Digital marketing requires so much work and so many different moving parts it’s often impractical for businesses to try to keep the work in-house—and remain up-to-date with current best practices.
Digital marketing activities and techniques are being updated on a daily basis with new technologies taking over to better reach and engage the consumers. With such a huge development in place, it becomes impractical for SME’s and their CEO’s to try to keep the work in-house – and remain up-to-date with current best practices.
Outsourcing to a digital marketing agency ensures you will have a team of dedicated experts without the overhead. Essentially, your SME can stay on the cutting edge by hiring an agency which provides digital strategist for your company.
But here’s the catch: There are many digital marketing companies out there, and not all of them provide the same quality of work or the same types of services.
Of course, you’ll first have to do the work of researching digital marketing companies to identify those that look like a fit for your needs. Then you’ll want to have conversations with each to figure out which is right for you. Going into those conversations, you want to be prepared with a good set of questions to ask a digital marketing agency, that will enable you to distinguish what makes each digital marketing company unique and make an informed decision about hiring the one that’s right for you.
To help you start crafting that list, here are a few good questions to learn more about these digital marketing companies and how they work.
Top digital marketing questions to ask when selecting a marketing agency
1. What’s your process?
This is a question with a potentially big answer—it should cover both how they approach digital marketing and how they approach working with clients. The process followed by the digital marketing agency is of paramount importance as it will provide you the roadmap towards attainment of your SME goals. Most digital marketing companies that have been around for a while have figured out a general process they use to work with clients. Their answer will give you a feel for the kind of experience they have and how organized they are in their work.
In addition to hearing generally about how they work, ask follow-up questions to dig down into how they approach the different areas of digital marketing you need help with. Certain questions to ask a marketing agency can be:
What’s their process for blogging, email marketing and lead generation?
How do they approach each channel and type of digital marketing, and bring it all back together in an overall plan?
Hearing them talk a little bit about each of the specific types of digital marketing you’ll be hiring them to perform gives them the chance to show their knowledge and expertise and you the chance to look for any signs that they may not be a good fit.
2. Who will manage my account and who will do the work?
When it comes to these questions, what you’re ensuring is that your account won’t be completely outsourced to a different company.
Many digital marketing agencies outsource some of their services – development, perhaps, or graphic design – but the bulk of what they’re doing for you really should be handled in-house.
This is because too much outsourcing almost always means lower quality. Plus, if they’re outsourcing everything from creative to analytics, you’re essentially paying them for little more than administrative and management tasks.
3. Who will be on the team working for me?
One of the benefits of hiring a digital marketing agency is trusting that they’ll have employees with specialized skill sets to bring to your digital marketing campaigns. Instead of trying to find a generalist to work in-house, you can lean on their full staff of specialists.
That’s the idea anyway, but you want to make sure it will actually play out that way with the agency you hire. Questions to ask the marketing agency would be:
Ask how the work on your account will be divided
Who will be in charge of what, and
how does their experience match what they’ll be assigned to?
Pay attention to how well the skills of the specialists they mention match your priorities. If your main goal is improved SEO, then you want to know someone with solid SEO experience would be assigned to work on your account. If you’re more focused on building an email list, then you’ll want to know they have people skilled in inbound lead generation and email marketing.
4. What’s your process for communication with clients?
You’ll want regular check-ins about how your campaigns are going and any insights your digital marketing company learns about your audience as they go. Find out how often they get in touch with clients and what kind of information they provide each time they do. What form of contact do they prefer? If they stick primarily with email, but you prefer regular conference calls, then that’s something to be aware of up-front.
You also should find out if you’ll have one main contact for communication, or if you’ll have direct contact with the various individuals working on your account. Which is preferable is a personal question. One clear contact makes communication simpler—you always know with whom to get in touch. But the ability to provide information directly to the writer working on a blog post or the designer putting together an email layout for your brand can be useful for those who want a little more hands-on access.
5. How does our business compare to the rest of your clients?
If your contact says “What other clients?” then run for the hills. Seriously, though, there are a couple of potential answers that you’ll want to explore more fully.
