How to Brief an Agency So You Get What You Want
Marketing Ops · Cyber Elite Team
A lot of dissatisfaction with agency work traces back not to the agency’s skill but to a brief that never actually communicated what success looked like. A clear, specific brief is one of the highest-leverage things a business can control in an agency relationship, and it costs nothing but time to get right upfront.
Describe the business problem, not just the deliverable
A brief that asks for ’10 blog posts’ or ‘a new landing page’ gives an agency a task but no context for judgment calls that inevitably come up during the work. A brief that explains the underlying business problem, why this deliverable matters, what it’s meant to change, lets an agency make better decisions in the many small moments a written spec can’t anticipate.
Share real examples of what good and bad look like
Describing a desired tone or style in the abstract, ‘professional but approachable’, is far less useful than pointing to two or three concrete examples, including work the business specifically dislikes and why. Concrete reference points remove a huge amount of subjective guesswork from the agency’s side.
Define who approves the work and how many rounds of feedback are expected
Ambiguity about who has final sign-off, and how many revision rounds are built into the process, is one of the most common sources of friction in agency relationships. Naming this upfront, even informally, prevents a project from sliding into open-ended revision cycles neither side budgeted for.
Be explicit about constraints, not just goals
Budget ceilings, brand guidelines, legal or compliance restrictions, and technical limitations all shape what a realistic deliverable looks like, and an agency working without this information may propose something that has to be redone once the real constraints surface midway through.
Our piece on evaluating agency pricing covers a related part of setting expectations before work begins.
Our team works through exactly this kind of brief with every new engagement before any work starts.
