Asking the Right Questions
What are your company’s marketing requirements
The first step is to figure out your own company’s marketing requirements before looking for an agency.
Do you need website design? Email marketing? SEO? Analytics?
If you already have an in-house marketing team, ask yourself which marketing strategies does your team have the skills for? What are the marketing tactics that you know you “should” do but haven’t gotten around to yet?
These are the sorts of questions that will shed some light on what you can outsource to an agency to get more efficient results.
How do they run their own business?
One of the best signs about an agency that will indicate what they can do for your business are the results they’ve generated for themselves.
If you’re thinking about hiring an agency for blog management, how do they run their own blog?
If you’re thinking about hiring them for social media promotion, how do they handle their own social media accounts?
If you want to hire them for SEO, how do they rank in search for terms in their industry?

We rank near the top for marketing funnel strategy. :-)
You can verify these details on your own, and also ask the agency.
If they don’t “practice what they preach” for their own business, then it could be a red flag that they don’t really believe in or are capable of the services that they offer.
What are their KPIs?
Most businesses track vanity metrics, numbers that might seem like they matter but have no real correlation to generating revenue for the business. For example, the number of “likes” you get on a post can be considered a vanity metric because it doesn’t always translate directly to sales.
The last thing you want is for an agency to charge you premium rates every month and only deliver more likes on your posts but no boosts in sales. How will they measure your success? Be sure to ask the agency this as you’re looking through your options.
Here are some important metrics in digital marketing:
Number of unique visitors
Depending on how solid the rest of your marketing funnel is, a boost in traffic could be directly correlated with a boost in conversions. But if you’re not sure exactly who your target market is, generating massive traffic to your site and measuring their interaction with your site could be a great, quick way of figuring that out.
Time spent on site
The number of minutes users spend on your site is data that shows how interesting and relevant your content is. If your content is highly relevant to their specific situation, then visitors will spend a relatively long time on your site. If not, then your content could probably be more targeted. Google loves using this metric when ranking content in search because it shows how valuable your website or blog is to a reader who searched for your keywords.
Other factors could influence time on your website as well, such as page speed. You can track your average time on site through the “average visit duration” statistic in Google Analytics.

Source: Engage the Crowd
Traffic source numbers
It’s important to find out which channels users are visiting your site from. For example, if you find that most of your traffic is coming through a particular article that ranks high in search, then you’ll want to produce more content similar to that one. In addition to that, it’s important to measure what what type of traffic you’re getting. Are most of your visitors referral traffic from other websites? Are you getting most of your traffic from specific marketing campaigns? Are you getting organic traffic from search?
Bounce rate
Bounce rate shows the percentage of visitors that leave your site after they land on it. High bounce rate could indicate that the content on your site is not relevant or valuable.
Cost per click
Cost per click is a purchasing model for paid ads where you pay each time your ad is clicked.
Click through rate
Click through rate measures the number of times your ad has been clicked versus the number of impressions it received. This helps analyze how targeted your ad copy is.
Social interactions
If you’re hiring an agency for social media management, then you’ll want to identify some KPIs in this area. Social interaction KPIs can help measure the extent to which your social media efforts help generate conversions. If you or your agency use a tool like KISSmetrics, you’ll be able to track the entire customer journey of people who come to your site through social media. That way, you can track exactly how many buyers your social media posts are generating, not just likes or shares.

What results do they promise?
When you’re in an industry that has a low barrier to entry, you’ll inevitably have to deal with people who claim to know what they’re doing, but actually have no idea.
Marketing is one of those industries.
There are plenty of marketing agencies that promise the world to customers just to close the deal, but lack the staff and the skills to deliver. In the worst cases, they keep charging you money every month and say that it will take a long time to see organic traffic results, even though they know that their actions will never deliver results.
Agencies also should not guarantee bottom-of-the-funnel results because there are just too many factors involved which are specific to each company that might result in differing ROI. For example, you could make all the right moves when it comes to your marketing, but results will take longer if you’re in a more competitive market.
You can filter out scammy or low-quality agencies by asking them for their “secret sauce.” What makes them different? What’s their strategy for getting you results?
For example, according to Social Media Examiner, a good question to ask at this stage is: “How are you going to help with content creation?” A good answer might go something like this:
First we’ll start by creating a publishing schedule. This is a list of keyword rich headlines which gives us a framework for the types of content we want to produce. Ideally, the content comes from within your organization, but if you don’t have the resources, we can help procure a professional writer who has experience with your industry.
Either way, we will have our SEO experts review and optimize the content before it’s posted to your website.
Additionally, we can leverage the content you’re already producing (whitepapers, case studies, webinars, emails, sales presentations, etc.). These assets can be transcribed, organized, and optimized to draw relevant traffic from the search engines.
According to Neil Patel, here are some common red flags to watch out for when hiring a marketing agency:
Be extra careful with hiring marketing agencies from overseas.
You tend to get what you pay for. If you find agencies that charge low prices, you might think you’re getting a great deal, but in reality you’ll likely have to deal with poor service.
Look up agencies on the Better Business Bureau website to see their ratings.
What do they charge?
You can easily filter out low-quality agencies through price. Many businesses want to save money, so price is usually the first thing they ask about. However, if you find an agency that charges low prices, then chances are they deliver low-quality results too.
Think about it from their perspective: if an agency prices itself too low, then they make lower margins on their services. In addition to that, they’re less likely to go the extra mile for your business because there’s not much incentive. Agencies that charge higher prices tend to treat their clients with more generosity because they can afford to do so. Don’t cut corners when finding the right agency for the job.
Learn more about the various agency pricing models that you’ll come across.