5 Questions to Ask Any Marketing Agency Before You Hire Them

A contractor gets a cold call, a slick pitch, a promise of page one rankings. They sign. Six months later, nothing. This happens constantly — and it's not because contractors are naive, it's because the marketing industry has made it genuinely difficult to tell the good from the bad. These five questions change that. Ask them before you sign anything.

As someone that has done a lot of cold calling in my life, I know from experience that contractors get an overwhelming number of these calls each week — and in some cases, each day: "Hi my name is _____ and I wanted to reach out to you because I saw you have a Google Business Profile but no website…"

And understandably, the contractor on the other end is either not interested, or skeptical because they have no idea who the person on the other side of the phone is, and what their qualifications are. In my experience, I would say a majority of the calls go in one of the following ways:

• 30–40% don't answer
• 30% hang up immediately once they realize it is a sales call
• 15% talk for a minute and say they are not interested
• 10% are frustrated and ask to be removed from the contact list
• 5% actually entertain the call but are understandably skeptical
• 1–2% actually turn into a deal

And what I can say of the 1–2% that do answer and end up signing on as a client — they ask a few key questions that tip the scales from "who the heck is this person, and why would I pay them to help with my website" to "this person seems like they know what they are doing — let's do it."

Today, I am going to walk you through the five questions that I would ask a digital marketer before agreeing to work with them, and urge you to do the same.

This is all in an effort to help you sift through the cold calls that you will inevitably get as a contractor or home service provider in 2026. Sorry about that, by the way.

Question 1: Who Actually Does the Work on My Account?

If you are talking to an SEO agency about generating blog content, backlink building, social media content, or even just a simple website build, the number one question you should be asking is: who will be doing the work for me, and how can I get in contact with them?

You don't need to ask that question verbatim, but the underlying motivation is this: are you selling me a relationship that you will then just pass on to another independent contractor who has no understanding of me and my business — or will you actually be doing the work, and will I be able to get in contact with you easily to measure our results?

You should know the following before moving forward:

• Who writes my content
• Who will be managing my ads
• Who updates my website
• What are the deliverables
• And this is the key one: at what frequency will I receive updates regarding our progress?

If the company just blanket-states "We handle your Local SEO" without providing any qualifying information — citation building, review solicitation and response, GBP update posts, one to two blog articles per month — then you should be worried.

If you don't have a solid understanding of what you will be getting from this agency, as well as who will be fulfilling your deliverables, then you are not starting off on the right foot. SEO has everything to do with understanding your business, learning about your customers and their pain points and search intent, and catering content specifically to that.

You can't boil down SEO to one strategy or recipe for success. It truly depends on the business in question, and your SEO partner should have a deep understanding of what your business does, who it serves, and the questions that your clientele have.

You should be able to easily get this person on the phone or a video call to chat through all of this — and honestly, they should want to do that too, because it's the only way they can effectively do their job.

Question 2: What Do I Own if I Leave?

I will keep this one brief — this is something that the agency should disclose to you upfront. Depending on the price point of the service you are paying for, there can be arguments made for each, and there really is no right or wrong answer. The important thing is that you know what you are paying for, and you understand your rights upfront from an ownership perspective.

At Esker Designs, we offer full ownership packages, as well as discounted plans — effectively $0 down — that operate as more of a service than an ownership model. It works really well for most people, so we offer both.

The important thing is that you ask what model the agency in question uses, and are okay with that before moving forward.

Question 3: Can You Show Me Results You've Gotten for a Contractor in My Trade — Recently?

This is a great question to ask, and it will really separate legitimate companies from people trying to get a cash grab because the internet is confusing to a lot of people, which can be easy to exploit.

I have almost never had a contractor ask me this question on a call, which I do find interesting. But if I can tell that I have intrigued someone and they just need a bit more convincing, I will actually offer this up to them: "Hey, if you want to chat with any of my prior clients, I would be happy to connect you to chat about what it's like working with me."

I have made a few connections like this in the past, and it gave peace of mind to the person on the other end of the phone — to show them that I don't plan on just taking their money and doing nothing for 12 months.

