01 / STRATEGY
Strategy & commercial thinking.
Good marketing starts before anyone opens Ads Manager or designs a post. These questions help you understand how commercially an agency thinks.
01. How will you get under the skin of our business?
A good agency should start with your business, not its services. Expect questions about revenue, margins, customers, products, sales cycles, seasonality, previous marketing and the things currently getting in the way of growth.
02. What would you need to know before recommending a strategy?
Be wary of anyone prescribing channels before they understand the problem. They should want customer insight, commercial context, existing data and a clear understanding of where you’re trying to get to.
03. How do you decide which marketing channels we should invest in?
The answer shouldn’t simply be “the channels we’re good at”. Look for a rationale based on your audience, buying journey, economics, existing data, competitive landscape and objectives.
04. How do you connect marketing activity to commercial goals?
Likes and clicks have their place, but marketing ultimately needs to support the business. A good agency should be able to connect its plan to leads, sales, revenue, retention, margin or another meaningful commercial outcome.
05. What should success look like in the first 90 days?
You may not see spectacular results immediately, particularly if you have a longer buying cycle. But you should expect clear priorities, proper measurement, testing underway and evidence that the agency is learning quickly.
06. How do you balance short-term results with long-term growth?
Performance activity can generate demand today. Brand, content, SEO, CRM and customer experience can make tomorrow easier. Good agencies understand that most businesses need both.
07. How would you define our ideal customer?
“We target everyone” is rarely useful. Your agency should be able to help identify the customers you most want more of, what motivates them and how their needs differ.
08. How do you approach positioning and value proposition?
Great marketing can’t permanently compensate for an unclear proposition. An agency should be willing to challenge what you’re saying, who you’re saying it to and why somebody should care.
09. What happens if you think our current strategy is wrong?
Hopefully, they’ll tell you. You’re paying an agency for expertise, not agreement. A strong partner should be comfortable challenging assumptions, explaining its reasoning and suggesting a better route when it believes one exists.
10. How would you prioritise our marketing if the budget was limited?
This question forces an agency to make choices. Listen for a clear order of priorities rather than a watered-down version of every service they offer. Good strategy is often as much about deciding what not to do.
11. How do you forecast marketing results?
Forecasting can be useful. Fortune-telling isn’t. A credible forecast should be based on real data, sensible assumptions, benchmarks and your commercial economics. As more evidence becomes available, the forecast should change with it.
12. Which KPIs would you recommend we focus on?
The answer should depend on the business. Revenue, qualified leads, acquisition cost, conversion rate, customer lifetime value or retention might matter far more than reach or impressions. A good agency should separate useful indicators from numbers that simply look impressive.
13. How do you know whether we’re spending enough on marketing?
There isn’t one magic percentage of revenue that every business should spend. The right level depends on your ambitions, margins, acquisition economics, market size and how efficiently additional budget can be deployed.
14. How do you measure brand activity?
Brand can be harder to attribute neatly, but it can be measured. Search demand, direct traffic, reach, customer research, brand recall, engagement and longer-term changes in acquisition efficiency can all tell part of the story.
15. How could marketing improve customer lifetime value, not just acquisition?
Growth doesn’t only come from finding more customers. It can also come from getting existing customers to stay longer, buy again or buy more. Ask how the agency thinks about CRM, retention, cross-sell, upsell and the wider customer experience.
16. How do you use data without letting it kill creativity?
Data should make creative smarter, not safer. Past performance can tell you what audiences respond to, but it shouldn’t mean producing endless variations of the same idea. The strongest approach combines evidence with genuinely new things worth testing.
17. How often will our strategy be reviewed?
A strategy shouldn’t be presented in month one and then quietly forgotten. Performance, competitors and customers change. There should be regular opportunities to review evidence, challenge assumptions and adjust direction.
02
Team & ways of working
The people in the pitch aren’t always the people doing the work. Find out who you’ll actually be working with and how the relationship will operate.
18. Who will actually work on our account?
Ask for names, roles and responsibilities. You should know who owns the strategy, who handles the day-to-day work and who you speak to when something needs attention. The answer shouldn’t be a mystery until after you’ve signed.