If your contact tells you that your business is by far their biggest client, you’ll want to ask a few follow-up questions.
There’s nothing wrong with being an agency’s biggest client, but it’s all about degrees. If you’re a global company with millions in annual revenue, and all their other clients are locally-owned small businesses, you may want to ask how they’re prepared to meet your – necessarily much larger – needs.
On the other hand, if the agency mainly services global companies with millions in revenue and you’re a smaller business, you need to make sure that your account will be just as important as their other clients. Will your business have its own account manager? Is the agency prepared to work with your budget? Are they as versed in running locally-focused campaigns as they are national or global ones?
There’s no hard and fast rule here, but if the fit feels a little off, you may want to look elsewhere.
6. How closely will you work with my internal team?
As we mentioned earlier, a client-agency relationship is all about communication. The agency should have a formal structure in place to ensure that communication lines stay open – weekly phone calls, regular email updates, etc.
This is generally laid out in the contract. If it’s not, you probably want to get something in writing to ensure that the agency is committed to regularly communicating with you.
However, there should also be a more informal culture of supportive communication at the agency. You want to feel confident that your account manager will be responsive to your team’s requests and prompt in returning emails and calls – even if it’s to suggest that you table a discussion until your regularly scheduled phone call. Even if she can’t chat several times a week, you should feel as though your requests, concerns, or comments are heard and acknowledged.
A good digital marketing agency will also be forthright in sharing strategy, KPIs, etc. with your team. An agency that guards this information with secrecy isn’t truly interested in helping you grow your business. And that, after all, is the whole reason you’re looking for a digital marketing agency.
7. What marketing technology do you use?
Any reputed digital marketing company will understand that marketing technology is an important tool to achieve success. So which marketing technology is being employed matters a lot. While this isn’t a question with clear correct answers (whether an agency opts for Buffer versus Hootsuite doesn’t tell you much about the quality of their work), it will help you understand how they work and give you a chance to confirm that their technology is compatible with any tech you’re already using.
8. What analytics do you track?
Defining and measuring success can be tricky in digital marketing—you want to be careful not to lean too much on vanity metrics to the exclusion of data that shows you which marketing activities are leading to sales and profit. Ask the digital marketing companies you speak with what analytics they pay attention to and report on for clients. Find out how often they send analytics reports and what form they send them in.
You want to make sure you and any firm you hire are on the same page in how you measure success, in what you expect success to look like, and in how it will be communicated to you over the course of your relationship.
9. How will you measure results and ROI?
The success of a marketing campaign can seem like a complex thing to measure. How do you measure things like brand awareness, people’s attitude toward your brand, or how much they like your content?
The answer? Through analytics. A good digital marketing agency will have the tools and skills to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) like unique visitors to your site, your bounce rate, etc. A great one, however, will work closely with you to identify the KPIs that are truly relevant to your marketing goals. Then they’ll use those to drive progress and inform future campaigns.
For example, if your marketing goal is to raise your CEO’s cachet as a thought leader in your industry, a good KPI to track would be inbound links – how many other sites are linking to your content. Another would be a specific conversion rate, such as how many people who come to the site are signing up for your newsletter.
If your marketing goal is to raise brand awareness for your new line of designer shoes, relevant KPIs might be more social media-oriented: Facebook likes, retweets, Twitter mentions, and other measures of how many people are talking about your product.
Your digital marketing agency should be transparent about the KPIs they’re measuring and willing to shift tactics or directions if the results warrant it.
10. How do your different departments collaborate?
Depending on the organization, digital marketing agencies may have different departments to handle different aspects their work: Social Media, SEO, Content, Influencer Outreach, etc.
If you’re engaging an agency for more than one of these services, you want to be assured that the departments’ teams will be working toward a cohesive strategy. It won’t do you much good to have the content team pushing hard on a few select topics, while the SEO team is optimizing your site for keywords related to different topics.
Ask the agency how their teams share information, and how they create strategies for each client. Will your blog posts spur social media campaigns? Will your social media campaigns tie into your SEO? You’ll get the best results when all these things are working in harmony, pushing toward agreed-upon goals.
