How to tell if a marketing company is worth your money.

What actually tells you whether a marketing company is worth it?

Four things, and you can check all four in a single conversation. One, you can name the person who will run your account and speak to them before you sign. Two, the price is on the table in plain numbers. Three, you know the term and you know what happens if it isn’t working. Four, the reporting is something you can read without a translator. If a company clears all four, you’re dealing with a real business. If it dodges any of them, the rest of the pitch doesn’t matter much.

This is written to be useful whether you hire us, hire somebody in Folsom or Sacramento, or decide to keep running it yourself. We’ve included the versions of these questions that are awkward for us to answer, because a checklist that only makes the author look good isn’t a checklist. It’s an ad.

Who exactly will run my account day to day, and can I speak to them?

Ask for a name. Then ask to talk to that person before you sign anything, not after. This one question sorts the local market faster than any other, because a lot of marketing is sold by one person and delivered by someone you never meet, often in another state, often carrying dozens of accounts at once.

A good answer sounds like a name, a phone number, and a short conversation you can have this week. A weak answer sounds like “our team” or “your success manager will reach out after onboarding.”

Ours: Clinton Goodrich, owner and publisher, (530) 306-1881. I build the plan, I sit in the review meetings, and I answer that phone. Here’s the fair follow-up, and you should use it on me too. I have a team behind me for design, content and account support, so ask where the line is between what the owner does and what the team does. “The owner runs it” should never mean the owner personally touches every task. It should mean the owner is accountable for it and reachable when you want him.

What does it cost, plainly?

You should get a number, or at least an honest range, before you spend an hour in a proposal meeting. If a company won’t discuss price until it has built your custom strategy, what it has really built is a sunk cost, and it’s counting on that.

Ask three things. What’s the monthly. What’s charged on top of the monthly, for setup, creative or platform fees. And what’s already included in the monthly that would otherwise be billed separately. That third question is where the surprises live.

Ours is published on the pricing section of our homepage. Placements start at $360 a month. Most of our partners land between $800 and $1,500 a month running digital, print and online presence together. The widest coverage runs $3,000 to $5,000 a month. If none of those work for your business right now, that’s a completely fine outcome of a phone call, and I’d rather hear it early.

What am I committing to, and what happens if it isn’t working?

Those are two separate questions, and companies love to answer only the first. Get the term in months. Then ask the harder one out loud: “If we’re three months in and my phone hasn’t moved, what do you do?” Listen for whether there’s an actual process, or whether the room gets defensive.

Ask what you keep when it ends, too. If somebody builds you a website, find out whether you own it. If somebody runs your ads, find out what carries over. Owners get burned on that more often than they get burned on price.

Ours: yes, there is an agreement, and yes, there is a term. You see the length and what it covers before you sign, and if you ask what happens when something isn’t working, you get the answer on the call instead of after. What we won’t do is pretend there’s no commitment at all. Print in particular is bought in advance, and a magazine that’s already at the printer cannot be unprinted.

What will you refuse to promise?

This is the best question on the list and almost nobody asks it. A company that’s been doing this a while has a list of things it won’t promise, and it’ll give you that list without flinching. A company that promises everything doesn’t have a list, which means it doesn’t have a line it won’t cross to close you.

Ours, said plainly. We don’t promise a number of leads. We don’t promise a ranking on Google. We don’t promise revenue. We don’t promise reviews. We don’t promise that the seat your competitor is looking at will still be open next month, and we don’t promise a category stays open just because it was open the day we talked.

What we’ll speak to is what’s inside our control. Reach, frequency, placement quality, creative, consistency, and who sees you. Those are the inputs, and they’re the part you’re actually paying for. The output is a decision made by a family in El Dorado Hills or Cameron Park or Rancho Murieta, at their kitchen table, on their timeline. No vendor controls that, and the honest ones stop pretending they do.

Can anyone actually promise me a specific number of leads?

No. Anyone telling you “this will get you twelve calls a month” is guessing, and the honest ones will admit it if you push once.

Here’s why. Advertising controls how many of the right people see you and how often they see you. It doesn’t control whether their water heater fails this month, whether the buyer they’re working with already has a lender, whether they just spent the remodel budget on a new roof, or what rates do in the fall. A campaign that produces four calls in March and fourteen in June often didn’t change at all. Demand changed.

So a promised lead count is a projection built from other businesses, in other categories, in other markets, in other years. That can be a useful reference point and it’s fair to ask for one. It’s not a promise, and it should never be written like one. If you see a specific lead number in a proposal, ask what it’s based on and what happens if it doesn’t happen. The answer will tell you more about the company than the number ever could.

What’s the short list of questions to bring?

Take these to us, and take them to whoever else you’re considering in El Dorado Hills, Folsom, Rancho Murieta, Roseville or anywhere else in the region. Ask them in the same order and compare the answers side by side.

• Who runs my account day to day, and can I speak with that person this week?
• What’s the monthly, what’s billed on top of it, and what’s included that would otherwise cost extra?
• How long is the term, and what happens if it isn’t working at month three?
• What will you show me, how often, and can I see a real report before I sign?
• What will you refuse to promise?
• Which of your clients left, and why?

If we come out of that comparison badly, hire the other company. That’s the honest point of writing the list down. If you’d like to run it on us with the evidence in front of you, our partner figures and the methodology behind them are on the results page, and what’s active, open and expanding is on the markets page. Then book a meeting and ask the hard ones.