Questions to Ask Before You Hire Anyone in Marketing.
You don't need to know marketing to know whether the person in front of you does. These questions expose the difference fast.
The marketing industry has a problem. The gap between someone who genuinely understands how to build and execute a marketing strategy and someone who has learned to sound like they do is almost invisible from the outside. Both use the same language. Both have a portfolio of some kind. Both can talk about reach, engagement, and growth. The difference only appears when you ask the right questions.
These questions aren't technical. You don't need industry knowledge to ask them or to recognise a good answer. What you're listening for is specificity, clarity, and honesty about the limits of what they do. Vagueness is the tell. So is overconfidence about things that depend entirely on context.
“Anyone can say the right things in a proposal. The questions below are the ones that are harder to fake.”
The questions
“Who is the ideal client for this business — describe them as a specific person, not a category.”
For: everyone. Social media managers, SEO specialists, marketers, brand strategists, copywriters, media buyers.
They ask clarifying questions before answering, or push back on broad demographic descriptions and ask for more specificity. They understand this is the foundation of everything else.
They accept a broad answer ('tradies in Brisbane,' 'women who care about health') and move on. Or they answer it themselves with a guess. Or they say the audience doesn't matter yet, they'll figure it out from the data.
“What is the one thing this business should be known for — and how is that different from your direct competitors?”
For: anyone claiming to do strategy, positioning, brand, or messaging work.
They treat this as the most important question in the room. They have a framework for answering it. They know positioning is the most consequential marketing decision a business makes.
They give a generic answer ('quality service,' 'customer focus'), or they say 'that's what we'll figure out together' without any indication they know how to get there. Or they skip to execution.
“What does success look like in 90 days — in numbers, not metrics?”
For: everyone.
They connect their work to enquiries, leads, bookings, or revenue. They are honest about what they can and can't control. They define lagging indicators (results) separately from leading indicators (activity), and explain the connection.
They lead with followers, impressions, reach, or engagement without connecting those to the business outcome. 'Increased brand awareness' is not a 90-day success metric — it's a deflection.
“What do you need from me to do this well — specifically?”
For: everyone.
A real list: access to accounts, content approvals, information about the business, regular communication, budget clarity, decision-making authority on creative. They know what they need and why.
'Just leave it to us.' Anyone who doesn't need anything from you is planning to make it up. Marketing that doesn't involve the business owner at all is marketing without context — and it shows.
“Do you have a client in a similar industry where you can show me what you did and what the result was — in actual numbers?”
For: everyone.
A specific case. Before state, what was done, after state. Numbers. Maybe a business they'd rather not name for confidentiality reasons, but a real story with real outcomes.
Testimonials without specifics. A portfolio of creative work without outcome data. 'We can't share client results.' Or a case from an entirely different industry presented as relevant.
“What is outside the scope of what you do — what should I hire someone else for?”
For: everyone, but especially generalists.
A clear answer. A social media manager who says 'I don't do paid advertising' or 'I don't do strategy, I execute against a brief' is telling you something valuable about what they're actually good at.
They claim to do everything. Full-service agencies that handle strategy, creative, SEO, social, paid, email, and PR all in-house are either very large or very average at all of it. A specialist who knows their lane is worth more than a generalist who claims to own them all.
“If the results aren't there in 90 days, what does that tell us and what do we do about it?”
For: everyone.
They have a diagnostic framework. They can tell you what they'd look at, what hypotheses they'd test, and how they'd know whether the problem is the strategy, the execution, the audience, or the timing.
'Give it more time.' This is the most common deflection in marketing. Some things take time — but a person who has no diagnostic process for underperformance is a person who won't tell you when something isn't working.
One thing to check before the conversation
Look at their own presence. A social media manager whose business account hasn't posted in three months. An SEO specialist whose website doesn't rank for anything relevant. A marketer whose brand has no clear positioning. These aren't disqualifying on their own — busy people neglect their own presence — but they're worth noting. If they're not applying their expertise to themselves, ask why.
The bigger problem
Even the most qualified execution specialist can't fix a strategy problem. If the audience isn't defined, if the positioning isn't clear, if the message isn't right — execution makes the problem more expensive, not less. The best social media manager in the country posting the wrong message to the wrong audience will produce nothing.
These questions will help you find someone who knows what they're doing. But the more important question to ask first is whether the strategy exists for them to execute against. If it doesn't, hiring execution is premature — regardless of how good the person is.
Before you hire anyone
Build the strategy first.
My Pixel Strategydefines the audience, the positioning, the message, and the channels before any execution partner is engaged. When you do hire someone, they have something real to work from — and you have a way to evaluate whether they're doing it right.