11. What’s included in your fee, and what costs extra?
Obviously, you can’t make a decision without knowing the cost of each agency. If you have a budget in mind, make sure what they charge works within it. And just as importantly, you want to know that what you’re getting for your money matches your expectations. You don’t want to realize after you sign the dotted line that you assumed you’d be getting social media services that the agency doesn’t actually offer.
Ask each agency to describe, in clear terms, what their monthly rate includes. And ask if there are services clients regularly request that cost extra. If you can think of specific future needs you might have that aren’t covered in the monthly rate, talk to them now about the expected costs for those if they arise.
If there’s something you know you need they don’t offer (or charge more for than you’re comfortable with), then you need to know that going in so you can get quotes from other providers for that service and factor the difference into your decision.
12. What makes you different from other digital marketing companies?
Marketers know the importance of positioning—if they can’t provide a satisfying response that clarifies their own positioning in the industry, it doesn’t speak well to their ability to do so for you.
Give them the chance to pitch you on why they’re special and what they do better than everyone else. It’ll give you the chance to make sure their specialties line up with your unique needs.
13. Can you show me successful examples of your work?
Nothing a business tells you about themselves is quite as persuasive as seeing evidence of their work or hearing from a peer who has worked with them. In response to this question, the digital marketing agencies you speak to should be able to provide evidence of their successful relationships with other customers in the form of case studies and testimonials.
They also should be able to point you toward the visible results of their work—whether it’s websites they’ve helped design, content they’ve created, rankings they’ve helped clients achieve or social media accounts they’ve run. Digital marketing usually leaves a clear trail of evidence, so every agency you consider should have good examples of their work.
14. How do you plan to do things differently given our industry?
Not every market or industry can be approached in the same way, so ask a digital marketing agency how they plan to do it differently given your particular market and needs. Not every business needs an ecommerce website, and some of them benefit from location advertising vs global internet marketing. A digital agency should know how to adapt and hone in on your specific industry.
15. What results have you generated for similar clients?
A great barometer for whether an agency can help you is to understand the results they’ve helped similar clients achieve. Do they have experience within your industry (this can be less important) or with this type of work (more important)? Ask to see case studies that show not only the work done, but the results of that work. Creating an ebook series is great and may look impressive if you’re in need of content marketing services, but what did that content achieve? How was the content used? In what way was it promoted? How many sales did it lead to? A solid case study can provide this information.
However, it might not tell the whole story. When you have narrowed down your list of potential agencies to just a few, ask for references. Former or past clients who can help you understand what it’s like to be a client of the agency. Are they happy with the results? Has the agency delivered everything it promised? What is the day-to-day relationship like?
No two businesses, or campaigns, are exactly alike and there are always mitigating circumstances that affect the outcome. But this question makes certain the agency has the kind of strategic thinking, collaboration and effectiveness that you’re looking for.
16. What is your policy on “rush” orders, revisions/approvals, and additional costs?
This is crucial information to determine. Ask them how they plan to handle rush changes, revisions and approval for presented materials, and any costs or fees added onto the base price according to additional work needed for a specified reason.
17. What can you do to help our company reach new goals?
You’re investing in digital marketing to grow your business online. Therefore, you need to know how this new approach is going to help you reach your goals. If a potential digital agency doesn’t have a clear picture for you, then go with one that can give you a straight answer such as, “we’re going to get more quality leads to your website and grow your customer base online using a website, social media profiles, and content marketing that speaks to your audience. We’re also going to build your sales system.”
18. How do you plan to execute digital marketing differently than our current approach?
Before you get roped into a whole new digital marketing system, present your own past efforts and approach, and ask how they plan to do it differently. You need a change instead of the same old thing, and your digital marketing agency should be able to present a brand new approach to get the job done.
19. When will the results start to show up?
Inbound marketing is a trip around the world, not a walk down the street.
I don’t say that to dissuade you from starting your inbound journey but it’s imperative to set the right expectation in stone before you begin. Even pieces of content that rightfully deserve the #1 spot take time to climb in the rankings. That goes for all aspects of inbound marketing, almost nothing is immediate, nor should it be.
