The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast 10 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an Agency
Dec 11, 2025
Learn the 10 critical questions every small business should ask before hiring a marketing partner. Discover why owning your assets is essential and how to measure success effectively. Sara highlights the importance of strategy alignment over mere tactics and warns against lengthy contracts that limit flexibility. She emphasizes the value of team involvement and suggest using AI to enhance, not replace, human analysis. These insights aim to empower businesses to forge transparent, collaborative marketing partnerships.
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Clients Locked Out By Agencies
- A client paid $10,000/month for Google Ads while the agency owned the ad account and the client had no access.
- Another paid $8,000/month for SEO under a three-year contract and couldn't exit or verify results.
Insist You Own All Marketing Accounts
- Make sure you own your website, paid accounts, and tools rather than the agency owning them.
- Grant agencies manager access so you can remove them if the partnership ends.
Define Metrics And Review Cadence Up Front
- Ask how success will be measured, what metrics are tracked, and the review cadence.
- Demand the agency educates you on metric meaning and uses data to drive decisions.
