Questions to Ask a Marketing Professional
Twenty questions for interviewing a marketing hire, freelancer, or agency, covering what they personally did, how they would spend your budget, how they report, and where credit for past results actually belongs.
The questions
Open any question for the note
Which parts of marketing do you do yourself, and which do you hand to someone else?
Why ask it
Titles hide enormous differences. Someone who has always had a designer, a media buyer, and a copywriter around them may be a good manager and a poor doer, which matters if you are hiring one person to cover everything.
Walk me through the last campaign you ran from start to finish.
Why ask it
Ask for the sequence: who decided what, what was built, what it cost, what happened. Detail is hard to fake, and the parts they skip are usually the parts they were not close to.
What did that campaign cost, and what did it return?
Why ask it
Both numbers, or the return figure means nothing. Watch for answers in impressions, reach, or engagement when you asked about money, and for a refusal to discuss cost while still claiming the result.
Which result on your CV are you least able to take sole credit for?
Why ask it
An unusual question that rewards honesty and exposes borrowed credit. Everyone senior has a line on their record that was mostly someone else's work or a favorable market, and candidates who can identify it are usually accurate about the rest.
What did you inherit when you started your last role, and what did you change first?
Why ask it
Marketers arriving into a working machine can look far better than they are. The first change they made tells you what they notice and whether they fix measurement, positioning, or spend before adding activity.
If you had our budget, where would it go in the first month, and what would you leave alone?
Why ask it
The second half is more revealing. Someone who wants to rebuild the website, change the logo, and start on four channels at once has not thought about sequencing, and will spend your money on setup rather than customers.
How would you know within eight weeks whether it was working?
Why ask it
You are testing whether they can name leading indicators, not just eventual revenue. Vagueness here is how three-month engagements turn into a year of dashboards with nothing to decide from.
What would you need from us to do this well, and what would make you fail?
Why ask it
Good marketers have a clear list: access to customers, a decision-maker who responds, a fixed budget, sign-off in days rather than weeks. Nobody who says they need nothing has worked inside a slow organization.
Can you show me something you wrote for a product you found dull?
Why ask it
Portfolio work is usually the glamorous account. Ordinary business-to-business or unfashionable products are where craft shows, and the ability to make an unexciting thing clear is what you are actually buying.
How would you set up measurement if our tracking is a mess?
Why ask it
Most tracking is a mess. Look for practical steps: fixing the conversion definitions, adding a self-reported source at signup, agreeing a single number both sides trust. Insisting on a full analytics rebuild before doing anything is a way to bill for months.
What have you noticed about our marketing already?
Why ask it
Anyone serious has looked before the meeting and has two or three specific observations. Generic praise, or a pitch that could be sent to any company in your sector, tells you what your account will receive as well.
How do you handle it when a senior stakeholder wants a campaign you think is wrong?
Why ask it
Ask for the last time it happened and how it ended. Marketers who always won, or always complied, are both describing a problem, and the second kind will burn your budget on someone's pet idea without saying so.
Tell me about a campaign that failed, and what it cost.
Why ask it
You want the diagnosis, not the confession. The strongest answers separate a bad hypothesis from bad execution and describe what they would test next. No failures on record means either a short career or a selective memory.
Who would actually be doing the day-to-day work?
Why ask it
In agency and consultancy pitches the senior people in the room are frequently not the ones on your account afterwards. Ask for the names, the seniority, and how much of their week you would get, and put it in the contract.
How do you charge, and what does that include?
Why ask it
Retainers, day rates, project fees, and a percentage of media spend all create different incentives, and the last of these rewards spending more. Clarify what counts as extra: revisions, reporting, meetings, ad spend, tools.
What would land in my inbox, and how often?
Why ask it
Ask to see a real report from another client with the numbers redacted. Reporting habits are the single best predictor of whether you will know what is happening in month four, when the initial attention has moved elsewhere.
Which tools would you want us to buy, and what do they cost per year?
Why ask it
Software can quietly consume a small marketing budget before any media is bought. It also shows whether they can work with what you have or only inside one particular stack they know.
Who owns the accounts, data, and creative when we stop working together?
Why ask it
Ad accounts, analytics, domains, ad copy, and audience lists should be yours. Agencies that hold these in their own accounts make leaving expensive, and this is the most common way small businesses lose years of history.
What kind of client or company do you work worst with?
Why ask it
A candid answer is a gift and often describes you: slow approvals, no budget for testing, a founder who rewrites everything. Someone who claims to work well with everybody has not noticed why their last engagement ended.
What do you want to ask me before you decide whether to take this on?
Why ask it
The questions they ask are better evidence than the answers they give. Expect questions about budget, decision rights, customer access, and what has already been tried, and be wary of anyone who has none.
Hiring or briefing a marketing professional
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before you interview anyone
Decide what you are actually buying
A strategist, a doer, or a manager of doers. Most disappointing marketing hires are a mismatch of level rather than of ability, and small companies frequently hire a strategist when they needed someone to write the emails.
Write down the number that would make this a success
Qualified leads a month, cost per acquisition, trial signups, retained customers. If you cannot name it, no candidate can be held to it, and you will end up judging them on how busy they seem.
Know your own constraints
Budget, who signs off, how fast you can approve work, whether they can speak to customers. Withholding these to seem more attractive means you will hire on a plan that cannot be executed.
Testing the claim, not the pitch
- Give a short paid exercise on your own product rather than a hypothetical, and pay for it
- Ask for two references from clients or managers, including one engagement that ended
- When checking references, ask what the person did themselves and what the team did
- Look at one campaign in the portfolio in depth rather than the whole deck
- Search for the campaigns they claim and check dates against when they held the role
Warning signs
- Results quoted only as percentages with no base figure
- Guaranteed rankings, guaranteed leads, or a promise of a specific return before any research
- Pressure to sign a twelve-month contract with no break clause
- Ad accounts, tracking, or domains held in the agency's own name
- A proposal that appears not to have been written for your business
- Fees calculated as a share of media spend with no cap and no other incentive
Setting up the first ninety days
Agree in writing what will exist by day thirty, sixty, and ninety, and make at least one of those items a decision rather than a deliverable: what to stop, what to double, what to test next. Give access to customers and to your own sales conversations early, since marketers who never hear a customer speak write copy that describes your company instead of their problem. Keep ownership of every account and dataset from day one, and schedule a short review at the end of the first quarter with the success number in front of both of you, rather than waiting for an annual renewal to notice nothing was measured.