Every agency list on the internet is either paid placement or a directory scrape. This is not a list. It is the six things we would check if we were the ones hiring, written by a team that gets asked all six on almost every call.
A founder doing three million in e-commerce revenue and a company doing eighty million need almost opposite things. The first needs volume and someone who ships without being managed. The second needs process, governance and specialists.
We work with founders and small teams under twenty million in revenue who need marketing to actually happen every week. If you are above that, a network agency will serve you better and we will say so on the call.
The most common failure is not bad strategy, it is nothing shipping. A deck lands, everyone agrees, and then two months pass with three posts and one landing page. Ask what leaves the building in a normal week, not what the plan looks like.
If the numbers live in the agency's own dashboard and cannot be traced back to your ad manager, GA4 or CRM, they are marketing, not measurement. You should own every account and be able to log in and check any figure yourself.
Content is a hit-rate business. Anyone who tells you most of what they make performs is either new or selling. A good partner will tell you the ratio of what they killed to what they scaled, and how fast they cut a loser.
Plenty of agencies now use AI generated creators and AI written copy. That is fine, and often the reason the volume is possible at all. What is not fine is finding out after launch. Ask what is synthetic, how it is labelled, and how they handle each platform's disclosure rules.
Content that drives traffic to a site that does not convert is wasted, and a beautiful site with no pipeline behind it is a brochure. Either one partner runs content, visibility, site and pipeline together, or you need to know exactly where their scope stops and who picks it up.
Accounts, ad assets, creative files, domains and analytics should all be in your name from day one. Long lock-ins exist to protect the agency, not you. A partner confident in the work does not need a twelve-month cage.