The Best Questions to Ask a Marketing Agency Before Hiring Them for Your Small Business

By ERIN LARISON

COO, Larison Media

Hiring a marketing agency is a pretty big decision for a small business.

Most small businesses don't have unlimited marketing budgets or a full internal marketing department overseeing the work. You may be handing an outside company thousands of dollars every month and trusting them with your website, your advertising budget, your brand and a meaningful part of how new customers find you.

The hard part is that agencies can look remarkably similar from the outside. Everyone does SEO. Everyone manages Google Ads. Everyone builds websites. And nearly everyone promises some version of more visibility, more leads and more growth.

So how do you figure out who actually knows what they're doing, who is a good fit for your business and what you're really signing up for?

Ask better questions.

Here are 10 I'd ask before hiring a marketing agency.

1. Have you worked with businesses like mine?

I don't think an agency necessarily has to specialize in your exact industry to do good work for you. Sometimes an outside perspective is actually helpful.

But they should understand what kind of business they're marketing.

A local HVAC company isn't marketed the same way as a law firm. A restaurant doesn't have the same customer journey as a B2B manufacturer. An ecommerce company has completely different goals from a business that needs someone to pick up the phone and schedule an appointment.

Ask about the businesses they've worked with that are similar to yours and what they've learned from them. I'd also ask how they think customers typically find and choose a business like yours.

If the answer is basically, "We work with lots of small businesses," keep digging.

And if they don't have experience in your industry, that's okay. Ask how they're going to learn it. I'd rather hear an agency admit what it doesn't know and explain how it's going to figure it out than pretend marketing works exactly the same everywhere.

2. What do you actually think my business needs?

You probably already have an idea of what you need when you start talking to agencies.

Maybe somebody told you that you need SEO. Maybe your website is 10 years old and you're embarrassed to send anyone to it. Maybe you've decided it's finally time to run Google Ads. Or maybe you're just thinking, We need more leads. Please help.

A good agency should be willing to look at the bigger picture before prescribing a service.

If your website gets plenty of traffic but nobody contacts you, sending even more traffic to it may not be the first thing I'd recommend. If your website converts well but hardly anyone can find it, that's a different problem. If you're generating plenty of leads but your sales team isn't closing them, that's different again.

Ask the agency what they would prioritize and why.

I'd also ask what they wouldn't recommend right now. That answer can be pretty revealing.

3. What exactly am I paying you to do?

This seems like an obvious question. It isn't always an easy one to answer after reading an agency proposal.

"SEO" isn't a scope of work. Neither is "social media management," "content marketing," "website management" or "paid advertising."

If you're paying for SEO, what is someone actually doing every month? Are they working on your website? Creating content? Handling technical issues? Working on your Google Business Profile? Building service or location pages?

If you're hiring someone to manage Google Ads, who's writing the ads? Who builds the landing pages? Who handles tracking? How often is someone actually reviewing the campaigns?

The same goes for social media. How much content are you getting? Who creates it? Is video included? Are you expected to provide photos? Who responds when somebody sends the business a message?

You don't need to understand how to do all of this yourself. That's the point of hiring someone.

But you should understand what you're hiring them to do.

4. What is this actually going to cost me?

Ask this directly.

There may be more than one number involved, and that doesn't necessarily mean the agency is hiding something. A Google Ads management fee and the money you're actually spending with Google are two different expenses. A website might also involve hosting, photography, software or ongoing maintenance.

Just make sure you know about those things before they show up on an invoice.

I'd want to understand the monthly agency fee, any setup costs, expected advertising spend and the kinds of requests that would fall outside my normal scope. I'd also read the contract and understand how long I'm committing, what happens if I cancel and whether the price can change.

Transparent doesn't necessarily mean cheap or simple. It means you understand the financial commitment you're making.

5. What results should I realistically expect?

This is where I'd be careful about anyone who sounds a little too certain.

"We'll get you to number one on Google."

"We guarantee 100 leads."

"We're going to double your revenue."

How?

Marketing performance depends on your market, competition, budget, reputation, pricing, website, offer, sales process and quite a few things your marketing agency doesn't directly control. That's why a responsible agency is probably going to ask a lot of questions before giving you a meaningful answer about results.

That doesn't mean you should accept, "Who knows? Marketing is unpredictable!"

