A marketing agency pitch is designed to be persuasive. Case studies feature the best quarter, the team in the room is often not the team on the account, and every proposal promises alignment with your objectives.
The questions below are useful because the answers are hard to rehearse. They also tend to surface how a firm actually operates.
Who will do the work day to day?
Ask for names, roles and how much of their week your account will take. A senior strategist in the pitch and a junior executive on delivery is common enough that it is worth asking directly rather than assuming.
What would you do in the first ninety days?
A useful answer is specific and sequenced, and usually includes a period of understanding the business before anything launches. An answer that jumps straight to campaign tactics suggests a template rather than a plan.
How does the marketing agency decide what not to do?
A firm that recommends every service it sells is describing its capability, not your priorities. The ability to say a channel is not worth it for your business right now is a good sign.
What does reporting look like, and how often?
Ask to see a real report from an existing client, with the confidential parts removed. You are looking for whether it connects activity to commercial outcomes, and whether it says anything about what will change next month.
Who owns the accounts, assets and data?
Ad accounts, analytics properties, domain registrations, design files and content should belong to you. Agree this before work starts. It is a straightforward question during onboarding and an awkward one during a handover.
What happens when something is not working?
Every account has a bad quarter. What matters is whether it gets raised early with a proposed change, or quietly buried under a favourable metric. Ask for an example of work that underperformed and what they did about it.
What do you need from us to do this well?
An agency that needs nothing from you is planning to work in isolation, which is usually how generic output happens. Expect them to ask for access to your sales team, your customers and your commercial numbers.
How long have your clients stayed?
Retention tells you more about delivery than any case study, and most firms are happy to answer if the answer is good. It is the last question worth putting to every marketing agency on your shortlist.
Four Media has worked with over 160 companies across a range of industries since 2005, and we are comfortable being asked all of the above. If you are drawing up a shortlist, put these questions to us and see how the answers compare.
