Most business owners pick a marketing agency the same way: someone calls, the price sounds reasonable, the person on the phone sounds confident, and three months later the money is gone with nothing to show for it.
It is a hard thing to judge from the outside. You cannot inspect marketing the way you can inspect a delivery of cement. So you end up trusting a pitch.
This checklist is a way to make that judgement with fewer guesses. Nine questions, and every one of them can be asked in a first call. Some of them are uncomfortable for agencies to answer — including us. That is exactly why they work.
1. Know what is actually broken before you call anyone
“We need digital marketing” is not a brief. It is a symptom.
Sit down and work out which of these is true for you:
- People search for what you sell, and cannot find you
- They find you, visit the website, and leave without calling
- Enquiries come in, but they are the wrong kind — price shoppers, wrong city, wrong service
- You get enquiries and lose them because nobody follows up fast enough
These four problems need completely different work. The first is a visibility problem, the second is a website problem, the third is a targeting problem, and the fourth is not a marketing problem at all.
An agency that hears your symptom and immediately proposes a package has skipped the diagnosis. Walk away from that.
2. Ask whether they work with businesses your size
An agency that mostly serves national brands will treat a clinic in Arrah as a small account, and small accounts get junior attention. An agency that has never handled anything bigger than a single-location shop will struggle with a multi-branch hospital.
Ask directly: what does a typical client of yours look like, and what do they spend? If your business is far outside that range in either direction, you are the exception, and exceptions get inconsistent service.
3. Find out who will actually do the work
This is the question that separates a real team from a sales operation.
The person selling to you is often not the person running your campaigns. That is normal in a big agency. What is not acceptable is not knowing. Ask: who writes my ads, who replies to my reviews, who do I message when something breaks, and can I speak to them before I sign?
If the answer is vague, your account is probably going to a junior with forty other accounts, or to a subcontractor you will never meet.
4. Get account ownership in writing
This one costs businesses more than any other mistake on this list.
Your Google Ads account, Meta Business Manager, Google Business Profile, website, domain, hosting and WhatsApp number should all be in your name. The agency works inside them as a manager. When you leave, you remove their access and everything stays exactly where it is.
Some agencies run your ads from their own account. It sounds like a convenience. What it means is that on the day you leave, you lose the campaign history, the audience data, the conversion learning — years of accumulated value that Google will not hand over. You start from zero with the next agency.
Ask before signing: whose name is the ad account in? If the answer is anything other than yours, that is a deal-breaker, not a detail to sort out later.
5. Understand how they charge
There are two common models, and they push behaviour in different directions.
A fixed monthly fee for the management work, with ad budget paid separately and directly to Google or Meta from your own card. The agency has no financial reason to push your spend up.
A percentage of ad spend. The more you spend, the more they earn. This is standard practice in the industry and not automatically dishonest — but it does mean the advice to “increase the budget” comes from someone who benefits from it.
Whichever model you pick, insist that ad budget never passes through the agency. It should go from your card to the platform, visible to you at all times. Money routed through an agency is money you cannot audit.
6. Ask what they would do in the first thirty days
A good answer sounds boring. Audit, tracking setup, fixing the landing page, keyword research, getting the profile in order. Actual work, in an order that makes sense.
A bad answer is a list of everything they sell.
Listen especially for whether they mention conversion tracking before campaigns. Running ads without tracking is buying traffic and hoping. Most of the broken accounts we inherit have this wrong — the ads ran for months, and nobody could tell which keyword produced a single phone call.
7. Pin down the reporting
Ask to see a sample report from a real client, with the name removed.
What you want to see: calls, enquiries, cost per lead, rankings, and what changed since last month. In language you can read.
What you do not want: a forty-page PDF of impressions, reach and engagement rate. Those numbers are easy to make look good and tell you nothing about whether the phone rang. If a report cannot answer “how many customers did this bring me and what did each one cost”, it is decoration.
Also ask how often you will actually speak to someone. A monthly call where you can ask questions is worth more than a weekly automated email.
8. Check the exit before you check the entry
Ask what happens if you want to stop in month three.
