What to Look Out For When Hiring a Marketing Agency

Introduction

There are thousands of marketing agencies in the UK, and from the outside most of them look the same: confident website, senior faces, a wall of client logos. Plenty are genuinely good. Others, not so much. And the hard part is that both kinds look identical at the pitch stage, which makes it really difficult to filter the noise and trust what you’re seeing.

This article is for you if you’re looking at bringing an agency in, or taking a hard look at the one you’ve already got. The differences that actually matter, who does the work, what the money buys, how honestly they report, don’t show up on websites. They show up when you know what to ask and what a straight answer sounds like. So that’s what this covers: where to find the right candidates, what to check before you sign, how to compare a shortlist fairly, and how to judge whether it’s working once you’ve committed.

There’s a checklist near the end you can copy straight into your notes before a pitch. Use it.

Work out if an agency is actually what you need

An agency isn’t always the right answer, and any honest one will tell you that. It’s also worth being sure you’re looking for one for the right reasons: to bring in senior thinking and capacity you don’t have, rather than to hand off a problem you haven’t defined yet. If the job is one clean piece of work with a fixed end, a freelancer may serve you better. If you need a permanent function embedded in your culture, hiring in-house might be right. And there’s a third model most businesses haven’t come across: the senior collective, which sits between freelancers and agencies and is how we’re built at Fortitude.

We’ve written a full comparison of freelancers, agencies and the collective model, so if you’re still deciding which shape of help fits, start there.

The rest of this article assumes you’ve landed on an agency, or you’re reviewing your current one. From here, the question isn’t which model. It’s how to tell a good agency from a bad one before the contract does it for you.

Where to actually look

Most people start with a Google search and a recommendation or two, which is fine, but it stacks the deck towards whoever markets themselves hardest rather than whoever’s best for you. A better shortlist comes from a few sources combined:

Peers in your sector. Ask businesses like yours, not businesses in general, who they use and whether they’d choose them again. A recommendation from someone with your kind of proposition is worth ten generic ones.

Who’s visible for your world. Search the way your buyers do, and note which agencies show up with genuinely useful content about your sector. An agency that can make itself visible for a niche is showing you the skill you’re buying.

The specialists, not just the brand. Look up the actual people on LinkedIn. An agency is only ever as good as the individuals who’d be on your account, so find out who they are and what they’ve done before you ever get to a pitch.

Sector fit before size. A big name with no experience of complex, considered sales cycles will apply consumer playbooks to a B2B problem. If your sector is technical or heavily regulated, look for an agency working in specialist B2B sectors like yours before anything else.

And it’s completely fine to just reach out and talk to a few. If you’ve got a specific requirement, put together a short brief and see how each agency reacts to it in a discovery call. Don’t ask anyone to build you a strategy or do real work for free, that’s not fair and good agencies will decline anyway, but you’ll learn a lot from how they approach the conversation: the questions they ask, what they push back on, whether they talk about your business or theirs.

Three or four candidates found this way beats ten found by search ranking alone.

Ask who actually does the work

Here’s the problem you may already know by name: sold to by seniors, delivered to by juniors.

It happens constantly. The pitch room is full of experienced, impressive people. You sign, and the account is quietly handed to junior staff and account managers who buffer you from the people you actually met.

The people in the pitch should be the people on the account. No layers, no buffers, no broken telephone between you and the person doing the work. When your main contact leaves, there should be a senior specialist who already knows your business, not a handover to someone starting from scratch.

So ask who will be on your account every week, and get names. Look those people up and check their experience is real and relevant. Then ask whether those same names were the ones who won the pitch, and what happens when your main contact leaves. The best answers name people and describe how they stay close to the work. The worst ones talk about “the team” without ever naming anyone in it.

Know what you’re getting for the money

The number on a proposal tells you very little on its own. What matters is what sits behind it.

You’ll meet a few pricing models. A retainer buys a committed team and continuity, with the risk of paying for capacity you don’t fully use if the scope is fuzzy. A project buys a defined outcome with an end date, with the risk of scope creep billed on top. Performance-based ties fees to results, which sounds appealing but pushes agencies towards short-term wins and metrics they can control. Hourly buys logged time, flexibly, with no incentive to work efficiently and no cap.

Some agencies don’t sell time for money at all, and that’s not a problem in itself. We run value-based retainers, for instance: the fee reflects the value of the outcome rather than hours logged, which sometimes means the client gets far more than an hourly arrangement would’ve bought them, and sometimes means we earn a little less on a heavy month. The value holds either way, and that’s the point.

