Before you sign with a marketing agency, ask five things: what will you measure, what happens in the first 30 days, who actually does the work, what do I own if we part ways, and how do I leave. A good agency answers all five in plain language, without hesitation. A weak one answers with adjectives.
Every pitch is built to sound good. The questions below are built to find out what happens after the invoice clears. This is how you vet a marketing agency before hiring one: ask them in the meeting, write the answers down, and compare them across everyone you talk to. If you are still building a shortlist, our guide to choosing a marketing agency in Cyprus covers how to narrow the field first.
1. What exactly will you measure, and where will I see it?
If the answer is impressions, reach, or engagement, be careful. Those numbers can climb for months while your phone stays quiet. The measures that matter are tied to money: enquiries received, calls answered, bookings made, quotes sent, jobs won. Ask to see the exact report you would receive each month. If it takes ten minutes to explain, it will not help you run your business.
2. What happens in the first 30 days?
A vague answer here is a warning. You want specifics: what gets audited, what gets fixed first, what they will need from you, and what you should expect to notice. In our experience the fastest wins usually sit close to the customer: enquiries answered faster, a Google Business Profile brought up to date, a booking path that works on a phone. Grand strategy can wait. Ask what changes in month one.
3. Who actually does the work?
The person who pitches you is often not the person who runs your account. Ask who will write, build, and reply on your behalf, and whether that work is done in-house, freelanced, or outsourced. None of those are automatically wrong. Not knowing is. Ask also how much of the work is AI-assisted, and who checks it before it reaches your customers.
4. Do you test any of this on your own business?
An agency that only experiments on clients is asking you to fund its learning curve. Ask what they run for themselves, live, where you can see it. We answer that question with Pinelaki, the founder's 35-year auto-body business, which runs a live AI damage estimator that real customers use every week. Whatever agency you talk to, ask for their equivalent.
5. What do I own if we part ways?
Ask directly: who owns the domain, the website, the ad accounts, the Google Business Profile, the content, and the customer data. The honest answer is you, all of it, from day one. Some agencies build on accounts they control, so leaving means starting over. Get ownership in writing before any work begins.
6. How do I leave?
Ask for the contract length, the notice period, and what happens to work in progress if you stop. A confident agency keeps exits simple, usually 30 days notice, because it expects to be kept for results rather than paperwork. A twelve-month lock-in with penalty clauses tells you where the agency believes its retention really comes from.
7. How fast do you reply, and on which channels?
Watch how the agency treats you as a prospect, because right now you are their most valuable lead. If replies take days before the contract, they will not get faster after it. Then turn the question around: can they help you answer your own customers quickly, on the channels people here actually use, including Viber and WhatsApp? Answering enquiries fast is usually where the quickest revenue sits, and it is the first thing we look at in our Answer service.
The one question that shortcuts all of this
Ask the agency to show you something specific about your business before you pay anything. Not a template, a real observation: where your enquiries leak, where you are invisible in search and AI answers, what a customer sees when they check you out. An agency that will not look before the contract is signed is selling a package, not a fix. That is why every engagement we take starts with a free diagnosis. It costs nothing, and you get a useful answer either way.