How to choose a video marketing agency: 12 questions to ask before you sign

Most shortlists are built on the wrong criteria

Company owners usually pick a video agency on showreel and price. Both are the wrong filter. A showreel tells you what a team can make when the budget is generous and the deadline is soft. It tells you nothing about whether the film sold anything, and nothing about what happens in month four when the first creative stops performing.

The useful distinction is between a video supplier and an acquisition partner. A supplier delivers files. A partner is judged on leads, appointments and customers, and therefore has to care about what happens after delivery: the targeting, the daily optimisation, the follow-up on the leads you receive. Those are different businesses that look identical on a website.

The twelve questions below sort one from the other in a single meeting. Ask them in order. You are not looking for perfect answers, you are looking for whether the person across the table thinks in commercial terms or in creative terms.

⚠️ Ask these in a first meeting, not after you have received a proposal. By proposal stage everyone sounds the same.

Group 1: strategy — do they start from your numbers?

Strategy is not a mood board. Strategy is deciding which customer you want more of, what that customer is worth, and what you are therefore allowed to pay to acquire one. If an agency cannot have that conversation, everything downstream is guesswork with good lighting.

1. What do you need to know about my business before you propose anything?

Good answer: average order value, close rate from appointment to customer, which service lines are most profitable, capacity, and which region you actually want to work in. Bad answer: an immediate creative concept, or a request for your brand guidelines and nothing else. If the first thing they want is your logo files, they are a supplier.

2. Which customer should we deliberately not attract?

Good answer: a clear description of the leads that waste your time, and how the message and the targeting will filter them out. Bad answer: more leads is always better. Volume with no filter means your sales time gets eaten by people who were never going to buy, and the campaign looks cheap on cost per lead while your cost per customer quietly climbs.

3. What is the single objective of the first campaign, and how will we know in six weeks whether it worked?

Good answer: one objective, one metric you agree in advance, and an honest statement about what six weeks can and cannot prove for your sales cycle. Bad answer: brand awareness plus leads plus recruitment plus social media presence. An agency that promises everything has not chosen anything.

Group 2: production — will this still work in month six?

Production questions are where showreels stop being useful. In a small market a single film gets shown to the same people repeatedly, so the real question is not how good the first video is but how quickly the second, third and fourth arrive.

Also worth probing: how much of the shoot depends on you. Every hour of your time on set is a real cost, and a team that needs three days of your presence for one commercial is more expensive than their invoice suggests.

4. How many usable pieces of creative come out of one shooting day, and what are they?

Good answer: a specific breakdown, for example one main commercial plus several shorter cuts and a set of variants built for different hooks. Bad answer: one film. One film means you are back to square one the moment it fatigues, and in Belgium that happens faster than in a large market.

5. Who writes the script, and do they also see the advertising results?

Good answer: the person writing has access to what previous ads did and adjusts the next script accordingly. Bad answer: the script is written by a creative team that never sees the campaign data. That separation is the most common reason a beautiful film underperforms.

6. What happens if the first creative does not perform?

Good answer: a described process — new hook, new opening, re-edit from existing footage first, then a reshoot if needed — and clarity on what that costs. Bad answer: silence, or the assumption that it will perform. Ask specifically whether re-edits from existing footage are included, because that is where most of the cheap improvement lives.

Group 3: advertising — who actually touches the account?

This is the group most companies skip, and it is where the money is either earned or wasted. A video without distribution is an expense. Distribution without daily attention is a slow leak.

You are trying to find out three things: who does the work, how often they look at it, and whether they are honest about the limits of what advertising can fix.

7. Who will be in my ad account day to day, and how often?

Good answer: a named person, a stated rhythm, and a description of what they change and what they deliberately leave alone. Bad answer: our team, or we use automated optimisation. Meta rewards patience on structure and speed on creative, and only a human who knows your business can tell those apart.

8. Which language regions will we run in, and with which budget split?

Good answer: a recommendation to start in one language region, prove the economics, then expand — with a reason. Bad answer: national coverage from day one with one set of creative. Belgium is not one audience, and a national budget spread thin across two languages usually underperforms a focused regional one.

