How to choose a marketing agency in Peterborough (what to ask before you hire)

Most bad agency hires aren't decided on the sales call. They're decided before it.

You go in without knowing what a customer is worth to you. You compare two quotes that aren't measuring the same thing. You sign without asking who owns the ad account. Six months later you're out $9,000, and you can't even log in to see what happened.

I've written before about how to spot a bad agency and why the standard agency model fails small businesses.

This post is the other half: how to actually run the hiring process, start to finish.

Do this in order, and the decision gets a lot easier.

Step 1: Know four numbers before you call anyone

You cannot evaluate a marketing proposal without these. Every agency will ask you what your budget is.

The right answer comes from math, not a gut feeling.

1. What a customer is worth to you.

Average sale, multiplied by how many times a typical customer comes back. A $90 massage where clients rebook monthly for a year isn't a $90 customer. It's a $1,000+ customer. That number changes what you can afford to spend to get one.

2. How many leads you get in a month right now, and where from.

Calls, form fills, walk-ins, referrals. Even a rough count. Without a baseline, you'll never know whether the agency moved anything.

3. What percentage of those leads become customers.

If you close 1 in 4, you need four leads for every sale. That's the multiplier that turns "cost per lead" into "cost per customer," which is the only version that matters.

4. What you can afford to pay to acquire one customer.

Take what a customer is worth, subtract your cost of delivering the service, and decide how much of the remainder you're willing to spend on acquisition. That's your ceiling.

Now a proposal is testable. If an agency's plan implies a $180 cost per customer and your ceiling is $60, that's a real conversation to have on the call, not a discovery you make down the road in month five.

If you don't know these numbers yet, that's fine. But a good agency should help you build them in the first conversation, not skip past them to talk about packages.

Step 2: Match the type of help to your stage

"Marketing agency" covers five very different things. Buying the wrong type is more common than buying a bad one.

Type of help	Roughly what it costs	Best when
DIY plus a one-time audit	A few hundred dollars, once	You have time but no clarity. You want to know what's broken before you commit to a retainer.
Freelancer, per project	Project-based	You need one specific thing built — a landing page, a set of ads, a batch of content — and you'll manage it after.
Solo operator / owner-led	Low hundreds per month	You're a local service business under roughly $1M in revenue and you want the person doing the work to be the person you talk to.
Boutique agency (3–15 people)	Mid four figures per month	You need several channels running at once and have someone internally to coordinate.
Full-service or national agency	Five figures per month	You have real scale, an internal marketing lead, and complexity a small team can't absorb.

That first row is worth taking seriously. A paid diagnostic is the cheapest way to find out whether you have a strategy problem or an execution problem before you commit to twelve months of retainer. It's why I built the Google Ads Powerups audit at $147 — some businesses need a plan, not a partner, and it's better for both of us to find that out for a couple hundred dollars.

The mismatch that burns most Peterborough businesses is hiring a full-service agency at a small-client budget. You get the agency's process without the agency's attention. Your account becomes the one a junior manager touches on Fridays.

Be honest about which row you're in. Then only take calls from that row.

Step 3: Read the money, not the pitch

Two quotes that both say "$1,200/month" can mean wildly different things. Normalize them before you compare.

Separate ad spend from management fee. These are two different transactions. Ad spend goes to Google or Meta. The management fee goes to the agency. If a proposal blends them into one number, ask for the split in writing.

For reference, my own Google Ads management is $320/month under a $500 ad budget and $480/month between $500 and $2,000 — with ad spend billed separately, straight to Google. You should be able to get that same clarity from anyone you're considering.

Ask what's a deliverable versus an activity.

"Ongoing optimization" is an activity. "Weekly bid and search-term review, monthly landing page test, quarterly strategy call" is a deliverable. You can hold someone to the second one.

Find the setup fee.

Some agencies quote a low monthly and recover it with a $2,500 onboarding charge. Not automatically wrong — real setup work exists — but it needs to be on the page before you sign, not in month one.

Check what reporting costs.

If reporting is a line item, you're paying extra to see your own data. It should be included, and it should be a live dashboard you can open yourself.

Do the math out loud.

Take the monthly fee plus the ad spend, divide by the number of customers the agency projects, and compare it to the ceiling you calculated in Step 1. If the agency won't project a number, that's information too.

Step 4: Settle ownership before you sign, not after

This is the step almost nobody takes, and it's the one that costs the most when it goes wrong.

If the relationship ends, and someday it will, amicably or not, what do you walk away with?

Get clear answers on all five:

The Google Ads account.
- It should be created under your business, with the agency granted access. Not the reverse. If the agency owns the account, your entire performance history, conversion data and audience lists leave with them, unless they transfer ownership to you. Rebuilding that from zero costs you months.
Your GA4 property.
- Same rule. You are the owner; they get admin access.
Your Google Business Profile.
- You should be the primary owner. Agencies commonly take manager access. Primary ownership sitting with a third party is not ok.
Your website, domain and hosting.
- Registered in your name, with credentials you hold. If an agency built your site on their own account, ask specifically what happens to it if you leave.
The content and creative.
Blog posts, ad copy, images, video. Ask whether you own the finished work outright. Usually yes, but make sure you get it stated to avoid the headache later.

One sentence to use on the call: "If we part ways after 90 days, walk me through exactly what I keep and what I lose."

A good agency answers that in thirty seconds without flinching. Hesitation gives you the answer you needed right upfront.

Step 5: Know what you're on the hook for

Plenty of agency relationships fail on the client's side. Worth being honest with yourself before you spend the money.

You need to be able to:

Answer within a day or two.
- Campaigns stall waiting on approvals. If you're slammed for the next two months, start the engagement after that.
Give real access.
- Analytics, ad accounts, website, booking system. Partial access produces partial results.
Have a clear offer.
- Marketing amplifies whatever you're selling. If your pricing, packages or booking process are muddled, ads make that more visible, not less.
Handle the leads.
- More calls only helps if someone answers the phone and follows up. This is where most of the return actually gets won or lost — I broke it down in what making it simple for your customer looks like.
Hold the plan for at least 90 days.
- Changing direction every three weeks guarantees you learn nothing.

Step 6: The shortlist call

Two or three candidates, max. Thirty minutes each. You're establishing three things.

One: do they understand your business before pitching?

If they get to packages before they ask what a customer is worth to you, you have your answer.

Two: can they explain the plan in words you'd repeat to your spouse?

Not because you can't handle jargon, but because clear explanations only come from people who actually understand the work.

Three: who does the work, and what do you keep?

The person on the call versus the person on the account. And the ownership answer from Step 4.

Then a practical one to close with: "What would you do first, and why that instead of something else?" The reasoning matters more than the tactic. Anyone can say "we'd start with Google Ads." The good ones tell you why that beats the alternative for your situation.

The short version

Know your four numbers. Pick the right type of help for your size. Split the fee from the ad spend. Own your own accounts. Then hire.

Do those five things and you've eliminated most of the ways this goes wrong, regardless of who you end up choosing.

Where Kayser Marketing fits

I'm a one-person shop in Peterborough, which puts me squarely in the "solo operator" row above. That's the right fit for a local service business that wants the person doing the work to be the person answering the phone. It's the wrong fit if you need five channels and a full creative team.

If you're working through this list and want a second opinion on where your marketing actually stands, that's the conversation I like having with fellow small business owners, whether or not it ends with you hiring me.

Book a free 30-minute audit and I'll give you a plain-English read on what's working, what isn't, and what's worth fixing first.