19. How involved will senior people be once we’ve signed?
Senior expertise shouldn’t disappear as soon as the sales process is over. Ask how often senior team members review performance, contribute ideas or challenge the direction of the account. Their experience should still be accessible.
20. How often will we communicate?
There isn’t one perfect meeting schedule. There should, however, be a clear rhythm. You should know when meetings happen, what they’re for, how updates are shared and how to reach the team between calls.
21. Who is responsible for keeping things moving?
Marketing projects slow down quickly when ownership is vague. There should be somebody responsible for actions, priorities, deadlines and making sure decisions actually get made. Good account management isn’t glamorous. It is incredibly important.
22. What will you need from us?
Even the best agency can’t do everything in isolation. They may need product knowledge, access to systems, sales feedback, approvals, customer insight, assets and timely decisions from your team. Understanding that upfront makes the relationship much easier.
23. What happens when we disagree?
You probably will at some point. That’s normal. A good agency should be able to explain its reasoning, listen to yours, use evidence where possible and disagree without turning the relationship into a battle.
03
Paid media
Google and Meta can produce brilliant results. They can also spend a lot of money very quickly. These questions help you work out whether there’s real thinking behind the media plan.
24. How do you decide between Google Ads, Meta Ads and other paid channels?
Different channels do different jobs. Google can be brilliant at capturing existing intent. Meta can be brilliant at creating demand. The choice should come from customer behaviour and commercial objectives, not whichever platform the agency happens to prefer.
25. How do you approach testing?
Testing shouldn’t mean randomly changing campaigns every few days. Good testing has a purpose. An agency should explain what it’s testing, why, what success looks like and what it’ll do with the result.
26. How do you judge whether our advertising is actually profitable?
ROAS is useful, but it doesn’t tell you everything. A £100 sale isn’t particularly exciting if fulfilling it costs £95. A good agency should understand margin, acquisition cost, lead quality, repeat purchases and the wider economics behind a conversion.
27. Do you rely on the numbers reported by Google and Meta?
Hopefully not exclusively. Advertising platforms have their own attribution models and will sometimes both claim credit for the same customer. Platform data should be combined with analytics, CRM, ecommerce data and commercial reporting.
28. How do you scale campaigns without destroying efficiency?
More money doesn’t automatically produce proportionally more results. Scaling should be deliberate, with creative, audiences, landing pages and conversion capacity developing alongside the media budget.
04
SEO & search
SEO isn’t about squeezing keywords into every available sentence. Find out whether the agency understands search as part of the wider customer journey.
29. How will you decide what to prioritise for SEO?
Not every SEO issue is equally important. The agency should consider technical health, search demand, commercial relevance, existing rankings, competition and the authority your website already has.
30. How do technical SEO, content and authority work together?
You generally need all three. Search engines need to access and understand the site. You need genuinely useful content. And your business needs enough credibility and authority to compete.
31. How are AI search results changing your approach to SEO?
Agencies should be thinking about clear expert content, structured information, brand authority and how your business is represented across both traditional search engines and AI-generated answers. The fundamentals still matter.
32. How long should SEO take to produce results?
It depends on where you’re starting and how competitive the market is. Some technical fixes can have an impact quickly. More competitive organic growth can take months to build. Be suspicious of anyone guaranteeing rankings by a specific date.
33. How will you demonstrate that SEO is working?
Rankings are useful, but they aren’t the end goal. Look at organic visibility, relevant traffic, enquiries, conversions and revenue. Most importantly, is search attracting more of the people you actually want to do business with?
05
Social media & content
Posting three times a week isn’t automatically a social strategy. Start by understanding what social is actually supposed to achieve.
34. What role should social media actually play in our business?
That depends entirely on the brand. Social media might build awareness, demonstrate expertise, create demand, support recruitment, nurture a community or directly generate sales. The important thing is agreeing what job you’re asking it to do.
