When vetting marketing agencies, know the right questions to ask. Hiring the wrong marketing agency can be a very expensive and time-consuming mistake. Getting the best help with your marketing starts with asking the right questions. Learn more by downloading the eBook by Adhere Creative: The Complete Guide to Hiring A Marketing Agency - http://www.adherecreative.com/how-to-hire-an-inbound-marketing-agency

1. 18 QuestionsYou never thought to ask your marketing agency.

2. We’ve broken questions into the
following sections:
General & Communication
Relevant Experience
Budget & Payment
Results
Software & Tools
1
2
3
4
5

3. How you communicate with your
agency can make or break the
relationship.
11
General
Communication

4. What is your process when it
comes to understanding my
business?
You want your agency to know your business as
good, if not better than your top executives.
1

5. 2
How often do you work with
in-house teams?
Some agencies are not used to sharing duties with
an in-house marketing team. Be sure everyone plays
nice.

6. 3
What’s the communication
process like?
Does it agree with how you prefer to communicate
with the agency? Are the meetings frequent enough
for you? Are they using a project management
platform you find simple to use?

7. 4
How often do you stay in
touch and collaborate on
objectives?
If an agency bills hourly, you don’t want to waste
your budget bugging them when they could be
working on your project. Just be sure you’re okay
with their preferred schedule of communication.

8. 5
How will we be maintaining
contact? GoToMeeting?
Facetime? Skype? In person?
You don’t want to stray to far from the agency’s
standards. It makes them more efficient. Just be sure
you agree with their preferences so there wont’ be
confusion or issues down the road.

9. 6
Is your team located in-house or
do team members work
remotely?
You may have a preference for the team to be all in-
house. Call us old school, but we believe there is
value to having a team work together in a physical
environment.

10. An agency who understands
your business can more quickly
get going and share relevant
strategies from past
experiences.
2
Relevant
Experience

11. 7
Have you had experience with
clients that operate in my
industry?
Agencies who specialize already understand your
target market, how to reach them and where to pull
in resources (writers, media, etc.) to benefit your
campaign.

12. 8
Do you have experience with my
market and do you have ideas on
where we should advertise to
them?
Agencies with industry experience can pull from
past successes and failures. They will be quicker
to market and potentially provide more impactful
results, the first time.

13. 9
Do you have any case studies
that we could review?
Get the details of how they drove results, not just
what the results were. Look to see how much the
agency drove the strategy and execution vs the
client vs the industry.

14. 10
(Local only) Do you have
experience marketing in X local
area?
Do you want to spend months explaining the
geographic area to your agency or hire one that
already understands it? Chances are, if you’re hiring
for local-marketing, you should hire a local agency.

15. Make sure you understand
exactly what you’re getting for
the money.
3
Budget &
Payment

16. 11
What will I receive for my
budget? Please break it down
for me.
This is in terms of deliverables and estimated results.
No agency can tell you for $4,000/month you’ll rank
for X keyword. But they can tell you it’ll provide these
activities with the goal of raising X keyword higher on
the SERP and here’s where they saw success using
this strategy in the past.

17. 12
How does our budget stack up
compared to your other clients?
You don’t want to be an agency’s biggest or smallest
client. Biggest client, and you could be too big for the
agency to handle. Smallest client, you won’t get the
same level of service or priority as a higher value
client.

18. 13
How does the agency bill for its
services?
Some agencies are hourly, some are by the
deliverable, some are retainers.

19. Be sure you are in alignment
with the agency in terms of
expected results.
4
Results

20. 14
What should we expect after a
month/3 months/6 months of
working with you?
What will be delivered and when do we expect to
start seeing results against our stated goals and
objectives?

21. 15
What are your average results
based on these specific areas
we want to market in (i.e. digital,
trade journals, social media,
etc.)?
What are your average results based on these
specific areas we want to market in (i.e. digital, trade
journals, social media, etc.)?

22. 16
How often should I expect a
review of what you’ve done (to
make sure you’re still on track
for goals.)
Too often, and you may not be allowing for
enough time to capture good data. Not often
enough, and you may be losing money when you
should be pivoting the campaign.

23. Alignment here is critical to a
frustration-free agency
engagement.
5
Software
& Tools

24. 17
What tools do you use to
measure results? What
analytics software do you use?
Make sure you’re comfortable with the reporting
format. Ask to see a sample report of performance
from the agency.

25. 18
Will you work with the
technology I already use at my
company?
It’s a huge benefit if the tools you already use in-
house are also widely used at the agency. Looking
for an expert with HubSpot? Marketo? Salesforce?
Go find one! It’ll save you frustration in the long-run.

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