The Best Questions to Ask a Marketing Agency Before Hiring Them for Your Cleaning Company

By ERIN LARISON

COO, Five Door Media

Hiring a marketing agency can be tough, especially if marketing isn't your thing.

You can look at an agency's website, read the testimonials and have a really good sales call. But none of that necessarily tells you what it's going to be like to hand them part of your marketing budget every month.

And if you've been burned by an agency before, you probably already know that.

The best thing you can do before signing a contract is ask good questions. Not just about price, but about what they're recommending, why they're recommending it, what they'll actually be doing and how you'll know if it's working.

Here are 10 I'd ask.

1. Have you worked with cleaning companies before?

This doesn't have to be a dealbreaker, but it matters.

Cleaning companies have some quirks that aren't obvious if you've never marketed one. A residential company trying to build a recurring client base is very different from a commercial cleaner pursuing larger contracts. And a company focused on move-outs or post-construction cleans has a different customer altogether.

So if an agency tells you they've worked with cleaning companies, dig a little deeper.

What kinds? What have they learned? What tends to be difficult? How would they market a recurring residential cleaning company differently from a commercial one?

You'll figure out pretty quickly whether they actually know the industry or whether "cleaning company" is just another local service business to them.

And if they haven't worked in the industry before, that's okay. I'd just want to hear a pretty good plan for how they're going to learn it.

2. What do you think my business actually needs?

I really like this question.

You might walk into the conversation convinced you need SEO or Google Ads or a new website. A good agency should be willing to tell you if they don't agree.

They should be asking about your goals, where your leads are coming from now, what you've already tried, your market and what happens after a lead comes in.

Because sometimes the answer isn't "more marketing."

If you're already getting plenty of leads but they're not turning into estimates or booked cleans, spending more money to generate even more leads may not solve the problem.

Ask what they'd prioritize first and why.

If the answer happens to be every service they sell, I'd have some more questions.

3. What exactly am I paying for?

Marketing agencies use a lot of big umbrella terms.

SEO. PPC. Content marketing. Social media management. Website management.

Those words don't tell you much about what's actually going to happen every month.

If you're paying for SEO, are they working on your website? Writing content? Optimizing service and location pages? Working on your Google Business Profile? Handling technical issues?

If you're paying for Google Ads, who's creating the ads and landing pages? Who's tracking the leads? How often is someone actually looking at the campaigns?

You don't need to know how to do the work yourself.

But you should know what work you're paying someone else to do.

4. What is this actually going to cost?

Obviously, ask about the fee. But don't stop there.

If you're running paid ads, find out whether the ad spend is included or separate. Ask about setup fees, software, hosting and anything else that could show up later.

And read the contract.

How long are you committing? What happens if you cancel? What happens if you ask for something that isn't included in your normal scope?

None of those things are automatically bad. You just don't want to discover them three months into the relationship.

5. What results are realistic?

This is where I'd be especially careful about answers that sound too good.

"We'll get you to number one on Google."

"We guarantee 100 leads."

"We're going to double your revenue."

Maybe. But how could anyone responsibly know that before they've looked at your market, competition, budget, website, reputation and current performance?

There are also things an agency can't control.

They can generate a lead. They can't make that person answer the phone when you call back. They can't make your office follow up five times. They can't fix pricing that's way out of line with your market.

That doesn't mean an agency gets to shrug and say, "No guarantees!" whenever results aren't good.

They should be able to explain what they expect to improve, what they've seen with similar cleaning companies and what they're going to watch to determine whether the strategy is moving in the right direction.

6. How long should this take?

"It depends" isn't necessarily a bad answer here.

I just want to know what it depends on.

Google Ads can start putting your business in front of people pretty quickly, but a new campaign still needs time to collect data and be optimized. SEO usually takes longer because you're trying to improve organic visibility over time.

Ask what the first few months should look like.

What are you doing in month one? What should we know by month three? At what point should we expect to have enough information to decide whether this is working?

That's much more useful than someone vaguely telling you to "give it time."

7. How are we measuring success?

This is a big one.

Marketing reports can have a lot of numbers in them. Impressions, clicks, traffic, rankings, engagement.

Some of those numbers matter. Some are just context.

If your goal is to add recurring cleaning clients, I'd want to know whether the marketing is helping you do that.

That might mean looking at leads, qualified leads, booked estimates, cost per lead, conversion rates or customer acquisition cost. It depends on what you're hiring the agency to accomplish.

I'd also ask what they're measuring at the beginning.

If nobody knows where you started, it's going to be pretty hard to have a meaningful conversation about what's improved six months from now.

8. What do you need from me?

This is one people don't always think to ask.

An agency can take a lot off your plate. That doesn't mean you disappear.

They may need photos from your team. Information about your services. Access to software. Approval on content. Feedback about lead quality. Someone who can answer questions about how you actually run your business.

Ask how much involvement they expect and who they need involved.

If you hired an agency because you're already stretched thin, you don't want to find out afterward that they need five hours of your time every week to do their job.

9. Who will I actually be working with?

You might love the person who runs your sales call.

That doesn't necessarily mean you'll ever talk to that person again.

Ask who your point of contact will be. Ask who is actually doing the work. Ask how often you'll talk and what happens when you have a question.

This matters more than people think.

Marketing isn't something you buy once and walk away from. You're probably going to work with these people for months or years. You should know what that relationship is going to look like.

10. What happens if this doesn't work?

Please ask this one.

Not every campaign is going to work exactly the way everyone hoped. We've seen ads that needed a completely different approach. We've seen keywords turn out to be more competitive than expected. We've seen pages get traffic and not convert.

That's marketing.

I wouldn't expect an agency to predict every one of those things before they happen.

I would expect them to notice, tell me about it and have an idea for what we're going to try next.

Ask how often they're reviewing performance. Ask what happens when something underperforms. Ask how they decide when it's time to change direction.

Their answer will probably tell you a lot about what it will be like to work with them when things aren't perfect.

Before you sign

You don't need to become a marketing expert before you hire a marketing agency.

You do need to understand what you're buying.

By the end of the conversation, you should know what the agency thinks you need and why, what they're going to do, what it's going to cost, what they'll need from you and how the two of you are going to judge whether it's working.

And pay attention to how they answer you.

Do they ask questions before giving you recommendations? Can they explain what they're doing without hiding behind marketing jargon? Are they comfortable telling you that something might not work?

I'd take that over the biggest promise in the room any day.