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Nine Questions to Ask a Marketing Agency
Most agency evaluation questions are easy to answer well and tell you nothing. "What's your process?" gets you a rehearsed slide. "Do you have experience in my industry?" gets you a yes. The useful questions are the ones where a bad agency has to either admit something or make something up.
Here are nine, with our own answers underneath — including the ones we don't come out of well.
1. What does it cost?
If you can't get a number before a second meeting, that's the answer. Pricing withheld until they've assessed what you can afford is pricing based on what you can afford.
Us: $1,500, $3,750 or $6,500 a month by tier, on the website. Add-ons for extra channels, locations and service lines are published too.
2. How do you make money besides my fee?
Ad spend commission, software referrals, white-labelled work marked up, reselling media. None of these are disqualifying. Not disclosing them is.
Us: Flat fee, zero commission on your media. We do earn affiliate commissions on some software — including a recurring 40% on GoHighLevel, which we also deploy for clients. That's a real conflict and it's why how we make money is its own page.
3. What's the last thing you told a client to stop spending money on, and what did it cost you?
The best question on this list. It requires a specific story and a real number, and an agency that has never advised against its own revenue will struggle to produce one.
Us: the recommendation we make most is "pause paid media and fix your callback times first," which under a percentage model would zero out our income on that account. It doesn't under ours — which is exactly why we don't use one.
4. Who actually does the work?
Not who's on the call. Whose hands are in the account, where are they, and how many accounts do they carry?
Us: Jared, on every account. That's the honest strength and the honest limitation — you get nine years of experience directly, and you get one person's capacity. If you need a team of twelve, we're the wrong shop and we'll say so.
5. What will you show me every month, and can I see a real example?
Ask for an actual anonymised report, not a description of one. If it leads with impressions and traffic rather than leads and revenue, that's the relationship you're buying.
6. Do I own everything if I leave?
Ad accounts, website, domain, analytics, tracking numbers, content, CRM data.
The correct answer is yes to all of it, in your own accounts, with you as owner and them granted access. An agency-owned ad account you can't take with you means your history and machine learning stay behind. It's a retention strategy dressed as convenience — and it's common enough that you must ask specifically.
7. What's the contract term and what happens if it isn't working?
Us: six-month minimum, because SEO and paid media genuinely don't produce a fair read faster than that. After that, monthly. We'd rather you could leave easily than have you stay because leaving is difficult.
Be sceptical of twelve-month lock-ins with no performance provision, and equally sceptical of no minimum at all — that usually means a churn-based model where nothing gets time to work.
8. What are you not going to do for me?
Every honest agency has a list. Watch what happens when someone claims not to.
Us: we don't do PR, we don't do traditional media buying, we don't do print or brand identity, and we don't implement field service or legal practice management software — we build marketing around those. We also don't take clients under about $500K in revenue, because the free playbook will serve them better than a retainer would.
9. Can I talk to a client who left?
Not a reference — anyone can supply three happy ones. Someone who stopped working with them, and why.
Us: this is where you should press us hardest. Ask us directly, and judge the answer on whether it's specific or evasive.
The tell that isn't a question
Watch what happens when you say "I'm not sure I should be spending on marketing at all right now."
An agency that immediately explains why you should is selling. One that asks what's going on in your business first, and might agree with you, is worth talking to further.
The best outcome of a first conversation is occasionally "not yet, here's what to do instead." We say that regularly, and it costs us nothing, because a business that isn't ready doesn't become ready by being sold to.
If you'd rather do it yourself, the guides are free and ungated. If you'd rather not, here's what we do and what it costs.
Written by Jared DeValk, founder of Nashville Digital. Published September 8, 2026.