Marketing Agency First-phase Evaluation Checklist

A first phase with a marketing agency should make the next decision clearer. It may be discovery, measurement repair, a focused experiment, or a small implementation. It should not be an unlimited period in which activity is reported while the business still cannot explain the problem, the owner, the evidence, or the exit path. Use this checklist before signing a retained engagement.

Define the decision and the first phase

Write the decision the phase must support: approve a channel test, repair measurement, improve a named offer, validate a market segment, or stop an unproductive direction. Define the start and end dates, deliverables, dependencies, access required, review cadence, and acceptance evidence.

Ask the agency to state what it will not decide in this phase. A credible boundary is a strength. It prevents a short engagement from being sold as a guaranteed revenue transformation and makes a later renewal a deliberate choice.

Check diagnosis before tactics

Require a written problem statement that names the audience, commercial outcome, current evidence, known constraints, and competing explanations. Reject a plan that begins with a tool, channel, volume target, or redesign before explaining why that intervention is appropriate.

Use this test:

| Question | Acceptable evidence | Warning sign | | — | — | — | | What is the business problem? | observable gap and affected segment | generic growth language | | What is already known? | dated records and limitations | confident claims without records | | What is uncertain? | explicit assumptions and alternatives | certainty before inspection | | What will be tested? | narrow hypothesis and method | activity list called a test | | What changes the decision? | threshold, owner, and stop rule | renewal decided by effort |

Verify claims and case evidence

Request the source, date, scope, and client permission for every material case claim. Separate the agency’s own contribution from the client’s offer, budget, seasonality, sales capacity, and other conditions. A logo or a screenshot is not a transferable result.

The FTC’s advertising FAQ explains that advertising claims must be truthful, non-deceptive, and supported by evidence, and notes that agencies can have responsibility for misleading claims. This is not a substitute for local legal advice. Use it as a practical reason to ask what substantiates the agency’s promises and what limitations will appear in the proposal.

Record whether a case is illustrative, anonymised, independently verifiable, or unavailable for review. Never make a purchasing decision on a benchmark that cannot be defined by population, period, denominator, channel, and contribution.

Inspect the first deliverables

Specify a minimum acceptance pack:

• current-state evidence map with data freshness and gaps;
• audience, offer, and intent assumptions;
• channel or page hypothesis with alternatives;
• measurement and naming specification;
• experiment or implementation plan;
• risk, dependency, and access log;
• owner for every handoff;
• decision memo with continue, change, or stop recommendation.

For an SEO or content phase, Google’s SEO Starter Guide is a useful baseline for crawlable, understandable, people-first pages. It is not a promise of rankings. Ask the agency to show how its work improves the intended reader journey and how it will detect a mismatch rather than simply produce more URLs.

Test operating ownership

Write down who owns accounts, pixels, analytics properties, content files, code, domains, creative source files, CRM records, and approvals. Confirm that access is granted through the client’s accounts and that the agency can be removed without losing evidence or control.

Check the working cadence: who attends, what is reviewed, how decisions are recorded, how exceptions are escalated, and what happens when the client is late with an input. A meeting calendar is not an operating model unless it creates a durable record.

Check the economics and capacity

Compare the first-phase fee with internal review time, media or production spend, tools, data cleanup, legal review, and the cost of a delayed decision. The U.S. Small Business Administration’s finance guidance points owners toward financial statements and cash-flow planning; apply the same discipline to the engagement. Do not treat a retainer as affordable merely because the monthly price fits a budget line.

Ask who will do the work, how much capacity is reserved, what is subcontracted, and what happens if the named specialist changes. Measure the evidence delivered per unit of owner attention, not just the number of tasks completed.

Run a bounded working session

Before a retainer, ask for a short working session using the company’s own evidence. The agency should be able to state what it sees, what it cannot see, which assumption it would test first, and what information it needs from the client. Give every participant the same limited data and note where the recommendation changes when one fact changes. This reveals whether the team can reason with incomplete information instead of repeating a prepared pitch.

Do not ask the session to produce a free strategy that can be copied into another proposal. Ask for a decision outline, a diagnostic method, and the boundaries of the paid first phase. Keep the session’s conclusions in the acceptance record so the final scope can be compared with what was actually promised.

Use the acceptance record

For each deliverable, record status, evidence link, reviewer, decision, unresolved assumption, next owner, and due date. Mark a claim as observed, inferred, proposed, or unknown. This prevents a polished presentation from silently becoming a fact in the next meeting.

Release the next phase only when the first phase answers its stated decision, or clearly proves why the question remains open. Change scope when the evidence changes. Stop when the agency cannot show the agreed work, the records are not portable, the claims cannot be substantiated, or the proposed next step depends on an unacknowledged guarantee.

Final pre-signature gate

Before signing, confirm five things: the first decision is explicit; the deliverables are testable; commercial claims have a source and boundary; the client retains account and data control; and the exit or renewal rule is written. If any item is missing, buy a smaller discovery or evidence-repair phase, or hold the engagement until the gap is resolved. A careful first phase protects both the client’s cash and the agency’s ability to do honest work.