Five things to check before you book a marketing agency: identity, scope and evidence before the commitment.

An agency’s identity, scope and evidence should be inspectable before you commit. These five checks help you ask better questions. Public records establish some facts; a relevant case and a clear written scope establish others. None is a guarantee of performance.

1 · The company number

For a UK limited company, check its legal name and number against Companies House. Read its incorporation date and filing status, and check how the trading name relates to that entity. This establishes identity and a public filing record, not delivery quality or financial security. A sole trader is a different legal form; absence of a company number is not itself evidence of wrongdoing.

2 · The ICO registration

Ask who controls the personal data, what the agency processes and which responsibilities are written down. The ICO’s data protection fee has exemptions; absence from the fee-payer register is not automatically misconduct. Registration or fee payment is not a certificate of data-protection compliance. Check the relevant record and ask the supplier to explain its position.

3 · Prices you can read without a call

Public prices make fixed-scope work easier to compare. A tailored quotation can also be appropriate for research, production or complex systems. Ask for the deliverables, assumptions, exclusions, revision allowance, media spend and third-party costs. Judge whether the price covers the work you need, rather than assuming a supplier’s motives from whether its prices are public.

4 · Work you can click

A live link lets you inspect what is available now, but it does not by itself prove authorship or commercial results. Ask what the agency actually did, when it did it and which artefacts demonstrate that role. A Meta Ad Library listing can show a creative in its available context; it does not establish its performance. Archived work can still be genuine when a client has changed its site since delivery.

5 · The number agreed before the work

Agree the intended outcome, the measurement definition, the reporting period and who records the business-side result. A design project can have clear delivery and usability objectives without a guaranteed sales uplift. A campaign can report leads without proving customers or profit. Ask how missing outcomes and changes in the brief will be handled.

Run it on us

Our legal identity and ICO registration are listed in the footer. Our website scope and marketing packages provide a starting point for a quotation. Inspect the Just Foster record for defined lead-quality measures, Kurt Muller for separate commerce comparisons and MKIC for delivered interface evidence. Each records a different kind of work; none predicts another client’s outcome.

Build an evidence ladder: confirm the business, establish its role in relevant work, understand its method, inspect defined outcomes and compare the proposed scope. A large headline number is less useful when its dates, denominator or attribution are unclear.