Fourteen Questions To Ask Before You Hire A Marketing Agency

Giang Le: Here is a fun fact about marketing agency pitch decks for doctors. They all look exactly the same. Same slides, same stock photos of smiling patients, same promise of more leads and more five star reviews. The differences never show up in the deck. They show up in the answers to the questions you ask before you sign anything. So today I want to hand you fourteen of them. Not softball questions. The kind that make a sales call turn into either a real conversation or a very short phone call.

Giang Le: I wrote these down because I kept watching smart, busy physicians sign retainers after one polished presentation, and then come to us six months later frustrated, having spent real money on an agency that never once asked about their intake process or their patient population. The retainer gets signed in the excitement of the pitch. The buyer's remorse shows up in the first monthly report that is all impressions and followers and nothing about booked appointments. So this is the list I wish every doctor had in hand before that first call. Fourteen questions, broken into a few groups. How they think. What they know about healthcare specifically. How they talk about money. And a few that should just end the conversation.

Giang Le: First group, how they think. Question one, what would you need to understand about my practice before recommending anything? A good agency has a list. Your patient population, your referral sources, your intake process, your capacity, your margins by service, your reputation online, your actual goals. If they answer with a package instead of a list of questions, they already decided what they are selling you before they met you. Question two, what would you tell me not to do? Strategy includes subtraction. If an agency cannot name one thing you should stop doing, or never start, they are selling you activity, not strategy. Question three, where do you think growth actually leaks for a practice like mine? Here is the honest answer, most of the time it leaks at intake and patient experience, not at the ad. If all they want to talk about is the top of the funnel, they have never looked at the bottom of it. And question four, who at your firm actually does the thinking on my account, and how many other clients do they carry? You are not buying a logo. You are buying somebody's judgment. Find out whose.

Giang Le: Let me give you one example of how this list actually saves you money, not just time. Say you run an aesthetic practice and an agency pitches you on a bigger ad budget, more leads, more consults booked. You sign on. The leads come in, the inquiry numbers go up, and three months later your schedule looks almost exactly the same as it did before. That is the common mistake, chasing the top of the funnel when the leak is at the bottom. If you had asked question three, where does growth actually leak for a practice like mine, a good agency would have told you to look at your intake process first. How fast you call back. How your front desk handles that first message. Whether your booking link even works properly on a phone. Fix that, and the same ad spend starts converting differently. Skip that question, and you just paid for more traffic into a bucket that has a hole in it.

Giang Le: Second group, and this one matters a lot, because healthcare marketing is not the same as marketing anything else. Question five, what do you know about the advertising rules for physicians in my state, and about HIPAA as it applies to marketing? Testimonials, before and after photos, claims, patient data in retargeting ads, all of that has rules attached to it. I'll put the links in the description if you want the longer version on what doctors can and cannot advertise. An agency that has never thought about any of this is not a marketing risk, it is a legal one. Question six, how do you handle patient reviews, and what will you never do with them? Buying reviews, gating them so only good ones get posted, responding to a bad review with clinical detail, these are all real problems I have seen agencies do. The right answer to this question has the word never in it, more than once. Question seven, how do you think about my personal reputation versus the practice's brand? These are two different assets. An agency that treats them as one thing will end up damaging one of them trying to build the other.

Giang Le: Third group, money and measurement, because this is where vague answers turn into disputes later. Question eight, what will I see every month, and what will it actually tell me? A good report shows inquiries, booked appointments, show rates, and revenue by source. Not impressions. Not follower counts. Question nine, what happens to the ad spend if my intake process is broken? The honest answer is that it gets wasted, and a good agency fixes intake before they spend another dollar on ads. Question ten, can you show me a client where you recommended spending less? If they cannot think of one, they never have, and that tells you something. And question eleven, what is your retainer actually buying, specifically, and what is not included? Vagueness in that answer today becomes an argument in month four.

Giang Le: Last group, and these three can end the conversation on the spot. Question twelve, do you guarantee results? If the answer is yes, hang up. Nobody honest guarantees patient volume, rankings, or revenue, and anyone who says yes is either lying or does not understand the business they are in. Question thirteen, do you own the accounts, the website, or the data? If the agency owns your domain, your ad accounts, or your analytics, you cannot leave even if you want to. Everything should be registered in your name, full stop. Question fourteen, are you paid by any of the vendors you recommend? Undisclosed referral fees mean the recommendation they just made you was not actually for you.

Giang Le: So what do you do with all fourteen answers? Write them down. Literally, in a notebook or a notes app. Then go have the same conversation with two or three agencies and compare the answers side by side. You will notice something fast. One conversation will feel like a diagnosis. The other will feel like a sales call. The agency that asks you more questions than you asked them is usually the right one. That is genuinely the test. I will say plainly, this is how we try to answer every one of these fourteen ourselves. We start above the deliverable. We tell clients what not to do before we tell them what to do. We treat your personal reputation and your practice's brand as two separate things. We never guarantee outcomes. Everything stays registered in your name. And we are not paid by anyone we recommend to you. The links are in the blog, click over and check them out if you want to see how we describe the model in full.

Giang Le: Here is the thing underneath all fourteen questions. You are the medical expert. We are the marketing and business experts. That split only works if the agency on the other side of the table actually respects it, asks real questions, and is willing to say no to you when the honest answer is no. If you are a physician or healthcare creator who would rather just create, who would rather spend your time on patients and content instead of contracts and ad accounts, book a consultation at studio germina dot com, and we will handle the business side with you, on terms that fit your brand and your ethics, not ours. I'm Giang, founder of Studio Germina, thanks for spending this time with me, and I will catch you on the next one.