By the fourth pitch they blur together. Same case study format, same list of services, same promise to be a partner rather than a vendor. The deck is not the product, and almost nothing in it predicts whether the engagement will work. What predicts it is a short list of unglamorous questions that most buyers in Cairo never think to ask, because nobody tells them the questions exist.
Before you choose a digital marketing agency, work out which kind you are buying
There are roughly three species operating in Egypt under the same label. Media buying shops, which are very good at running spend and much weaker at the thinking upstream of it. Content and social studios, which produce beautiful output and often cannot tell you what it earned. And full-service teams that cover strategy, performance, content and build, which cost more and are worth it only if you genuinely need three or four of those things at once.
There is also a fourth species worth naming: a freelance collective presenting itself as an agency. That model can be excellent and it can be a single person subcontracting the work you are paying a team rate for. Neither is disqualifying. Not knowing which one you signed is.
So decide the outcome first. Write one sentence: in twelve months, this works if X happens. Qualified inquiries, not traffic. Contribution margin, not revenue. Then buy the shape of agency that moves that sentence, and ignore the services grid entirely.
The checks that separate a real team from a good deck
Ask who works on your account day to day, by name, and how many hours a month each of them is allocated. Then ask whether the people in the pitch room will still be on the account in month four. In a lot of agencies the answer is no, and the honest ones will say so and explain the handover instead of pretending.
Ask to see a real monthly report sent to a real client last month, with the name redacted. You learn more from three pages of somebody else’s reporting than from an hour of positioning. Look for whether it separates what was observed from what was modeled, whether it states a baseline, and whether anything in it is bad news. A report with no bad news in it is a marketing document, not a management one.
Ask what they would stop doing that you do now. An agency with no opinion about your current activity has either not looked or is afraid to say. And ask who writes the Arabic. Not who translates it. Egyptian Arabic written by somebody who thinks in it reads differently from Modern Standard Arabic run through a translator, and your audience can tell in one line.
The commercial checks almost nobody runs
Confirm you are contracting with a registered company holding a tax card and a commercial register entry, and that it issues compliant electronic invoices. This is not pedantry. If the invoice is not on the tax authority system, your finance team cannot recover the 14 percent VAT and the whole engagement quietly costs more than the number you agreed. Ask how withholding tax at source is handled so the deduction does not become a monthly argument.
Then settle where the money sits. Media spend belongs on your own card, in your own ad accounts, under your own business assets, with the agency added as a partner. Agencies that insist on running your spend through their accounts are building a switching cost, not a service. Ask what currency the fee is set in, and who absorbs the platform charges billed in dollars when the exchange rate moves.
Finally, ask what happens on the last day of the relationship. Which logins, which files, which data, and by when. Any agency that has thought about their own exit clause has thought about the rest of it too.
If you want a reference point before the pitches start, our digital marketing solutions pages set out how each discipline is actually staffed and priced, and the free audit gives you an independent read on your own accounts so you walk into those meetings knowing what good looks like.