Ask what they've seen in similar situations. Ask what they believe they can realistically improve. Ask what would have to happen for the investment to make sense.

And don't let the entire conversation revolve around numbers that sound impressive but don't necessarily help your business.

Ten thousand website visitors aren't particularly useful if none of them become customers.

6. How long is this going to take?

"It depends" may actually be the correct answer.

But I'd follow it immediately with: What does it depend on?

Different marketing strategies have very different timelines. Paid advertising can start generating visibility relatively quickly, although a new campaign still needs time to collect data and be optimized. SEO and content tend to be longer-term strategies. A new website has its own development timeline.

What you want is a reasonable picture of what happens next.

What will the agency be doing in the first month? What should you expect to know after 60 or 90 days? When should there be enough information to make decisions about what's working and what needs to change?

You may not have reached your ultimate goal in 90 days, but you shouldn't feel like you're writing checks into a black hole either.

7. How will we know whether this is working?

Marketing reports can contain a truly impressive number of numbers.

Impressions. Clicks. Rankings. Engagement. Website sessions. Reach.

Some of those numbers are useful. None of them automatically means your business is growing.

What actually matters depends on why you're doing the marketing in the first place. You may care about qualified leads, appointments, online purchases, cost per lead, customer acquisition cost, foot traffic or revenue.

Your agency should understand the business goal and be able to explain how the marketing metrics connect to it.

I'd also want to establish where we're starting. If we don't know what your website traffic, leads, conversion rates or sales looked like before the work began, evaluating improvement gets much harder.

The report shouldn't just prove that the agency did some stuff this month. It should help both of you make better decisions about what happens next.

8. What are you going to need from me?

Hiring an agency should take work off your plate.

It probably won't remove you from marketing completely.

Your agency may need photos, access to software, information from your sales team, approvals, business data or your expertise. If they're creating content, they're going to need some way to understand what your customers actually ask and how you would answer them.

That's a good thing. The strongest marketing usually includes knowledge that exists inside the business, not just whatever somebody at an agency can find on Google.

But you should understand how much of your time they'll need.

Who from your company needs to be involved? How often? How quickly do they expect approvals? What happens if you're unavailable?

There's a big difference between hiring an agency that needs an hour of your time every month and discovering after you sign that you've somehow acquired a second part-time job.

9. Who am I actually going to work with?

The person who runs your sales call may not be the person who manages your account.

That's completely normal.

You should still know who is.

Ask who your primary contact will be, who is actually doing the work and how often you'll talk. Find out how questions are handled and how frequently you'll sit down together to talk about strategy and performance.

This is one of those things that doesn't seem terribly important when you're comparing proposals but becomes very important six months into the relationship.

You're not only buying marketing services. You're going to be working with these people, potentially for years.

Make sure you understand what that relationship is going to look like.

10. What happens when something isn't working?

I really like this question because eventually something won't work the way everyone hoped.

An ad campaign may underperform. A landing page might get plenty of traffic without generating enough leads. A piece of content might go absolutely nowhere. An audience might respond completely differently than expected.

That's marketing.

What I'd want to know is what happens next.

How does the agency know something isn't working? How long do they let it run before making a change? How do they decide what to test next? And how transparent are they going to be when the numbers aren't good?

There's also another side to this. You don't want an agency that panics and changes the entire strategy every time there's a bad week.

I'd want to hear how they balance giving something enough time to work with recognizing when it's time to change direction.

So how do you actually choose an agency?

By the time you've had these conversations, you should understand what each agency thinks your business needs, why they're recommending it, what they'll actually do, what it will cost and what they'll need from you.

You should also have a pretty good sense of what it would be like to work with them.

Did they ask enough questions about your business before recommending something? Were they willing to tell you when they didn't know something? Could they explain marketing without making you feel like you needed a degree in it? Were they willing to talk about what could go wrong?

Those things matter.

The cheapest agency isn't automatically the wrong choice. The most expensive isn't automatically the best. And I'd be particularly careful about choosing the one that makes the biggest promises.

You're looking for the one whose thinking makes sense for your business, whose expectations seem grounded and whose people you trust enough to work through the parts that don't go exactly according to plan.

That's a much better basis for a long-term marketing relationship than a really impressive sales pitch.