Most businesses in Lebanon choose an agency on price and a portfolio, then leave eight months later having learned nothing about what worked. These are the questions that would have told them in the first meeting.
This is the single most important question and almost nobody asks it. If the agency runs your Meta and Google campaigns inside their own account, then when you leave you lose every campaign, every audience you built and your entire performance history. You start from zero with the next agency.
The correct answer is that you own the accounts and the agency is given access. Any other answer is the agency holding your data as a reason for you to stay.
These must be two separate numbers. If an agency quotes one figure covering both, you cannot tell what is being spent on reaching customers and what is being kept.
Ask what happens if you raise the budget. If the fee is a percentage of spend, the agency earns more by spending more, whether or not it works.
A report full of reach, impressions and engagement is a report designed not to be judged. Ask for cost per result: cost per lead, per conversation, per sale. Agree the one number that defines success before anything launches.
If an agency will not commit to a number in the first meeting, it is because they do not expect to hit one.
In Lebanon it is common to meet a senior person in the pitch and then be handed to a junior. Ask who will be on your account day to day, and whether content production and media buying are in-house or subcontracted.
Subcontracting matters because it determines speed. If an ad is underperforming and the agency has to brief an outside producer, the fix takes a month. If the team is in one building, it takes a week.
Meta Business Partner and Google Partner are awarded on managed spend, certification and client performance. They are a reasonable signal that an agency handles real budgets competently.
Be careful with the wording, though. Certified by Meta is not a thing an agency can be. Partner status is. An agency that is loose about this is loose about other claims too.
This is the most revealing question in the meeting. An agency that says yes to everything, every platform, every tactic, any budget, is selling, not advising.
A good agency in Lebanon will tell you that your budget is too small for a particular objective, that TikTok is wrong for your category, or that your website has to be fixed before any traffic is sent to it. That answer costs them money to give, which is exactly why it is worth hearing.
Three months is a fair minimum, because below that nothing can be properly tested. Twelve months with no exit is not. Ask what notice you must give and what you keep when you leave.
Fees vary widely by scope. What matters more than the number is the structure: management fee and ad budget quoted separately, with no percentage-of-spend arrangement that rewards the agency for spending more. Ask for both numbers in writing.
It depends on the objective, not on the agency. Generating WhatsApp conversations costs a fraction of generating online sales. A serious agency will tell you whether your budget can achieve your goal before taking it.
Three months. The first month is setup and learning, the second produces the first reliable data, the third shows whether it is improving. Judging at week two tells you nothing.
One person cannot film, edit, design, buy media and do SEO. An in-house marketer makes sense when you need someone close to the business daily. An agency makes sense when you need six skills at once. Many businesses do both: one coordinator in-house, execution outside.
At Creators Specialist we answer all seven the same way every time: you own your accounts, the fee and the budget are separate, we agree the number before we start, the team is in-house in Jbeil, and we will tell you when we think you should not spend. If that is the kind of agency you are looking for, talk to us.