Similar to the process of building trust towards strangers or new co-workers, inbound marketing requires an enormous amount of trust from your audience. It’s the backbone of any solid marketing strategy. So if a potential digital marketing agency trumpets their ability to bring you results in a month’s time, you now know better than to take the bait.
20. Why are you right for me?
A digital marketing agency could consistently do stellar work and still not be the one that’s right for your company. You don’t need just a good digital marketing agency; you need one that’s good for you.
Give them a chance to explain why they feel their agency is a good fit for you. If they’ve been doing their job during the interview, they’ll have gathered plenty of information about what your company does, what you’re looking for, and what your goals are by this point. Look for a customized plan that will help your organization accomplish its goals.
Before you partner with an agency, it is important to know what you are stepping into. This checklist will help you evaluate the agency form every angle and give clarity in your marketing path.
Conclusion:
Digital marketing is a long game. To get the results you seek, you want to establish a long, productive relationship with a digital marketing agency. It’s better to be picky now and find the agency you want to stick with in the long term than to make a rash decision and go through this process again in a year. Take your time to vet the potential candidates and consider which is the best fit for you. Once you do, you can begin to see how much a strong digital marketing plan can benefit your company.
For Curious Minds
An agency's core process is the strategic framework that governs how they move from understanding your goals to executing and reporting on campaigns. It reveals their organizational maturity and strategic depth, ensuring they do not just perform tasks but build a cohesive plan for growth. A well-defined process is your best indicator of future success.
A strong agency will detail its methodology, which typically includes:
Discovery and Strategy: An initial deep dive into your business, competitors, and audience to establish baseline metrics and set realistic KPIs, such as a 20% increase in qualified leads within the first six months.
Implementation Roadmap: A clear plan outlining which channels (blogging, email, PPC) will be used, the timeline for execution, and who on their team is responsible for each component.
Performance and Analytics: Regular reporting cadences and access to dashboards that show progress against the defined KPIs. They should explain how they analyze data, not just present it.
Grasping this process helps you assess if their approach aligns with your SME's operational style and long-term vision. The full article provides more detail on what to look for in a robust agency workflow.
An agency's specialized team provides a depth of expertise across multiple disciplines that a single in-house generalist cannot replicate. This structure ensures that every facet of your strategy, from SEO to graphic design, is handled by an expert, leading to higher quality work and more effective campaigns. This model allows your SME to access a full marketing department's worth of talent for a fraction of the cost.
The key advantage comes from having dedicated specialists for distinct functions:
A Content Strategist focuses on creating a high-value blog and email marketing plan.
An SEO Analyst ensures all content is optimized to rank for target keywords.
A PPC Manager handles paid campaigns to maximize return on ad spend.
A Graphic Designer creates compelling visuals that align with your brand identity.
This division of labor ensures that each channel is optimized based on current best practices, something a generalist juggling multiple roles would struggle to achieve. Exploring the full article will reveal how to verify an agency truly has this specialist structure in place.
The choice between a boutique and a large agency depends on your need for specialized expertise versus a broad range of services and resources. A boutique firm may offer deeper knowledge in a specific niche, while a large agency provides a one-stop-shop, but potentially less personalized attention. Your decision should be based on your specific goals for lead generation and your preferred working relationship.
Consider these factors when comparing them for your SME:
Expertise: A boutique agency might have a proven track record of boosting conversion rates by 15-20% in your specific industry, while a large agency may have a more generalized approach.
Account Management: You will likely get more direct access to senior talent at a boutique firm. In a larger agency, your primary contact might be a junior account manager.
Service Integration: A large, full-service agency can more easily manage a complex campaign involving SEO, content, paid ads, and social media under one roof, ensuring a cohesive multi-channel strategy.
Ultimately, you must weigh the benefit of deep specialization against the convenience of integrated services. The full article explores how to assess which model is a better cultural and strategic fit for your team.
Successful partnerships are built on a foundation of structured communication and transparent, goal-oriented reporting. Agencies that establish a regular cadence for meetings and provide reports that connect activities directly to business outcomes, like revenue growth, consistently achieve better results. This is because clear communication fosters alignment and allows for agile strategy adjustments based on real data.