Apart from that type of character testimonial, I have offered to show sales prospects analytics from past clients — their organic traffic — and beyond that, I also offer an explanation of exactly what I did to achieve those results, and how I can apply the same type of methods to their business to help them get more traffic and leads for their contracting business.

Question 4: What Does Success Look Like in 30, 60, and 90 Days — and What Happens if We're Not Hitting It?

Any agency worth working with should have benchmarks. Not "we'll get you to page one" — that's a promise nobody can make. But they should be able to say: here's what we typically see in the first three months, here's how we measure it, and here's what we do if an account falls behind. Vague timelines with no accountability plan are a red flag.

Think of it this way: if you hired a subcontractor to frame a house, you'd expect them to give you a timeline, check in at key milestones, and tell you what happens if something falls behind. Marketing is no different. A good agency treats your account like a project with milestones — not a subscription they set and forget.

The 30/60/90-day framework is useful because it forces the agency to be specific. In month one, maybe it's a fully launched website, a cleaned-up Google Business Profile, and a baseline report on where you're starting from. By month three, you should be seeing early movement — impressions climbing, phone calls being tracked, maybe a handful of organic leads starting to come in. If an agency can't describe what that progression looks like in concrete terms, they're selling you hope, not a plan.

And the second half of the question matters just as much. What happens when results are slow? Do they adjust the strategy, add more content, revisit the keywords they're targeting? Or do they just keep cashing the check and sending you a monthly PDF that's designed to look busy without actually saying anything? Ask them. Make them answer it specifically. How they respond to that question will tell you a lot about how they'll respond when things aren't going the way they promised.

Question 5: What Percentage of Your Clients Are Actually Hitting Their Targets?

Every agency will tell you they get results. But a good agency tracks internally what percentage of their active clients are hitting defined benchmarks at any given time — and they can tell you that number without hesitating. Not a vague "most of our clients are happy" — an actual figure. In our case, we track this. If an agency has no internal standard for what winning looks like across their client base, and no way to measure whether they're achieving it, that's worth knowing before you hand over your credit card.

But here's the part nobody talks about, and I'll be upfront about it because I think it matters: hitting those benchmarks is almost never one-sided. The best marketing partnership in the world still requires something from the client. Not a lot — but the right things.

For me specifically, there are three things that make the difference between a client who sees real results and one who doesn't:

1. I need to be able to write the content I actually recommend for your website. Not just what feels comfortable or what you think sounds good — the content that matches what your customers are actually searching for.
2. I need a client list I can reach out to for Google reviews. Reviews are one of the biggest local ranking factors there is, and I can't manufacture them out of thin air.
3. I need consistent photos of your work. Real job photos — before and afters, finished projects, your crew on site. They're the single best trust signal a contractor website can have, and stock photos don't come close.

When those three things are in place, people tend to do really well. When they're not, results are slower and harder to sustain — and that's true regardless of who you hire.

So when you ask an agency what percentage of their clients are hitting targets, listen carefully to whether they acknowledge that dynamic. A good agency knows that their success rate is partly a reflection of the clients they work with and the cooperation they get — not just their own effort. If they take zero accountability for the clients who aren't winning, that's a flag. And if they take zero credit for setting expectations around what they need from you upfront, that's a flag too.

The best answer you can get sounds something like: here's our benchmark, here's how we're tracking against it, and here's what we need from you to make sure you're on the right side of that number.

The Bottom Line

You're not asking these questions to be difficult — you're asking them because it's your money and your business on the line. Any agency that treats due diligence as an inconvenience is showing you exactly how they'll treat you as a client. The right agency answers all five without hesitation, because they've got nothing to hide. That's the bar. Don't lower it.

None of these questions are unreasonable. None of them are trying to catch anyone out or be difficult. They're just the basic due diligence that anyone spending real money on their business should be doing — and the fact that so many contractors skip them is exactly why the marketing industry has been able to get away with so much for so long.

The right agency answers all five of these without hesitation, because they've got nothing to hide. They'll show you the work, introduce you to their clients, walk you through the ownership model, and give you a realistic picture of what the first 90 days actually look like. That's not a high bar — it's just the minimum standard of professionalism you deserve.

And if you want to ask me all five? Go ahead. I'd expect nothing less.

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