None of these models is wrong. What you’re checking is that you understand exactly how it works, what the money buys, and that you’d be genuinely happy with the arrangement, before you commit. A good agency explains its model willingly and shows you what’s included line by line. If a proposal is vague about either, treat the vagueness as the answer.

Two questions cut through any proposal: what’s included and what’s billed on top, and what happens if the scope changes mid-quarter. A good agency has a clear, fair process for the second. A bad one improvises and invoices.

Why a cheap quote isn’t always cheap

A suspiciously low retainer means someone has to do the work for that price, and it won’t be the senior people. Month to month, junior delivery looks like this: templated strategy, copy you end up rewriting yourself, answers routed through an account manager who has to “check with the team”, and a new face to brief every few months as staff churn.

None of that appears on the invoice. It appears in your calendar, and that second cost is usually the bigger one. So don’t compare the numbers. Ask who does the work, and price the answer.

Reporting that connects work to revenue, not rankings

This is where most agency relationships fail, and where your last one might have.

Good reporting connects the work to pipeline and revenue. It shows which activity is generating leads, which leads are turning into opportunities, and where the money is actually coming from. Bad reporting lists rankings, impressions and traffic. Those are inputs, not outcomes. A page one ranking that produces no enquiries is a green graph that never pays for itself.

First, decide what valuable looks like for you: more sales conversations, more revenue, or brand visibility in your market. All are legitimate answers, but it has to be agreed at the start, so it’s what gets tracked from day one rather than retrofitted when someone asks what the money achieved.

Then ask to see a real report from a live account, anonymised if needed. If the first thing you see is a keyword position rather than a business result, you have your answer. The standard is simple: can they tie their work to the thing you agreed mattered? Our guide on how to measure marketing ROI properly sets out what that link should look like.

One practical thing worth asking: how they’ll pull the reporting together, because most businesses run several platforms and data sources, and stitching them into one honest picture is where a lot of agency reporting quietly falls apart. It’s why we built Fortitude HQ, our own tool that connects via API to each client’s data sources and presents everything in one clean dashboard. However an agency solves it, make sure they’ve solved it.

One counterintuitive check: be sceptical of any agency promising a precise ROI number. In most B2B contexts that number doesn’t exist. Sales cycles are long, deals close offline, and attribution is imperfect by nature. A good agency tells you this up front, shows you what it can prove, what it can reasonably infer, and where the honest gaps are. That candour is the signal.

The questions to ask on the call

You don’t need a long interrogation, just a tight set of questions and the judgement to hear the answers properly. Every conversation is different, so treat these as examples rather than a script: they’re the ones we rate, including some we’ve been asked ourselves by prospects, which led to noticeably better conversations afterwards.

Who does the work? Ask this first, and listen for names.

A good answer sounds like: “Your SEO is Sarah, fifteen years in, she’d be on every monthly call. Content is James. They’re both in this meeting because they’d be doing the work.”

A bad answer sounds like: “You’d have access to our full team of specialists across every channel, coordinated by your dedicated account manager.” Nobody’s been named, and the only person you’ll definitely speak to is the coordinator.

How do you report? The follow-up matters more than the first answer, so ask to see a real report from a live account.

A good answer sounds like: “Here’s last month’s report for a client like you. Page one is enquiries and pipeline. The rankings are in the appendix, because they’re inputs, not results. And here’s the section where we explained a campaign that underperformed.”

A bad answer sounds like: “We have a live dashboard you can log into any time.” A dashboard is data, not reporting. If the first thing you’re shown is a keyword position, you have your answer.

What does the first month look like? Tests whether they have a plan. A strong agency describes the opening phase clearly: workshops to understand your business and buyers, then a prioritised plan with reasons behind the priorities.

What would you refuse to do for us? Tests whether they have judgement.

A good answer sounds like: “Honestly? If you asked us to spend the whole budget on paid ads before fixing the positioning, we’d push back. We’ve watched that fail too many times.”

A bad answer sounds like: “We’re very flexible, we shape everything around what you want.” That’s selling compliance, not judgement. An agency that will do anything you ask has no opinion about what actually works.

Which client most resembles us, and what has gone wrong? Ask for a story, not a polished slide. A good agency points to a client genuinely like you and talks through the real detail, including the hard parts. Ask to see case studies and follow up the testimonials attached to them. If nothing has ever gone wrong, you’re not being told the truth.

How to compare a shortlist fairly

The mistake most people make is judging each agency on its own pitch, which means the best presenter wins. Instead:

Ask identical questions. Every agency gets the same set, and you write the answers down. The pattern across candidates is usually clearer than any individual pitch.

