At six in the evening the shutters come down, and Ravi, who runs a small furniture workshop, sits on an upturned crate with his phone. The light through the window has gone the colour of weak tea. On the screen are nine open tabs, each promising more customers, and none of them explaining how.
He is not short of options. What he lacks is a way to tell them apart. A search for a digital marketing agency brings up pages of confident words that all sound alike, and the loudest are not always the clearest. Here is a quieter way to judge them, built on things you can see and check for yourself.
Look at the Report, Not the Pitch
Pitches are polished because they are rehearsed. Reports are honest because they are made every month, whether the month went well or badly. So ask to see a real report, with the client’s name removed.
Read it slowly. Does it explain what changed and why? Or is it a wall of charts with no sentences? A good report tells a story you could repeat to a friend over lunch.
Ask to See a Bad Month
Every account has a bad month. The useful question is what the team did about it. Ask for one example where results dropped, what they found, and what they changed.
Here is a decision rule. Someone who has an answer ready has done the work. Someone who changes the subject has either not been doing this for long or is not telling you everything.
Generalist or Specialist
Some agencies do a little of everything, and others focus on a single channel. Neither is wrong, and each has a cost. A broad team can keep the whole plan in one head, but it may spread itself thin. A specialist may go deeper, but it may also steer you towards the one thing it sells.
Ask which channel they would start with for your business, and why. Listen for whether the reasoning begins with your customers or with their menu.
Your First Ninety Days
A sensible start has a shape you can describe. Ask what the first three months look like, and listen for these things.
- A clear conversation about your goals, and what a customer is worth to you.
- A review of what already exists, such as your website, tracking and past campaigns.
- A written plan with priorities and a rough order of work.
- A date for the first report, and an agreed way of reading it.
Who Owns the Accounts
This is a small question with large consequences. Advertising accounts, analytics and website access should be set up in your name, with the agency given permission to work in them. If you part ways later, you keep your history and your data.
If an agency prefers to hold everything in its own name, ask why. There may be a good reason. Even so, it is worth hearing it before you sign.
Contracts and Exits
Ask about the minimum term, the notice period and what you receive if you leave. Good partners are comfortable being leavable. They expect to keep your business by doing good work, not by making departure awkward.
Ravi did not choose the loudest tab. He closed eight of them, wrote four questions on the back of an invoice, and went home. The next morning he sent the same four questions to three teams and waited to see who answered them plainly. It was not a dramatic way to hire help. It was a clear one, and clarity is most of what you are buying.