9. What is the minimum monthly ad spend below which you would tell me not to start?

Good answer: a figure with reasoning behind it, tied to your order value and your sales cycle. Bad answer: any budget works. An agency willing to take a budget it knows is too small to learn from is prioritising its own retainer over your result.

Group 4: results and follow-up — leads are not the finish line

Most disappointing campaigns are not advertising failures. They are follow-up failures. Leads arrive, nobody calls within the hour, and by the time someone does the prospect has already spoken to two competitors.

So the last three questions are about what happens after the form is submitted. If the agency has no opinion on this, you are buying half a system and carrying the risk for the other half.

10. What do you report on, and what do you refuse to report on?

Good answer: leads, appointments, cost per appointment, and where possible customers and revenue — with a clear statement that views, reach and engagement are diagnostics, not results. Bad answer: a monthly dashboard full of impressions and video view rates. Those numbers move whether or not you sell anything.

11. What happens to a lead in the first hour, and whose job is that?

Good answer: a defined process — lead lands in a CRM, an automated WhatsApp or SMS acknowledgement goes out immediately, a human calls within a set time, and unreached leads get chased on a schedule. Bad answer: we send you the leads by email. Email is where leads go to cool down.

12. What would you need from me to make this work, and what will you stop doing if I do not deliver it?

Good answer: honest requirements — access to a site or location for filming, someone available on camera, a person who calls leads back the same day — and a willingness to pause rather than burn budget. Bad answer: nothing, we handle everything. Nobody can sell your service better than someone inside your company, and an agency that pretends otherwise has not done this often.

The contract nobody reads

By the time you are comparing proposals, the creative conversation has taken all the oxygen and the contract gets a two-minute skim. That is a mistake, because four clauses determine whether you are a client or a hostage.

The first three are widely discussed and easy to fix. The fourth is the one almost nobody asks about, and it is the reason companies stay with an agency they have stopped believing in.

Get all four in writing before you sign. Any agency confident in its work will agree to them without friction, because they intend to keep you by performing, not by holding your assets.

• →Ask who is the owner of the ad account in Business Manager, not who manages it. Those are different roles and only one of them survives a break-up.
• →Ask whether the pixel or conversions API dataset is installed under your business asset or theirs. If it is theirs, every visitor you have paid to attract belongs to them.
• →Ask what happens to your custom audiences and retargeting pools if you give notice. Get the answer in the contract, not in an email.
• →Ask for the raw footage delivery method up front — hard drive, cloud archive, retention period. Assume nothing.
• →Ask whether the landing pages and forms are built on your domain and your tooling. Assets on an agency subdomain leave with the agency.

⚠️ None of this is about distrust. It is about making sure the reason you stay is the results, not the switching cost.

Frequently asked questions

Should I hire a video production company and a media agency separately?

You can, and it works when both are strong and someone coordinates them. The risk is that the production side never sees the campaign data and the media side has no influence on the script, so nobody owns the result. If you split the work, insist on a shared reporting rhythm where the editor sees which hooks are working.

How long before I can judge whether a video advertising campaign works?

It depends on your sales cycle far more than on the advertising. If you sell something people decide on in a week, six weeks gives you a readable signal on cost per lead and cost per appointment. If your average deal takes three months to close, judge the early period on lead quality and appointment rate, and accept that revenue attribution comes later.

What is a reasonable budget split between production and advertising?

There is no universal ratio, but a useful test is whether the media budget is large enough to give the creative a fair trial in your region. A premium film with too little spend behind it is a portfolio piece, not a campaign. If the split leaves you unable to run for at least a few months continuously, reduce the production ambition rather than the media budget.

What does a project like this cost with VIEWS?

We have delivered projects from €7,000 to €30,000, depending on the objective, the number of videos and the size of the advertising budget. The range is wide because a single-region test with two videos and a national programme with a full creative cadence are genuinely different pieces of work. We would rather scope it against your numbers than quote a package.

Do I need to be on camera myself?

Not always, but it usually helps. In service businesses the owner or the person who runs the work is the most credible face available, and viewers can tell the difference between someone who does the job and someone reading a script. If you are genuinely uncomfortable on camera, a site manager or lead technician is often just as effective.