Insights · Strategy
How to brief a marketing agency (and get better work back)
A practical guide to writing a marketing agency brief: goals, audience, budget, constraints and how success will be judged, with a ready-to-use checklist.
The quality of the work you get from an agency is shaped heavily by the brief you give it. A vague brief invites generic proposals, guesswork on budget and a long cycle of revisions. A clear brief lets an agency tell you quickly whether it is the right fit and what it would actually do.
A good brief does not need to be long. One or two pages is usually enough. What matters is that it answers the questions an agency would otherwise have to guess.
Start with the business problem
Describe what you want to change in the business, not the tactic you think you need. "We need more qualified inquiries for our commercial cleaning service in the Valley" is a better starting point than "We need TikTok ads". The first lets the agency recommend the right mix; the second assumes the answer before anyone has looked at the problem.
Include a little context: what you sell, roughly how a customer finds and buys from you today, and what has changed that makes this the right time.
Define success in numbers you can check
Say how you will judge the work. That might be a number of leads per month, a cost per lead you can afford, bookings, online sales or a specific launch date. If you do not know what a realistic target is, say so and ask the agency to propose one with its reasoning. That is a perfectly good brief.
Also share what a customer is worth to you, even roughly. It is the single most useful number for deciding how much you can sensibly spend to win one.
Describe the customer
Who buys from you, and who would you like more of? Include what they care about, the objections you hear most, the words they use to describe their problem and where they spend time. Your sales team or front desk often knows this better than anyone, so ask them.
Be open about budget
Many businesses hold the budget back, hoping to see what agencies propose. This usually wastes everyone's time. Share a range for the agency fee and, separately, for media spend if ads are involved. A good agency will tell you honestly if the budget does not fit the goal, and suggest what it can achieve within it.
List what already exists and what is fixed
Agencies work faster when they know what they are starting with. List your current website, ad accounts, analytics, brand guidelines, past campaigns and any results you can share. Note what worked and what did not.
Then list the constraints: legal or industry rules, approvals that take time, brand rules that cannot change, dates you cannot move and anything you do not want to do.
Agree how you will work together
Say who on your side makes decisions, how often you want updates and in what form, and who will provide access, content and feedback. Many projects slow down not because of the agency, but because approvals and assets on the client side take longer than planned.
Ask for a response you can compare
If you are talking to more than one agency, ask each to respond in the same structure: their understanding of the problem, the approach, what is included, the timeline, the cost and how they will report progress. It makes the comparison fairer and highlights who actually read the brief.
ChecklistOne-page agency brief checklist
- The business problem you want to solve, in one or two sentences.
- How success will be measured, with targets if you have them.
- Roughly what a customer is worth to you.
- Who the customer is, their objections and the words they use.
- Budget ranges for agency fees and media spend.
- Existing assets, accounts and past results.
- Constraints, approvals and fixed dates.
- Decision-maker, update rhythm and who supplies content and access.
Send the brief, then make time for a call. The questions an agency asks about your brief will tell you a great deal about how it would handle your work.