Two proposals land on your desk at similar monthly figures. One is from a serious operation with several specialists behind it. The other is one person reselling software with a markup. Nothing in the documents makes the difference obvious, and the pricing certainly does not — the variance in marketing services is worse than in almost any other professional service you buy.
These six questions sort them out quickly, and how a provider reacts to being asked is itself informative.
1. Who specifically will work on this, and how many hours a month?
The people in the pitch are frequently not the people on the account. Ask for names and roles, and ask for the hours in writing. A retainer without a stated time commitment is not a quote, it is a number. This one question resolves more ambiguity than the rest combined.
2. Will the accounts be in our name?
Your ad account, analytics, business profile and domain should belong to you, with the agency granted access. Arrangements where leaving means starting over are common enough that you should check every time, before signing rather than after. If the answer is vague, that is the answer.
3. What is the fee and what is the media spend?
These are two different costs and a proposal should say which is which. Management is typically a flat fee or ten to twenty percent of spend. A single blended number means you cannot tell, month to month, whether your advertising increased or your invoice did.
4. What will the reporting show, and how often?
Ask to see a real report from another client with the name removed. What you are looking for is whether it connects spend to booked work, or whether it recites activity — posts made, impressions served, ads run. A report full of impressions is a report designed not to be judged.
Ask what happens if it does not work. A provider who has thought about that answer is a different proposition from one who has not.
5. What would you look at first, and why?
This is the competence question. A good answer is specific to your business and frequently unglamorous — your listings disagree across directories, your site takes six seconds on a phone, you have eleven reviews and your competitors have two hundred. A bad answer is a list of services. The best answer sometimes is that you are not ready for a retainer yet, which is worth more than the retainer.
6. What is the term, and what happens at the end of it?
- How long is the initial commitment, and is there a break clause?
- Does it auto-renew, and how much notice does cancelling require?
- What do you keep — the site, the content, the data, the accounts?
- Is there an exit fee, and what is it actually for?
Twelve-month terms are normal in this industry and not automatically a red flag; local search genuinely takes three to six months to move. What matters is whether the term is explained by the work or simply asserted.
One thing to settle before you ask any of them
Decide whether you need a retainer at all. If your listings are wrong, your site is slow and nobody has ever asked a customer for a review, that is a few months of finite work rather than an ongoing engagement — and any provider worth signing will tell you so before taking your money.
We have written the honest version of that decision up as three comparisons — in-house, agency, freelancer or doing it yourself — including the cases where the answer is not to hire anyone. If you would rather see numbers than ranges, our plans and pricing are published in full, and the growth proposal is six questions and no call.
Frequently asked questions
- Is a twelve-month contract a bad sign?
- Not by itself. Local search and reputation work compound over months, and a provider who commits to that timeline is being realistic. What matters is whether there is a break clause, whether you keep your accounts, and whether the term is justified by the work rather than just stated.
- How much should I expect to pay?
- For a single-location local business, ongoing marketing across the agency market generally runs from a few hundred to a few thousand a month depending on channels and competitiveness. The figure matters less than what it buys and how many hours of real attention sit behind it.
- What if they will not answer these questions?
- That is a complete answer in itself. Every one of these has a straightforward response for a provider running a legitimate operation, and reluctance on the accounts question in particular is the one worth walking away from.
- Should I ask for a guarantee?
- Be wary of anyone offering one on rankings — nobody controls the search engines, and a guarantee of position is either meaningless in the small print or a sign of something worse. A guarantee about process, reporting and responsiveness is reasonable and worth asking for.