The short version
- Goals and tone are the cheap part of a brief. What decides the work is access to your customers and the constraints nobody writes down.
- Hand over recordings rather than a persona document. A survey we sent for a ghostwriting programme returned six responses, all too thin to write from.
- Say what state the plumbing is in. One audit found roughly 92% of raw sessions were bot, another found roughly 98% of CRM contacts stuck in the first stage.
- List everybody who can stop a release, with lead times. On one launch, two approvals that appeared in nobody's plan moved the date twice.
A good agency brief is mostly things only you can supply. Who we are allowed to record. Which analytics view is filtered. What a lead meets on arrival. Who can stop a release. Goals and tone are the cheap part, and the part an outsider could have guessed.
What does a brief need that a goals document does not?
The easy parts of a brief are the parts we could have guessed: objectives, an audience described in the abstract, a paragraph on tone.
What decides whether the work lands sits inside the company and is rarely written down. The shape below is what we ask for now.
What the brief usually says, and what it needs to carry:
| Section | The version that stalls | What it needs to carry |
|---|---|---|
| Audience | Mid-market SaaS decision makers | Two or three customers we can record |
| Baseline | The numbers off the dashboard | Which view is filtered. One audit: roughly 92% bot sessions |
| Destination | Send us qualified leads | What a lead meets. One audit: roughly 98% of contacts stuck in stage one |
| Tooling | The names of the tools | The ceiling on each. One email tier capped sends at 300 a day |
| Environment | A staging link | Which URL is live and how a change reaches it |
| Approvals | I sign everything off | Everyone else who can stop it, with lead times |
| Rules | The tone of voice guide | Which rules a script must enforce |
Why is access worth more than a description of the audience?
A description of the audience summarises what your team already believes, and we can write one without you.
A ghostwriting programme at a global consulting firm needed the executives’ own thinking. A survey went out, six responses came back, and all six were too thin to write from. The thinking existed the whole time, in recordings of calls those people were already having.
So the ask is names and permission rather than a persona document: the recordings we can listen to, the customers who will take a call. Sentences from somebody who buys the thing read differently.
What do we need to know about your plumbing?
Four items, each here because it was missing once.
Which analytics view is filtered. On one account roughly 92% of raw sessions were non-human. Nothing was obviously misconfigured. Filtering had never been switched on, and every ratio quoted for years sat on that denominator.
What a lead meets on arrival. A CRM audit elsewhere found roughly 98% of contacts in the first lifecycle stage with nothing moving anybody forward. Traffic briefed into that produces names.
The ceiling on each tool. A youth sports platform ran on an email tier capped at 300 sends a day, found mid-campaign rather than at setup. A daily cap turns one send into a queue.
Which URL is actually live. One project document listed a staging URL that had been correct a year earlier. It now served a different application that looked similar.
Who can stop the work?
The question we used to ask at kickoff was who is involved, which returns the working team. On one launch the date moved twice and neither delay was delivery. One approval sat with security review, the other with pricing sign-off.
Both were reasonable approvals. Neither had been in the kickoff, so a brief now carries the people who can stop a release and how long each takes. A security review is not an afternoon.
Two approvals moved a launch date twice. Neither was in the brief, neither was in the kickoff, and both were reasonable.
What happens to a rule you state but never enforce?
It holds for as long as somebody is watching. We audited 200 essays on this site against our own documented rule of zero em-dashes and found 2,801. The rule had been written down and restated in briefs, with nothing mechanical behind it.
So the part worth arguing over is which rules are absolute enough to sit in a script that blocks a publish. The rest is preference, and preference gets settled in review.
The two lines of a brief that move dates most: auditing the CRM before you add traffic and naming every gate in week one.
Frequently asked questions
What should a client include in a brief to a marketing agency?
The things only somebody inside the company knows: who we are allowed to record, which analytics view is filtered, what a lead meets on arrival, the ceiling on each tool in the chain, and everyone who can stop a release.
What is the most useful thing a client can give an agency?
Access to conversations that already happen. On a ghostwriting programme at a global consulting firm, a survey came back with six responses, all too thin to write from. The thinking was in recorded calls, and permission to use those beat any persona document.
Should an agency brief include the budget?
Yes. Without it you get a proposal priced at a guess about what you will accept, with scope reverse-engineered from that guess. Naming the number moves the conversation to what fits inside it.
How long should an agency brief be?
Length is not the variable. One page naming the approvers, the filtered analytics view and the state of the CRM beats twenty pages of audience description. Write down what an outsider cannot find out alone.
Who should write the brief, the client or the agency?
The agency usually drafts it and the client supplies the parts only they hold. It then gets signed off by whoever can stop the work rather than only the person managing the relationship, because those are frequently different people.
Sources
- Chua Network delivery data across 8 client accounts (internal fact bank)
- Chua Network engagement records, anonymized (internal experience bank)