Proven structures that lead to high ROI include:
Weekly Tactical Check-ins: Short, 15-30 minute calls to discuss progress on current tasks and address immediate roadblocks.
Monthly Performance Reviews: A detailed meeting to review KPIs against goals, analyzing what worked and what did not. For example, a report should clearly link a 10% increase in website conversion rate to a specific A/B test.
Quarterly Strategy Sessions: A high-level meeting to review overall progress toward business objectives and plan the upcoming quarter's priorities.
These elements ensure that both the agency and your SME remain aligned on goals and accountable for results. This disciplined approach to communication transforms the relationship from a simple service to a true strategic partnership, a topic explored further in the complete guide.
A systematic agency process directly translates to measurable growth by creating a predictable and scalable engine for attracting and converting leads. For instance, agencies that follow a clear content marketing process have demonstrated the ability to improve organic traffic and generate high-quality leads consistently, unlike those with a more ad-hoc approach. This structure is what turns marketing activities into tangible business results.
Consider the common outcomes for an SME that partners with a process-driven agency:
One B2B tech firm saw a 40% increase in MQLs within a year by implementing an agency's pillar-cluster content model for their blog.
An e-commerce business was able to lower its customer acquisition cost by 25% after their agency introduced a systematic email marketing and lead nurturing workflow.
The process ensures that every piece of content has a purpose, every email is part of a sequence, and every campaign is measured against clear KPIs.
These examples show that a documented strategy is the foundation of ROI. The full article examines case studies that further prove the link between a structured process and superior market outcomes.
Selecting the right agency requires a structured approach that goes beyond a simple web search and initial calls. You need a methodical process to identify candidates, evaluate their capabilities, and ensure they align with your company culture and goals. This systematic vetting process minimizes risk and maximizes the potential for a successful partnership.
Follow these key steps to make an informed decision:
Define Your Goals: Clearly document your objectives. Are you trying to increase website traffic by 30% or generate a specific number of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) per month?
Initial Research: Identify 5-7 agencies that specialize in your industry or the services you need most, such as B2B lead generation or e-commerce SEO.
Screening Calls: Conduct initial 30-minute calls to ask foundational questions about their process, team structure, and experience with clients like your SME.
In-Depth Interviews: Narrow your list to 2-3 finalists. In these meetings, ask them to talk through a potential strategy for your business and provide relevant case studies.
Reference Checks: Contact 1-2 of their current or former clients to ask about their experience with communication, reporting, and results.
This structured plan ensures you are not just hiring a vendor, but choosing a strategic growth partner. The full guide provides a more detailed checklist of questions to ask at each stage of this process.
A successful launch depends on a well-structured onboarding process that aligns both teams on goals, metrics, and responsibilities from day one. This initial phase is not just about administrative setup; it is a strategic deep-dive that sets the tone for the entire partnership. A thorough onboarding ensures that the agency fully understands your business context and that expectations are crystal clear on both sides.
A comprehensive onboarding plan should include:
A formal kickoff meeting: This should involve key stakeholders from your SME and the agency's core team to review the scope of work and high-level objectives.
Goal-setting workshop: Collaboratively define SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals, such as "achieve a 5:1 return on ad spend within 90 days."
Technical integration: Provide access to necessary assets and platforms like your website CMS, analytics accounts, and ad platforms.
Process alignment: Agree on communication channels (e.g., Slack, email), meeting schedules, and the format for performance reports.
This meticulous approach prevents misunderstandings and ensures the agency can start delivering value quickly. Investing time in a structured onboarding is the single best way to guarantee a strong start, and the full article provides a checklist for this critical process.
Evaluating an agency's commitment to innovation requires looking beyond their current portfolio and assessing their internal culture of learning and adaptation. An agency that is truly future-focused will invest in its team's development and be able to articulate how emerging trends could impact your specific business goals. This forward-looking perspective is what separates a tactical vendor from a strategic partner.
Look for concrete evidence of their commitment to staying current:
Ask about their budget for training: Do they send their team to conferences or pay for certifications in new platforms?