Weight sector experience heavily. An agency that already understands your buyers, your sales cycle and your constraints starts months ahead of one that has to learn them on your budget.

Talk to a current client, not a referee. References are hand-picked. Ask instead to speak to a client at your kind of size and stage who’s been with them over a year. The question that matters: would you choose them again tomorrow?

Score the pushback. Note which agencies challenged something in your brief. The one that told you an idea wouldn’t work, and explained why, is showing you what the relationship will feel like when it matters.

How to judge whether it’s working, once you’ve hired

Choosing well is half the job. The other half is knowing, at each stage, whether what you’re seeing is normal progress or the start of a slow decline.

First 90 days. You should see genuine discovery (real questions about your business and buyers, not a templated onboarding), a prioritised plan with reasons behind the priorities, and foundations going in. What you shouldn’t accept: silence, or activity with no explanation of why it comes first.

Three to six months. Keep your expectations realistic here: don’t expect dramatic growth within weeks unless your marketing has major, obvious problems an agency can fix quickly, because sustainable results compound rather than spike. What you’re looking for is leading indicators, appropriate to the channel. Paid moves quickest, with meaningful signals soon after budget goes live. Organic compounds over quarters rather than weeks, so judge it on trajectory and on the quality of what’s being built, not on a revenue number it can’t yet have produced. Anyone who guaranteed fast organic wins wasn’t being straight with you.

Six to twelve months. The work should now be connecting to pipeline: enquiries you can trace to the activity, and reporting that says so plainly, including where it fell short.

Ongoing. The subtle one. Watch for the quiet downgrade: senior faces appearing less, reports getting thinner and rosier, ideas drying up, your challenges going unchallenged. Delivery that slips after signature rarely announces itself. It just gets a little more junior each quarter.

The protection for all of this is agreeing what good looks like at three, six and twelve months before you sign. Then you’re judging against something you both wrote down, not against a feeling.

Warning signs worth walking away from

Some signals should end the conversation:

• Promises that outrun everyone else’s. An agency saying it’ll improve your results is fine; that’s the job. The flag is when the promises seem unrealistic, or sit far above what every other agency you’ve spoken to said was achievable. No one controls search algorithms or your buyers, so if one pitch defies the gravity the others all acknowledged, believe the gravity.
• Vague deliverables. If you can’t tell exactly what you’re getting each month, neither can they.
• No named team. “Our specialists” without names means you’ll meet them for the first time after you sign, if at all.
• Reporting that only ever contains good news. Real accounts have setbacks. Reporting that never mentions one is hiding something.
• Pressure to sign before you’ve compared. Urgency is a sales tactic. A confident agency is happy for you to look elsewhere.

Also check who owns your accounts and assets. Your Google Analytics, ad accounts, website and content should belong to you, not sit locked inside the agency. Confirm it in writing before you sign, not after the relationship sours.

A checklist to take into your next pitch

Copy this into your notes before your next meeting. Ask every agency the same questions, and score each answer 0, 1 or 2: a 2 for a specific answer with named people or real examples, a 1 for a partial answer, a 0 for anything vague. It sounds mechanical, but it does something useful: it stops the best presenter winning by default, and after three pitches the totals usually make the decision for you.

On the work

• Who specifically does the work, and what’s their seniority?
• Were these the same people who won the pitch?
• What happens when my main contact leaves?

On cost

• What’s included, and what’s billed on top?
• What happens if the scope changes mid-quarter?

On reporting

• Can you show me a real report that connects work to pipeline?
• How do you measure success when a clean ROI figure isn’t possible?
• What realistic timeline should I expect, per channel?

On judgement

• What does the opening phase look like?
• What would you refuse to do for us, and why?
• Which of your clients most resembles us, and can I speak to one?
• What has gone wrong on an account, and what did you do about it?

Before you sign

• What does good look like at three, six and twelve months? Write it down together.
• Who owns our analytics, ad accounts, website and content? Get it in writing.

Two agencies can both feel impressive in the room. The scores are how you find out which one was actually specific.

The right agency depends on what you’re trying to achieve

There’s no single right answer, and anyone who claims one is selling. The right choice depends on your goals, your sector, your timeline and how much of the thinking you want to keep in-house. Sometimes a freelancer, an in-house hire or a collective is genuinely the better call, and a good agency will say so.

If you want a straight conversation about what would actually move your pipeline, that’s worth having before you commit to anyone. Book a discovery call: time with a senior specialist, no pitch deck and no pressure, just an honest read on where your best growth is likely to come from.

Frequently asked questions