not a strategic partner. They’re a production resource. That’s fine if production is what you need. But if you’re paying for thinking, you should expect to be challenged.

During the selection process, notice whether the agency pushes back on your brief at all. Do they ask questions that suggest they’ve thought about your problem independently? Do they flag anything that looks like a flawed assumption? If they take your brief at face value and come back with a proposal that simply executes it, they’re telling you what kind of partner they’ll be.

The best agency relationships I’ve been part of, on both sides, have been ones where the agency felt safe enough to tell the client they were wrong. That requires trust, which takes time to build. But you can see the seeds of it in how an agency behaves during the pitch process.

What Are the Red Flags Worth Walking Away From?

A few things I’ve learned to treat as genuine warning signs, not just minor concerns.

An agency that can’t explain their process clearly. Not in jargon, but in plain terms: what happens in week one, who does what, how decisions get made, what happens when something goes wrong. If they can’t articulate this, the process either doesn’t exist or they don’t want you to look at it too closely.

An agency that talks primarily about awards. Awards are a proxy for peer recognition, not commercial effectiveness. I’ve seen campaigns win major creative awards while the client’s sales declined. I’ve seen campaigns that would never win anything drive significant, sustained business growth. The two are not the same thing.

An agency that’s reluctant to discuss previous client departures. Every agency loses clients. The question is why. A good agency can talk about this honestly: the relationship ran its course, the client brought the work in-house, there was a strategic misalignment. An agency that becomes evasive or defensive when you ask is hiding something.

And finally, an agency that promises outcomes they can’t control. No agency can guarantee a specific revenue outcome. Anyone who does is either naive or lying. What they can commit to is a process, a level of rigour, a set of deliverables, and a framework for measuring whether the work is moving in the right direction. That’s what accountability looks like in practice.

There’s more on how agencies operate commercially, including how they price, structure teams, and manage client relationships, across the Agency Growth & Sales section of The Marketing Juice. Worth reading if you’re going into a selection process with a serious budget on the line.

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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