Inquire about their R&D process: How do they test new channels or technologies before recommending them to clients like your SME?
Discuss recent industry shifts: Ask for their take on a recent Google algorithm update or a new social media feature and how they are advising clients to adapt.
Their answers will reveal if they are proactively shaping strategy or reactively following trends. The full article discusses how this forward-thinking approach can provide a significant competitive advantage over time.
Your evaluation must shift from focusing on an agency’s executional skills to assessing their analytical capabilities and strategic thinking. In today's market, success is driven by data-informed decisions, so you need a partner who can translate performance metrics into actionable business intelligence. An agency that only reports on vanity metrics without providing strategic recommendations offers limited long-term value.
To gauge their analytical depth, ask them to:
Explain their analytics process: How do they move from raw data to strategic insights? Ask them to walk you through a sample performance report and explain the "so what" behind the numbers.
Demonstrate their tech stack: What tools do they use for data visualization and analysis beyond standard platforms like Google Analytics?
Provide a case study: Ask for an example where they used data to identify a key opportunity or pivot a campaign strategy for a client, resulting in a measurable improvement like a 30% reduction in churn.
The future of marketing belongs to those who can turn data into a competitive advantage. Choosing an agency with strong analytical prowess is no longer a luxury, it is a necessity, a point our complete article elaborates on.
The most significant pitfall is unknowingly paying a premium for an agency that heavily outsources its core services, leading to inconsistent quality and a lack of direct accountability. This often means you are paying for project management rather than expert execution, which dilutes the value of your investment. To avoid this, you must directly inquire about their in-house capabilities versus their reliance on external contractors.
During your vetting process, ask specific questions to uncover their operational model:
"Which specific services, like graphic design or development, do you outsource, and which are handled by your full-time team?"
"Can I speak with the lead strategist and the specialists who will be directly working on my account?"
"How do you ensure quality control and consistent communication when working with external partners?"
A transparent agency will have clear answers, while hesitation or vague responses can be a red flag. True partnership requires clarity on who is doing the work, ensuring your budget funds expertise, not just administrative oversight. The complete guide offers more questions to help you identify a genuinely capable in-house team.
To prevent a lack of transparency, you must establish clear expectations for communication and reporting before signing a contract. Asking direct questions about who will manage your account and how they will report on progress forces an agency to commit to a specific level of accountability. This preemptive step is crucial for building a healthy, long-term partnership based on trust and shared goals.
Pose these questions to gauge an agency’s commitment to transparency:
"Who will be my day-to-day point of contact, and what is their level of experience?"
"What is your standard meeting cadence for progress reviews, and what topics are covered?"
"Can you show me a sample of a monthly performance report so I can see the level of detail you provide on metrics like Cost Per Lead?"
"What tools or dashboards will we have access to for real-time campaign monitoring?"
An agency that values transparency will welcome these questions and have structured answers. Proactive communication protocols are a hallmark of a reliable partner, and our full guide explains how to interpret their responses.
Agencies typically fall on a spectrum from "do it for you" executors to "do it with you" collaborators. For a hands-on leadership team, finding an agency with a highly collaborative model is essential for success, as it ensures your industry expertise is integrated into the marketing strategy. Evaluating their process for communication, feedback, and strategic planning will reveal if they are a true partner or just a service provider.
When assessing their collaboration style, consider:
Strategy Development: Does the agency present a finished plan, or do they hold collaborative workshops to build the strategy with your team?
Content Approval: Is there a clear, streamlined process for your team to review and approve content, or is it an afterthought?
Access to Specialists: Can you speak directly with the SEO or content lead, or is all communication filtered through an account manager? A collaborative agency will encourage direct interaction.
For an involved SME, the ideal agency acts as an extension of your in-house team, valuing your input at every stage. The full article offers tips on how to identify these collaborative partners during the interview process.
Chandala Takalkar is a young content marketer and creative with experience in content, copy, corporate communications, and design. A digital native, she has the ability to craft content and copy that suits the medium and connects. Prior to Team upGrowth, she worked as an English trainer. Her experience includes all forms of copy and content writing, from Social Media communication to email marketing.
Growth Strategy and Planning