35. How will you decide what content we should create?
Good content should sit somewhere between what your audience cares about, what your brand has a right to talk about and what supports your commercial goals. If the content calendar could belong to any business in your sector, it probably isn’t distinctive enough.
36. How should organic and paid social work together?
They shouldn’t operate in separate worlds. Organic content can reveal which ideas, messages and formats resonate naturally. Paid media can then take strong creative and put it in front of far more of the right people.
37. How will you measure social media beyond follower numbers?
Followers can be useful, but they don’t tell the whole story. Depending on your objectives, reach, engagement quality, video consumption, website visits, enquiries, sales or increases in brand search might tell you far more.
06
Creative & brand
Better targeting can’t rescue forgettable creative forever. Ask how the agency turns strategy into ideas people actually notice.
38. How does strategy influence the creative work?
Creative shouldn’t simply look good. Who you’re talking to, what you’re trying to communicate, where the creative will appear and what you want somebody to do next should all influence what gets made. Great creative has a job to do.
39. How do you develop and test creative ideas?
There should be room for both big ideas and continuous iteration. An agency should develop distinctive concepts, test different hooks and formats, learn from what performs and feed those insights into the next round of creative.
40. How do you keep our brand consistent without making everything look the same?
Consistency doesn’t mean repetition. A strong brand should be recognisable without every post, advert or email looking identical. Good brand systems create structure while still giving creative teams room to experiment.
07
CRM, email & retention
Some of your biggest growth opportunities might already be sitting in your customer database.
41. What role should email and CRM play in our marketing?
Much more than sending a newsletter once a month. CRM can nurture leads, onboard customers, recover abandoned purchases, encourage repeat orders, re-engage lapsed customers and strengthen the overall relationship.
42. How would you approach segmentation and personalisation?
Not everybody in your database needs the same message. Useful segmentation might reflect behaviour, purchase history, interests, lifecycle stage or customer value. The trick is making communications more relevant without building something nobody can manage.
43. How will you measure whether CRM is improving retention?
Open rates aren’t enough. Look at repeat purchase rates, churn, reactivation, revenue per customer, customer lifetime value and the revenue generated by automated journeys. The question is whether customer behaviour improved.
08
Websites & conversion
There’s little point paying to bring people to your website if the website immediately loses them.
44. What role should our website play in the marketing strategy?
For many businesses, the website is where every other marketing channel eventually meets. It should explain what you do, make the value obvious, build trust, answer objections and make the next step incredibly easy. It shouldn’t simply look nice.
45. How do you approach conversion rate optimisation?
Good CRO isn’t randomly changing button colours. It starts with understanding user behaviour, analytics, customer objections and where people are dropping out. From there, you can test whether changes genuinely improve performance.
46. Who will own the website, data and accounts you create?
Ideally, you. Your domains, website, analytics properties, advertising accounts, CRM platforms and customer data shouldn’t be held hostage inside an agency’s private accounts. Make ownership and access clear before the relationship begins.
09
Reporting & transparency
A marketing report should answer questions, not create twenty more of them.
47. What will you actually report to us?
The numbers that matter. A good report should explain what happened, why it matters and what the agency plans to do next. Twenty pages of charts without interpretation may look impressive, but they’re not particularly useful.
48. What happens when the results aren’t good?
Marketing doesn’t always work perfectly. Look for an agency that’s comfortable saying when something isn’t performing, explaining what it’s learned and telling you exactly what it intends to change. Transparency matters far more than pretending every month was brilliant.
10
Fees, contracts & ownership
Get the boring stuff clear before it suddenly becomes very interesting.
49. What exactly is included in your fee?
Make sure you understand what the monthly fee covers and what sits outside it. Does it include strategy, creative, reporting, meetings, website changes or media management? Are advertising spend, software or production costs additional? Nobody enjoys an unexpected invoice.
50. What happens if we decide to leave?
Ask before you sign, not after you’ve decided to go. Understand the notice period, what happens to your work, how accounts are transferred and whether you’ll retain full access to your data and assets. A healthy agency relationship shouldn’t depend on making it difficult for a client to leave.