Long lock-in contracts exist to protect the agency from its own results. Month-to-month terms mean they have to keep earning the fee. If someone insists on a twelve-month commitment for ongoing services, ask why — and listen carefully to whether the answer is about your benefit or theirs.
Setup-heavy projects like a website build are different. Those reasonably have milestones and a fixed scope.
9. Look at their own marketing
This one is free and takes five minutes.
Search for the agency the way a customer would search for them. Do they rank for anything in their own city? Is their Google Business Profile complete, with recent reviews and replies? When did they last post? Is their own website fast on your phone?
An agency that cannot do for itself what it promises to do for you is telling you something. It is not always disqualifying — some good teams genuinely neglect their own marketing while busy with clients — but it deserves a question.
Red flags worth walking away from
- Guaranteed number one ranking. Nobody can promise this. Google does not sell positions, and local results change depending on where the searcher is standing. A guarantee means either a meaningless definition of “ranking” or tactics that will get your listing suspended.
- “We have a partnership with Google so we can rank you.” Google Partner status is about ad spend and certification. It gives nobody special access to organic rankings.
- Offering to get you reviews. Bought reviews get wiped and listings get suspended. A real agency builds a system for collecting genuine ones.
- Prices that seem impossibly low. Nobody can research, write, design, run and report on campaigns for a couple of thousand rupees a month. Something is being skipped, and it is usually everything.
- No questions about your business. If the first call is all pitch and no diagnosis, the strategy will be a template.
Agency, freelancer or in-house?
All three work in the right situation, and cost is not the only difference.
A freelancer is usually the cheapest and can be excellent at one thing — a designer, an ads specialist. The risk is coverage. When they take a holiday or take on a bigger client, your work waits.
An agency costs more and gives you several skills under one contract, plus continuity when someone is unavailable. The risk is becoming a small account inside a big roster.
In-house makes sense once your monthly spend is large enough that a salary is cheaper than fees — and only if you can actually manage that person. Marketing hires without supervision drift.
For most local businesses in Bihar, an agency is the middle path: broader than one freelancer, cheaper than a salary.
What it costs, roughly
Anyone quoting you a price before understanding your competition is guessing. What you can plan for is the shape of the cost.
There are always two separate numbers. Ad budget goes to Google or Meta and buys the clicks. As a working floor, Google Ads needs from around ₹5,000 a month to gather enough data to improve, and Meta from around ₹3,000. Below that the platforms cannot learn, and the money leaks without producing a steady stream of enquiries.
Then there is the management fee, which pays for the work. This varies with how many services, campaigns and locations are involved. What matters is that the two numbers are stated separately, so you can always see what you paid for advertising and what you paid for the work.
Frequently asked questions
How long before I see results?
Paid ads can produce enquiries in the first week. Local SEO and profile work usually shows clear movement in 60 to 90 days, then compounds. Any agency that cannot tell you which timeline applies to your situation has not thought about your situation.
Should I choose a local agency or a big-city one?
For local search, a team that understands your market has a genuine edge — they know how customers in your area actually phrase things, and which competitors you are really up against. For national campaigns it matters less. Meeting in person is nice but rarely decisive; most work happens over calls and messages either way.
What should I have ready for the first call?
Your business name and city, your website if you have one, a rough monthly budget, and an honest description of what is not working. That is enough for a useful conversation. Nobody needs account access until you decide to work together.
Can I hire an agency for just one service?
Yes, and it is often the sensible way to start. Take one service, judge the results for two or three months, and expand only if it earns its fee.
What if it is not working after a few months?
Ask for the numbers, not reassurance. Cost per lead, enquiries, rankings, month by month. If those have not moved and the explanation is about impressions and reach, that answer is itself the answer.
Use this on us too
Every question on this list is one you can put to us. Whose name is the ad account in, who does the work, what happens in the first thirty days, what does a report look like, can I leave in month three.
If you want a straight answer on whether we are the right fit, tell us your business and city on our contact page. We will look at your Google presence together and say honestly what would move the needle first — even when that is not something we sell.