What Questions Should You Ask a Marketing Agency Before Hiring?
The questions most people ask agencies are the wrong ones. Here are the ones that reveal whether an agency is worth hiring.
Quick answer: Ask questions that reveal how the agency thinks, staffs, measures, and handles hard conversations. Portfolios and process pages are useful, but they do not tell you whether the agency will be honest when the work gets messy. The best questions make it hard for them to hide behind polished case studies.
Why This Question Matters
By the time you are vetting agencies, everyone sounds competent. They have nice work, confident language, and a process diagram with tidy arrows. Your job is to find out who will actually lead, who will disappear after the sale, and who will say the uncomfortable true thing before it costs you money. That takes better questions than asking whether they have worked in your industry. The right questions also help you notice how the agency behaves under pressure. Anyone can sound thoughtful when describing past wins; the better signal is how they respond when you ask about limits, mistakes, staffing, and tradeoffs.
Ask What They Would Not Recommend
A strong agency should be able to tell you what not to do. Ask, 'Based on what you know so far, what would you avoid?' This reveals whether they are thinking or just collecting potential billable work. If every idea you mention becomes a great idea, be careful.
Ask About a Client They Turned Away
This question reveals standards. A real answer might involve poor fit, unrealistic expectations, unclear leadership, or a business that was not ready. Agencies that never turn anyone away may be brave, desperate, or not paying attention. None of those are ideal traits in a strategic partner.
Ask Who Will Actually Work on the Account
The pitch team is not always the working team. Ask who your day-to-day contact will be, who owns strategy, who makes creative decisions, and how often senior people stay involved. A vague answer here is a staffing red flag. You do not want to buy senior thinking and receive junior task management.
Ask What Success Looks Like at 90 Days
This separates output thinkers from outcome thinkers. A weak answer lists deliverables. A better answer talks about clarity, agreed priorities, communication rhythm, early indicators, and what the agency expects to learn. At 90 days, not every metric will move, but the relationship should already be proving whether it can work.
Listen for Red Flag Answers
Be wary of guaranteed results without context, pricing that stays mysterious until you are emotionally invested, and big-client name-dropping that has nothing to do with your problem. Also listen for agencies that skip discovery and jump straight to tactics. If they have a solution before they understand the business, they are selling a shelf item. Bring the same real problem to each agency and compare how they think through it. The contrast will tell you more than asking everyone to perform the same polished overview.
How We Think About This
How we think about this: the first meeting should be a mutual interview. Daymade is evaluating fit too, because a bad-fit client relationship is not noble work; it is slow damage for everyone involved. The Sit Down is built to make room for honest questions before scope, timeline, and money start doing all the talking. An agency that seems desperate to close you may not be the agency you want leading you.
Common Questions
How many agencies should I talk to before deciding?
Three is usually enough if you have done your homework. More than that can create noise and make every answer blur together. Talk to enough agencies to see different approaches, then choose based on fit, clarity, and trust.
Should I ask for references from current clients?
Yes, especially for a larger engagement. Ask references about communication, follow-through, strategic pushback, and whether the agency stayed involved after the sale. The best reference calls are less about praise and more about what the relationship is really like.
What should a good agency proposal include?
A good proposal should include the problem being solved, recommended scope, timeline, responsibilities, pricing, team structure, success measures, and assumptions. It should also explain why the agency is recommending that path. A menu of services is not a strategy.
If you're working through this right now, the Sit Down is a free conversation, not a pitch deck in disguise. Bring the messy version of the problem and we'll help you sort what matters from what can wait. Book the Sit Down ->
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Here are quick answers to the things founders ask us most
Daymade is a creative agency working in four areas: brand strategy, brand identity, websites, and ongoing marketing. Most engagements combine two or three of them. We have run 52 projects for 27 clients over five-plus years.
We work with clients across Central Illinois, including Bloomington-Normal, Peoria, Champaign-Urbana, Springfield and Decatur, and we take remote work anywhere in the United States. Being close by means we can run the opening workshop in person, which is usually the fastest way to get a brand unstuck.
It depends on scope, so we quote per project rather than publishing a rate card. As a rough guide, a focused brand identity or website sits in the mid five figures, a full brand and website build runs higher, and ongoing marketing is a monthly retainer. We tell you the number before any work starts.
A focused brand or website project typically runs 8 to 16 weeks. That covers five stages: workshop and strategy, moodboards, visual direction, design and build, then handoff. Ongoing marketing is a rolling monthly engagement.
A branding agency decides what you stand for and what you look and sound like. A marketing agency takes that to an audience. Daymade does both, which is why the campaign work does not contradict the brand it is meant to be selling.
Yes. A lot of our work is with founders and early-stage teams who need to punch above their weight, and we scope engagements to the stage the business is actually at rather than the stage it hopes to be at.
Start with the Sit Down, a free conversation rather than a pitch. Email hello@daymadeagency.com or use the contact form. Bring the messy version of the problem; we will help sort what matters now from what can wait.